DH's greatest hits? Top tech innovations stemming from the humanities?

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DH's greatest hits? Top tech innovations stemming from the humanities?

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Asked 4 years ago by Bethany Nowviskie
Latest answer from Patrick Murray-John

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Bethany Nowviskie
Admin
What would you name as the top technical innovations of DH -- or some of the most important and broadly applicable science-and-techology contributions that can be reasonably claimed by the (digital) humanities?

I'm thinking of things like XML, as developed by Michael Sperberg-McQueen and other computing humanists, and would appreciate references not only to standards and protocols, but to important algorithms and tools. I can name a few more of my own, but am writing something on behalf of the ACH community, so would like to engage the wisdom of the crowd!
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Posted 4 years ago Permalink
streamweaver@gmail.com
Member

Just running through a few while I wait for the SWTOR queue. :)

* RDF (Though the whole stack is still over complex)
* Natural Language Toolkit (Python NLTK) and other NLP engines.
* OAI-PMH
* Big Social Media APIs (Twitter and Facebook primarily)
* The I-don't-care-about-my-privacy mavens brave enough to post all their personal details.
* I think MongoDB will be big or useful but nobody is really leveraging it yet.
* Government supported Open Data initiatives. (http://services.data.gov/sparql) Europe is way ahead of the US in this regard and will likely stay there for some time.
* SPARQL querying language overall. (Noticing a trend here?)
* On Demand cloud services like Rackspace that put larger server resources in DH hands on an as-needed basis.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Eric Johnson
Member

Dublin Core is one that leaps right to mind. And, as you mentioned, RDF beyond that. I'll dwell on it some more, but wanted to add those as they came up.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
footnotesrising
Member

metadata.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
footnotesrising
Member

to expand re metadata: looking for patterns in culture, productions of culture, items of culture, etc., is a fundamentally humanistic enterprise, as is creating ways to attach words or codes to those patterns in order to sort and categorize and pattern them some more.

and, in the same way, i would argue that object-oriented approaches to computing are also based in a (sometimes overly simplified) humanistic understanding of a post-renaissance western world. so that's another one to look at.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
John Fink
Member

Are things like metadata-as-concept, OAI-PMH, Dublin Core really of DH origin? I always considered them sort of libraries' territory. And while I definitely agree that Mongo (and other NoSQL/key-value stores) are on the upswing, it's pretty tenuous to say that Mongo is a DH creation, unless there's a 10gen origin story that I'm not familiar with.

If we're going to get down to discrete protocols or programs as examples, I'd put forth CHNM's Zotero.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Anupam Basu
Member

I don't think NLP or the NLTK are DH creations either - they have enabled many aspects of DH but statistical language processing can hardly be claimed by the DH community. Same goes for social media APIs.

I agree about Zotero as a program that is in widespread use and looks likely to set the standards for the future.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

Someone would probably fire me if I didn't mention Omeka alongside Zotero :) Probably the same for Anthologize, and more generally the concept of One Week | One Tool.

I'd refine the RDF mention to include some specific vocabularies: VRA, CIDOC, ORCID. There are certainly more that I'm not thinking of right now.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink

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