http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/tags/definitions Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: definitions - Recent Posts en-US Sun, 30 Dec 2018 17:59:23 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-2130 Sun, 17 Nov 2013 20:07:26 +0000 royalyoucef@gmail.com 2130@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Hope that you will continue doing nice<br /> <a href="http://hidemybody.com/" title="proxy sites">proxy sites</a><br /> <a href="http://hidemybody.com/" title="proxy">proxy</a><br /> <a href="http://hidemybody.com/" title="Surf The Web Anonymously">Surf The Web Anonymously</a><br /> <a href="http://hidemybody.com/" title="school proxy">school proxy</a> </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-829 Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:02:17 +0000 tcarmody@gmail.com 829@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Just wanted to point out a few bullet-points that might/might not be obvious:</p> <ul> <li>The "digital scholarship" bit in the NEH-ODH mandate doesn't just apply to universities, but all kinds of institutions doing scholarly work - museums, nonprofits, what we sometimes call the "public humanities." I'd say most people would agree that "digital humanities" extends to these institutions too, plus a whole host of amateur/non-academic writers/artists/etc applying digital tools to humanities problems.</li> <li>You can do "digital humanities" research on very old, old media. Text-mining (big keyword searches over old digitized texts) are the most noteworthy example.</li> <li>Academics don't always agree with industry people about what constitutes new media, or what kinds of new media are particularly interesting. Academics also don't always agree with each other about what constitutes new media, let alone what is/isn't a "media studies" approach.</li> <li>You can also take a very traditional, analog approach to studying new media: interviews, reviewing archives, doing content-based critique.</li> <li>Not all digital tools have the same "cred" in digital humanities. Whipping up PowerPoints, bar graphs, or Google searches aren't quite as big-time is writing code and creating new digital tools. (In an older era, this is analogous to the division between lit-theory people who'd glossed Paul de Man and Foucault and folks who were reading late-era Heidegger in German.)</li> </ul> <em>Replying to @<a href='/profile/jonvoss'>jonvoss</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-827">post</a>:</em> </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-827 Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:29:41 +0000 jonvoss 827@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Thanks for the feedback on this folks. I'm not coming from an academic perspective but of that of a technologist, so it's interesting to see that there are different definitions depending on where you're coming from, within academia, and also from various industries. Looking at it from outside of the academy, I see a lot of the overlap as well. However, it seems it can be argued that "digital humanities" may be limited to an academic pursuit. For instance, the NEH-ODH defines their mission this way: "Our primary mission is to help coordinate the NEH's efforts in the area of digital scholarship." "New media" may have academic implications, but it's certainly not limited to that sector. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-826 Mon, 13 Dec 2010 23:55:12 +0000 kfitz47@gmail.com 826@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @<a href='/profile/mjboyce'>mjboyce</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-825">post</a>:</em></p> <p>Sure, but I think what the question is after is the difference between "digital humanities" and "new/digital media studies." And I'm with Patrick here: they have different vectors of approach but so much overlap until thinking about conjunctions might be more productive. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-825 Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:28:38 +0000 mjboyce 825@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Strictly speaking, isn't Digital Humanities a discipline of research and study, whereas New Media is an industry and category of technology? There is cross-over, of course, in that the one attends to and makes use of the other. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-824 Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:07:03 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 824@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>I think that there is a lot of overlap, in no small part because definitions here are very, very fuzzy -- fuzzy enough that I'd through Ed. Tech. into the Venn diagramming fun.</p> <p>I've seen "new media" used to describe just about anything on the web, and so it overlaps DH and Ed.Tech. Elsewhere, "new media" is a little more like A/V 2.0 -- knowledge of codecs, recording and conversion tools, best practices for audio and video on the web, etc. (N.B. I don't mean "A/V 2.0" in a disparaging way at all. We're not talking about filmstrips and setting up a VCR anymore!)</p> <p>It might be interesting to see <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-help-questions-are-you-asked-most-frequently">this thread about common help questions in a DH shop</a>. (Once we got on a role, it also got somewhat amusing a cathartic). The same questions come up in Ed. Tech. groups, and it's notable how many of them are about "new media" in one guise or another.</p> <p>So I'm clearly not giving info about a difference, but examples of how, healthily, I think, there's too much overlap to pursue a statement of difference. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-817 Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:05:49 +0000 kfitz47@gmail.com 817@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>I hope you'll forgive me for responding with a link rather than an answer, but I wrote about exactly this Venn diagram, as well as the institutional stakes involved in drawing it, <a href="http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/the-stakes-of-disciplinarity/">a while ago</a>. It's one take on what's a pretty knotty set of issues. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media#post-816 Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:43:03 +0000 jonvoss 816@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>What are the differences within and outside an academic context? Is there much overlap? </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-354 Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:19:59 +0000 Elizabeth Glascock 354@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @<a href='/profile/mkirschenbaum'>mkirschenbaum</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-309">post</a>:</em></p> <p>I saw your talk "What is Digital Humanities and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" at Loyola this past Spring. It was edifying - THANK YOU! </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-319 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:27:30 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 319@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Like Bethany said, and as you've seen already, there are lots of floating definitions. One place to look for at least some ideas is in the variety of "Digital Humanities" tenure-track positions I've seen advertised over the last few months. However, I'd say that digital humanities is not limited to TT gigs. Instead, I'd say that one pervasive characteristic of digital humanities is the number of people <strong>not</strong> in TT positions who do digital humanities.</p> <p>Here's another approach to responding. You might be a digital humanist if:</p> <ul> <li>You use emerging technologies to rethink what "the humanities" is all about.</li> <li>You collaborate with people across disciplines and backgrounds to explore innovations in academia</li> <li>You are willing to experiment with new pedagogies and research approaches made possible by new technologies</li> <li>You are not afraid to work closely and collaboratively with your friendly neighborhood technologist</li> <li>You are willing to take a do it yourself approach to creating the tools and technologies you need for your teaching and/research</li> <li>You use technology in a way that disregards traditional boundaries between disciplines and hierarchies</li> </ul> <p>I'm sure others will have different and additional perspectives, but that's what springs to my mind first. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-314 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:19:50 +0000 briancroxall 314@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @<a href='/profile/mkirschenbaum'>mkirschenbaum</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-310">post</a>:</em></p> <p>Way to score one for the team, Matt! </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-310 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:02:29 +0000 mkirschenbaum 310@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @<a href='/profile/mkirschenbaum'>mkirschenbaum</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-309">post</a>:</em></p> <p>Btw, ADE Bulletin normally departmental subscription access only. Successfully lobbied editor to make my piece, as well as neighboring contributions by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Kate Hayles, available open access. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-309 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 01:44:00 +0000 mkirschenbaum 309@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @Nicholas Pavkovic's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-289">post</a>:</em></p> <p>I have an essay coming out later this year in ADE Bulletin entitled, you guessed it, "What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in Your English Department?" (It's based on an earlier talk entitled "What is Digital Humanities and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?") Anyway, I like Bethany's answer too, but fwiw here's the money quote from my piece:</p> <p>"Digital humanities, which began as a term of consensus amongst a relatively small group of researchers is now backed on a growing number of campuses by a level of funding, infrastructure, and administrative commitments that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Even more recently, I would argue, the network effects of blogs and Twitter at a moment when the academy itself is facing massive and often wrenching changes linked both to new technologies and the changing political and economic landscape has led to the construction of “digital humanities” as a free floating signifier, one which increasingly serves to focus the anxiety and even outrage of individual scholars over their own lack of agency amid the turmoil in their institutions and profession. This is manifested in the intensity of debates around open access publishing, where faculty increasingly demand the right to retain ownership of their own scholarship—meaning, their own labor--and disseminate it freely to an audience apart from or in parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing, which in turn are perceived as outgrowths of dysfunctional and outmoded practices surrounding peer review, tenure, and promotion.</p> <p>"Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that’s bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that is collaborative and depends on networks of people and that lives an active, 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?"</p> <p>Comments welcome. </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-296 Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:43:28 +0000 Vika Zafrin 296@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p><em>Replying to @Nicholas Pavkovic's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-289">post</a>:</em></p> <p>Hello, Nicholas! I'll echo Bethany's answer -- there's no solidity yet in the various definitions of digital humanities. Perhaps this is because we're still continually discovering new things we can do with DH tools and methods, so maybe it's that we <em>can't</em> answer that question yet. Of course, that doesn't stop anyone from trying.</p> <p>I keep coming back to Espen Aarseth definition of ergodic literature in his book <em>Cybertext</em>: it's literature in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text." (See Noah Wardrip Fruin's discussion of this statement <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2005/1/Wardrip-Fruin/">here.</a>) I've modified it a bit: when someone asks me what DH is, I usually say any activity that requires non-trivial computation in the course of teaching and research in any humanities field. In this case, non-trivial means that word processing doesn't count. :)</p> <p>Of course, now that I look at it, I see that for me, DH = activity. That's about right. This is a culture of participation. Glad to have you with us! </p> http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-290 Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:53:14 +0000 Bethany Nowviskie 290@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ <p>Welcome to the DHanswers forum! This is a great question, and not all all too basic! I'm sure you'll get many responses, because the definition of the "digital humanities" is something that an international and very diverse community of scholars and practioners is continually formulating -- rethinking, questioning, and demonstrating through projects and collaborations of different sorts.</p> <p>Our definitions are often therefore a little muddy. (Melissa Terras, in a great <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html">keynote presentation</a> at last summer's annual <a href="http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/">Digital Humanities conference</a>, called the entire community to task for hemming and hawing: "It's... kinda the intersection of...") We need to get better at this! So I'm looking forward to the answers you get.</p> <p>In the meantime, I'll point you to a few existing attempts and conversations.</p> <p>The new CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative has put out a fantastic beginner's <a href="http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/The_CUNY_Digital_Humanities_Resource_Guide">Resource Guide to the Digital Humanities</a>, which includes a set of links on definitions, but -- even better -- some great pages on sample projects, basic readings, and "hot topics" in DH, which will give you a terrific overview of the scene.</p> <p>Patrick Svensson has a solid piece (one in a series) in <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em> called "<a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">The Landscape of Digital Humanities</a>."</p> <p>A recent post by a UVa graduate student, Chris Forster, on the HASTAC Scholar blogs, <a href="http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cforster/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong">attempted to define DH</a>. I recommend it highly, both for Chris's smart formulation of four areas of activity (the use of computational methods for research that couldn't be done any other way; "new media" media studies; the ways technology reshapes the humanities classroom; and the ways it reshapes scholarly communication and the roles in the academy) and for the spirited discussion that followed.</p> <p>Finally, there's a great project out of the University of Alberta, called the "<a href="http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities">Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities</a>." For the past two years, they've hosted an event in which, for one day, digital humanists from all areas of the field (scholars, administrators, developers, librarians, archivists, students, researchers) blog about and reflect on what they do. The sign-up process allows you to offer your own personal definition of the digital humanities, and some of those definitions <a href="http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F">have been published online</a>.</p> <p>(PS: when I was in grad school -- not that long ago! -- we all called it "humanities computing." Now, as a digital humanities administrator at a major research library, the question I hear most from colleagues outside the DH community is whether it even needs a name. Are these just the new humanities, the "new normal?") </p>