From CUNY Academic Commons

Here are just a few examples of Digital Humanities work to give a sense of its range. What other projects would you want to show to a beginning DHer?

Advocacy

• 4Humanities, a site created by the international community of DH scholars and educators to assist in advocating for the humanities. Provides a communication platform, tools, and resources. “The humanities are in trouble today, and digital methods have an important role to play in effectively showing the public why the humanities need to be part of any vision of a future society.”

The Archive, Digital Preservation of Analog & Born-Digital Materials

• Transcribe Bentham, based at University College London, has been crowdsourcing the transcription of thousands of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Anyone can sign up to participate, viewing the original documents, and transcribing and encoding them online in a wiki; instructions and a discussion forum are provided.
• See also What’s On the Menu?, which invites users to transcribe the New York Public Library‘s collection of 40,000 menus; a project of NYPL Labs.
• The Rossetti Archive, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia under the direction of Jerome McGann, provides access to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s complete works, including high-quality images, detailed descriptions and commentary. Related works (contemporary and antecedents) are also included, along with a bibliography.
• The Walt Whitman Archive – “an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world.” Directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).
• Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 – exploring methods for preserving digital game environments. A collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Stanford University Libraries, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
• The work of institutions such as the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in preserving born-digital textual materials.
• Omeka – a free, open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions; developed by the team at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University “with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming.”

Digital Fabrication/Making Things

• See William J. Turkel’s work on humanistic fabrication (also his post “A Few Arguments for Humanistic Fabrication.”)

Networked Pedagogy

• Looking for Whitman – an experiment in multi-campus digital pedagogy funded by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, LFW used open-source tools to connect classrooms in multiple institutions, creating a dynamic, social, collaborative learning environment; students at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), New York University, University of Mary Washington, and Rutgers University-Camden shared their intellectual experiences of exploring Whitman’s work in relationship to specific places in which Whitman lived, with students from Novi-Sad in Serbia adding a global perspective.
• Not specific to DH but an important related movement in Educational Technology are projects that provide open platforms for teaching, learning and collaboration, such as University of Mary Washington Blogs. CUNY is a leader in this space, with the ePortfolio Gateway and Macaulay Social Network at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, Blogs@Baruch at CUNY’s Baruch College, and now the OpenLab at City Tech.

Scholarly Communication & Publishing

• The CUNY Academic Commons – you’re on it! A network “designed to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning.” Members are graduate students and faculty across the CUNY campuses. See also UMW Blogs, Macaulay Social Network, and Blogs@Baruch above.
• Commons-in-a-Box, in which the CUNY Commons team has partnered with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create an easily implementable installation of the CUNY Academic Commons. The Modern Language Association has used the platform to create an MLA Commons for its 30,000+ members.
• PressForward, a Sloan Foundation-funded initiative of the CHNM: “Bringing together the best scholarship from across the web, producing vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around.” Publications include the DHNow, the Journal of Digital Humanities, with others such as THATCamp proceedings to come.
• Zotero – a Mellon-funded free, open-source extension to the Firefox browser developed by the team at the CHNM. It enables users to collect, manage, cite, and share research sources. See also Online Communities/Discussion Forums.
• Anthologize – another initiative of the CHNM, this is a plug-in for WordPress 3.0 that transforms online content into an electronic book. See also Training/Professional Development.
• Shakespeare Quarterly conducted an experiment in open peer review for its special issue, 61:3, “Shakespeare and New Media” (available in Project Muse at Mina Rees). The peer review process was conducted online at MediaCommons (a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book), and is available for viewing there. (It also received coverage in the New York Times.)
• Paul Fyfe‘s talk, “Open Access, Open Secrets: Peer Review and Alternative Scholarly Production,” provides an excellent overview of the issues and how scholars are responding.

Text/Data Mining, Analysis & Visualization

• TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) – a suite of text analysis tools that can be used to analyze user-provided texts; housed at University of Alberta, Canada.
• MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) – an open-source digital environment providing texts and tools for textual analysis; a collaboration of multiple US institutions, based at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
• HyperCities – “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.”
• Spatial Humanities, an initiative by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library, is a community-driven resource (‘sharing-house’) for those interested in using spatial methods in humanistic inquiry.
• Stanford University’s “Republic of Letters” project visualizes the “social network” of Enlightenment writers through analysis of their correspondence.
• On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, Ben Fry‘s visualization of the changes between editions of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
• See also the work of Lev Manovich and team at Cultural Analytics.
• Work in progress:
  • The Digging into Data Challenge – a range of projects recently funded by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.
  • The work of Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers at Stanford’s Literature Lab (covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education; here is Jockers’s response).
  • Projects funded by Google that will leverage its Google Books corpus – see Dan Cohen’s recent discussion of CHNM‘s text mining work on Victorian novels. Cohen and team have set up a site where they’re describing their research, making their data available, and inviting input.
  • Voyant – text analysis tool developed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell.
  • Wordseer – see it in action here.
• Google gets into the game itself, partnering with scientists at Harvard to create the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The Harvard team launched the project under the rubric of a neologism, “culturomics,” or “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” via a paper in Science. The DH community has engaged with the project, but with reservations – to get a sense of the views of DHers already working in this space see posts by Dan Cohen, who provides a nice summary of reactions, and Matt Jockers. The Culturomics team has provided a list of FAQs in response to issues raised.

@CUNY

In addition to the major initiatives listed under Networked Pedagogy and Scholarly Communication above:

• See the great work going on at the CUNY Graduate Center New Media Lab.
• Also the graduate projects funded by the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants.
• Jesse Merandy’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry – an online critical edition of Whitman’s poem, with links to criticism, commentary, and multimedia; also tracks the edition’s evolution over Whitman’s lifetime, and provides an audio walking tour of Brooklyn that traces the poet’s footsteps.

CUNY DHers, please add your projects to this list!

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