Digital Humanities: A Resource List
This web site has been designed to provide a quick and simple reference source for information about, and resources for, the
theory and practice of Digital Humanities. While it has been assembled for the particular use of scholars and students working in the
Digital Humanities at Western University, it is open to anyone, and (it is hoped) will prove a particularly useful resource for those
new to the field.
This resource list is avowedly neither comprehensive nor complete. The focus is upon free and open access tools and sources of information that can be of immediate assistance to those who
wish to begin to engage with technology directly. Doubtless I have overlooked a great deal that is of value, and I will be updating these pages periodically with
new materials as I become aware of them; a list of recent additions is to be found immediately below. All of the resources listed here are, for the moment, available online (although some
exist in print as well); future iterations of this list may additionally include conventional print sources, as well as exemplary projects in the Digital Humanities. Additional areas that I will be adding in the future
include digital archives, linguistics, and virtual worlds.
There is a great deal of overlap between many of the subareas of Digital Humanities, and this is reflected also in the literature and resources relating to the field. Some resources
will therefore be found listed under more than one category.
If you know of a web page, digital tool, blog post, or other resource from which this list and its users might benefit, please contact Mark McDayter ; if it is your own resource, or
one with which you are associated, the inclusion of a brief descriptive blurb would be greatly appreciated. While I cannot guarantee that I will incorporate all suggestions into this resource, if it is (mostly) free, available online, and likely
to be of assistance to those working in the Digital Humanities, I will be delighted to include it here.
Recent Additions
Graham, Shawn. "Getting Started with MALLET and Topic Modeling ." added to Digital Tools — 12/05/2012
MALLET: MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit Digital Tools — 12/05/2012
Flanders, Julia, and Trevor Muñoz. "An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation. added to Digital Humanities - General — 12/05/2012
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyeur Tools: See Through Your Texts DH & Literary Studies — 03/05/2012
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Methods Commons DH & Literary Studies — 03/05/2012
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Heremeneuti.ca: The Rhetoric of Text Analysis DH & Literary Studies — 03/05/2012
Prism Digital Tools — 03/05/2012
Evernote Digital Tools — 27/04/2012
Rickshaw Digital Tools — 26/04/2012
LaBonte, Karen, comp., Teaching & Learning in the Digital Age Pedagogy & Technology — 25/04/2012
TEI Boilerplate Text Encoding Initiative — 25/04/2012
The Miso Project Digital Tools — 23/04/2012
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy JiTP ) added to Pedagogy & Technology — 17/04/2012
Rorabaugh, Pete and Jesse Stommel, "How to Storify. Why to Storify. added to Digital Tools — 13/04/2012
Bauman, Syd and Julia Flanders. "Resources for Teaching and Learning Text Encoding " added to Text Encoding Initiative — 12/04/2012
Gray, Jonathan. "Curating the Commons with TEXTUS ." added to Digital Tools — 12/04/2012
TEXTUS Digital Tools — 12/04/2012
Harris, Katherine D. "NITLE Digital Pedagogy Seminar ."added to Pedagogy & Technology — 12/04/2012
Harris, Katherine D. "Digital Pedagogy at DH Commons, MLA 2012 ." added to Pedagogy & Technology — 12/04/2012
Spiro, Lisa. "Getting Started in Digital Humanities ." added to Digital Humanities - General — 12/04/2012
Greene, Colleen. "Sample workshop assignment for teaching Omeka ," added to Content Management Systems — 11/04/2012
Jockers, Matthew L. "The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors ." added to DH & Literary Studies — 07/04/2012
Weingart, Scott B. "Topic Modeling and Network Analysis ." added to DH & Literary Studies — 07/04/2012
Underwood, Ted. "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough ." added to DH & Literary Studies — 07/04/2012
Tooling Up for Digital Humanities added to Digital Humanities - General — 07/04/2012
Juxta: Collation Software for Scholars Digital Tools — 06/04/2012
HTML5 Boilerplate Digital Tools — 06/04/2012
Automating TEI encoding (using the Overtoom/Jockers Python script) added to Text Encoding Initiative — 06/04/2012
Auto Converting Project Gutenberg Text to TEI added to Text Encoding Initiative — 06/04/2012
WordHoard Digital Tools — 05/04/2012
WordSeer Digital Tools — 05/04/2012
Journal of Digital Humanities Digital Humanities - General — 05/04/2012
ShareThis Digital Tools — 04/04/2012
The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Organizations — 04/04/2012
Annotator and AnnotateIt Digital Tools — 04/04/2012
Delicious Digital Tools — 01/04/2012
Viewshare Digital Tools — 31/03/2012
Sarah Jones "When Computers Read: Literary Analysis and
Digital Technology ," Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 27-30, added to DH & Literary Studies — 31/03/2012
Jordan J. Ballor, "The Dynamics of Primary Source and Electronic Resource:
The Digital Renaissance and the Post-Reformation Digital Library ," Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 16-19 added to DH & History — 31/03/2012
Jonathan Hagood "A Brief Introduction to Data Mining Projects
in the Humanities ," Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 20-23 added to DH & History — 31/03/2012
Storify Digital Tools — 31/03/2012
The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T )Organizations — 31/03/2012
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Digital Humanities - General — 31/03/2012
Weebly Digital Tools — 30/03/2012
Wix Website Builder added to Digital Tools — 30/03/2012
Disqus Digital Tools — 30/03/2012
Markup Pedagogy & Technology — 30/03/2012
MONK TutorialsDigital Tools — 30/03/2012
Diigo Digital Tools — 30/03/2012
Crocodoc Digital Tools — 30/03/2012
Twitter Pedagogy & Technology — 30/03/2012
"A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic ," added to Pedagogy & Technology — 30/03/2012
The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE )Pedagogy & Technology — 28/03/2012
Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects) added to Digital Tools — 28/03/2012
Jennifer Adams, "Digital Humanities ," The Catholic University of America University Libraries added to Digital Humanities - General — 28/03/2012
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Digital Humanities — General A list of resources relating to the general history, functions, fields, and practice of Digital Humanities.
Flanders, Julia, and Trevor Muñoz. "An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation. " DH Curation Guide: A Community Resource Guide to Data Curation in the Digital Humanities . Web. 12 May, 2012.
A part of Flanders and Muñoz, eds., DH Curation Guide , an online resource dedicated to all aspects of the curation of Humanities Data. The "Introduction" can be annotated by users, and
includes two parts, "What Is Data Curation?" and "Unique Features of Humanities Data Curation." The main Guide , of which this is a part, includes more detailed discussions."The DH Curation Guide is a compilation of articles that address aspects of data curation in the digital humanities. The goal of the DH Curation Guide is to direct readers to trusted resources with enough context from expert editors and the other members of the research community to indicate to how these resources might help them with their own data curation challenges.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in
English Departments? ." ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1-7.
An excellent summary of contributions to the question "What is Digital Humanities," with a discussion of some of the diverse areas of enquiry encompassed by this broad field.
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. Companion to Digital Humanities
Probably the most comprehensive and useful single online introduction to the Digital Humanities, with extensive articles, references, and bibliographies on most aspects of the field.
Robichaud, Andrew and Cameron Blevins, with Rio Akasaka and Jon Christensen. "Tooling Up for Digital Humanities ." Spatial History Project and the Computer Graphics Lab , Stanford University. [2011].
Svensson, Patrik. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities ." Digital Humanities Quarterly 4.1 (2010).
"The digital humanities is increasingly becoming a 'buzzword', and there is more and more talk about a broadly conceived, inclusive digital humanities. The field is expanding and at the same time being negotiated, and this article explores the idea of a broadly conceived landscape of digital humanities in some depth. It is argued that awareness across this landscape is important to the future of the field. The study starts out from typologies of digital humanities, a 'flythrough' of the landscape, and a discussion of what being a digital humanist entails. The second part is an exploration of four concrete encounters: ACTLab at University of Texas at Austin, the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and Internet Studies.
In the third part of the article, it is suggested that a model based on paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and
information technology can help chart and understand the digital humanities. The modes of engagement analyzed are technology as a tool, study object, expressive medium, exploratory laboratory and activist venue."
Turkel, William J. "Going Digital ." William J. Turkel (Wordpress Blog). 15 March, 2011.
A useful set of guidelines and links to tools for the beginner in the Digital Humanities.
Unsworth, John. "Knowledge Representation in Humanities Computing ." Texts and Contexts: The Department of English Faculty Conference (30-31 March, 2001). Charlottesville: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, 2001.
"The assertion of this paper is that the methodology known as knowledge representation has profound implications for humanities computing, and through humanities computing, has the potential to change the way humanities scholarship is done, to change the nature of graduate education in the humanities, and to change the relationship between the humanities and other professions, let alone other disciplines. I believe that knowledge representation has already produced important new research, and will, in the future, bring us new insights into what we know about the human record, and how we know it."
Spiro, Lisa. "Getting Started in Digital Humanities ." Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 (2012).
"When I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions workshop on digital humanities (DH) in October, I tried to answer the question “Why digital humanities?” But I discovered that an equally important question is “How do you do digital humanities?” Although participants seemed to be excited about the potential of digital humanities, some weren’t sure how to get started and where to go for support and training. Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into digital humanities work. I should emphasize that many in the digital humanities community are to some extent self-taught and/or gained their knowledge through work on projects rather than through formal training. In my view, what’s most important is being open-minded, experimental, and playful, as well as grounding your learning in a specific project and finding insightful people with whom you can discuss your work."
Open Access Journals and Periodicals Available Online in Full or in Part
Digital Humanities Now (DHNow )PressForward . (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University)
"Digital Humanities Now showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the Digital Humanities community, through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review."
Digital Humanities Quarterly Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO )
"ACH's open-access journal of Digital Humanities."
Journal of Digital Humanities (JDH )PressForward . (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University)
"The Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2165-6673) is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter. The Journal of Digital Humanities offers expanded coverage of the digital humanities in three ways. First, by publishing scholarly work beyond the traditional research article. Second, by selecting content from open and public discussions in the field. Third, by encouraging continued discussion through peer-to-peer review. The Journal of Digital Humanities selects content from the Editors’ Choice pieces from Digital Humanities Now , which highlights the best scholarship — in whatever form — that drives the field of digital humanities field forward. The Journal of Digital Humanities provides three additional layers of evaluation, review, and editing to the pieces initially identified by Digital Humanities Now . The Journal of Digital Humanities and Digital Humanities Now are produced by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media."
Digital Studies / Le champ numérique
"Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (ISSN 1918-3666) is a refereed academic journal serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities. DS/CN is published by the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), a partner in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). DS/CN was founded for SDH/SEMI at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, University of Victoria, in 2008 by Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe."
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T )
"The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is a bi-monthly news magazine packed with developments and issues affecting the field, pragmatic management reports, opinion, and news of people and events in the information science community."
Journal of the Association for History and Computing (JAHC )
"This journal is sponsored by the American Association for History and Computing (AAHC), organized at a conference held in Cincinnati in January 1996. The AAHC aspires to promote and develop interest in the use of computers in all types of historical study at every level, in both teaching and research. We believe that computers and computing are rapidly changing important elements of the work of historians and students of history, constituting a major transformation in the way knowledge is created and communicated. A major goal of this journal is to help define useful standards to maximize the utility of computers in historical studies."
Journal of Digital Information (JoDI )University of Texas Libraries .
"First publishing papers in 1997, the Journal of Digital Information is an electronic-only, peer-reviewed journal covering the broad topics related to digital libraries, hypertext and hypermedia systems and digital repositories, and the issues of digital information. JoDI is supported by the University of Texas Libraries and Texas A&M University Libraries and hosted by the Texas Digital Library."
Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP )
"The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) is a forum for research and discussion about contemporary publishing practices, and the impact of those practices upon users. Our contributors and readers are publishers, scholars, librarians, journalists, students, technologists, attorneys, and others with an interest in the methods and means of contemporary publishing. At its inception in January 1995, JEP carved out an important niche by recognizing that print communication was in the throes of significant change, and that digital communication would become an important—and in some cases predominant—means for transmitting published information.
Other Resource Lists and Collections
"Resources ." Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO )
"The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) promotes and supports digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines, acting as a community-based advisory force, and supporting excellence in research, publication, collaboration and training."
Jennifer Adams, "Digital Humanities ," The Catholic University of America, University Libraries .
A fairly comprehensive guide to a broad variety of resources and publications relating to the Digital Humanities.
The CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide
A "collaboratively produced introduction to the field of Digital Humanities. The guide is a project of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI), a new working group aimed at building connections and community among those at CUNY who are – or would like to be – applying digital technologies to research and pedagogy in the humanities."
"Digital Humanities ," YouTube , comp. Greta Franzini.
A new YouTube channel devoted to videos of lectures, papers, and presentations in the Digital Humanities, created and curated by Greta Franzini.
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Digital Humanities and Literary Studies The applications of the methodologies of Digital Humanities to literary studies have been varied and numerous, ranging from the preparation and digital publication of scholarly editions, to the
linguistic and stylistic analysis of both individual texts and "big data" sets compiled from very large collections of electronic texts. Below are a number of theoretical introductions to the
digital practice of literary studies, as well as some guides for the deployment of digital tools and resources. The information here should be consulted alongside that found in the Text Encoding Initiative section of this resource guide. More tools and applications can be found in the "Digital Tools " section of this page.
Ballor, Jordan J. "The Dynamics of Primary Source and Electronic Resource:
The Digital Renaissance and the Post-Reformation Digital Library ." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 16-19.
From a special issue, "Digital Humanities and Information Visualization: Innovations and Integration," ed. Joan Beaudoin and Sarah Buchanan.
Burrows, John. "Textual Analysis ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
"The object of this paper is to show that computer-assisted textual analysis can be of value in many different sorts of literary inquiry, helping to resolve some questions, to carry others forward, and to open entirely new ones. The emphasis will not be on the straightforward, albeit valuable, business of gathering specimens of chosen phenomena for close study – the business of concordances and tagged sets. It will fall rather on the form of computational stylistics in which all the most common words (whatever they may be) of a large set of texts are subjected to appropriate kinds of statistical analysis."
Craig, Hugh. "Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
"In this chapter I offer first an example of a study in computational Stylistics to set the scene. Then I discuss the most important theoretical challenge to Stylistics, and go on to sketch a methodological basis for the practice. Turning to authorship attribution, I treat some underlying ideas about authorship itself, then theoretical issues in attribution studies, and finally some practical considerations."
Flanders, Julia. "Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts ." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.4 (2009).
"Broadly conceived, this article re-imagines the role of conjecture in textual scholarship at a time when computers are increasingly pressed into service as tools of reconstruction and forecasting. Examples of conjecture include the recovery of lost readings in classical texts, and the computational modeling of the evolution of a literary work or the descent of a natural language. Conjectural criticism is thus concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction. It has ancient parallels in divination and modern parallels in the comparative methods of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology.
Hagood, Jonathan. "A Brief Introduction to Data Mining Projects
in the Humanities ." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 20-23.
From a special issue, "Digital Humanities and Information Visualization: Innovations and Integration," ed. Joan Beaudoin and Sarah Buchanan.
Jockers, Matthew L. "The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors ." Matthew L. Jockers (Blog) 29 September 2011.
"For my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter on the uses of topic modeling in literary studies, I wrote the following vignette. It is my imperfect attempt at making the mathematical magic of LDA palatable to the average humanist. Imperfect, but hopefully more fun than plate notation . . ."
Jones, Sarah. "When Computers Read: Literary Analysis and
Digital Technology ." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 27-30.
From a special issue, "Digital Humanities and Information Visualization: Innovations and Integration," ed. Joan Beaudoin and Sarah Buchanan.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "'So the Colors Cover the Wires': Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
A superb discussion of the importance of "interface," informed by an exploration of the implications to electronic texts and resources of both human computer interaction and book history.
–––––. "What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in
English Departments? ." ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1-7.
An excellent summary of contributions to the question "What is Digital Humanities," with a discussion of some of the diverse areas of enquiry encompassed by this broad field.
Lancashire, Ian. "Renaissance Electronic Texts: Encoding Guidelines ." Renaissance Electronic Texts . Renaissance Electronic Texts Supplementary Studies 1. Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, 1994.
Although now nearly two decades old, this set of guidelines for SGML coding of handpress-era printed texts still contains much excellent advice about the coding of early modern books.
–––––. "Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
"Cognitive Stylistics analyzes an author's idiolect, his individual language traits. Although cognitive psychology and neuroscience do not know how the human mind works, they have detected, through experiments on how people behave (not through personal testimony about that behavior), features of mental behavior that are consistent with a standard theory or model. . . .
New knowledge about language processing in the brain helps us interpret data from traditional computer text analysis, not because the mind necessarily works algorithmically, like a computer program, but because quantitative word studies reveal auditory networks, and the cognitive model asserts that the brain operates as a massively distributed group of such networks. Cognitive Stylistics underscores how every utterance is stamped with signs of its originator, and with the date of its inception: these traits are not unique, like fingerprints, but, taken together, they amount to sufficiently distinctive configurations to be useful in authorship attribution or text analysis. Cognitive Stylistics determines what those traces may be, using concordances and frequency lists of repeated phenomena and collocations: together, partially, these conceivably map long-term associational memories in the author's mind at the time it uttered the text."
McGann, Jerome. "The Rationale of Hypertext ." Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. n.d.
An HTML version of McGann's seminal essay "The Rationale of Hypertext," printed in full in Electronic Text. Investigations in Method and Theory , ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1997), 19-46.
–––––. "Texts in N-Dimensions and Interpretation in a New
Key [Discourse and Interpretation in N-Dimensions] ." TEXT Technology 12.2 (2003): 1-18.
"The IVANHOE project can be understood in various ways – an interpretive environment, a tool of collaborative critical thinking, a pedagogical
game for studying cultural materials – it emerges out of a basic shift in the theory of texts and textuality. IVANHOE is regulated by seven key ideas: 1.
The textual ?eld is a Baktinian space (heteroglossia); 2. In textual space, a equals a if and only if a does not equal a; 3. Textual ?elds arise codependently with interpretative action; 4. Textual forms are generated by
algorithmic and autopoietic devices; 5. Interpretive action is always performative/deformative; 6. Interpretation of a textual ?eld proceeds at an inner standing point ; 7. Textual ?elds are n-dimensional.".
–––––. "Marking Texts of Many Dimensions ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
An important and worthwhile theoretical-informed discussion of text markup by Jerome McGann, from Companion to Digital Humanities .
––––– and Dino Buzzetti. "Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon ." Electronic Textual Editing . eds. Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth. Text Encoding Initiative, [2005].
"Just as the machinery of the codex opened radically new ways to store, organize, study, transform, and disseminate knowledge and information, digital technology represents an epochal watershed for anyone involved with semiotic materials. For scholars of books and texts, and in particular for editorial scholars, digital tools have already begun their disciplinary transformations, and we can see as well the promise of further, perhaps even more remarkable, changes on the near horizon of our work."
–––––. "From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text ." Romanticism on the Net 41-42 (2006).
"The essay is a study of how critical editions work, whether in paper-based forms or in electronic forms. The first section – more than half the essay – gives a close examination to J. C. C. Mays’s superb recent (Bollingen) edition of Coleridge’s poetry. This analysis establishes the terms for investigating the opportunities that digital technology supplies for scholars pursuing a close study of the socio-historical character of literary works. This investigation pivots around the seminal work of D. F. McKenzie, whose theory of the social-text edition argues for a more comprehensive kind of editorial method. This essay argues that the method can be best realized through digital resources. It concludes with a discussion of The Rossetti Archive as a 'proof of concept' experiment to test the social-text approach to editorial method."
–––––. "Electronic Archives and Critical Editing ." Literature Compass 7 (2010): 37-42.
"Developments in traditional editorial theory and method that came into prominence 25 years ago have converged with more recent online IT resources to
establish important, perhaps even breakthrough, approaches to the ways we pursue the scholarly investigation of cultural materials. Various online projects illustrate the
widespread effort to create digital tools and environments for studying cultural materials at remarkable levels of complexity. Scholarly ‘editing’ no longer confines itself to a focus
on textual documents alone, but now pursues investigations into the entire social context that comprises the cultural work. Moving from a brief look at the theoretical foundations
of these developments, this essay sketches the shape of this scholarly work and supplies a few examples of what it entails."
Committee on Scholarly Editions, Modern Language Association. "Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions ." Modern Language Association (MLA ) 29 June, 2011.
An important and influential set of scholarly and technical specifications. It includes a very useful checklist, the "Guiding Questions for Vetters of Scholarly Editions," for the editors of digital scholarly editions.
Ramsay, Stephen. "In Praise of Pattern ." TEXT Technology 14.2 (2005): 177-190.
"The exploration of pattern may be usefully regarded as the strongest point of intersection between the computational strictures of text analysis and
the open-ended interpretive landscape of literary studies. Seeing computational analysis in literary studies as a quest for interpretations inspired by pattern can, moreover, lead to a change in the perception of text analysis among more mainstream literary critics by moving the hermeneutical
justification of the activity away from the denotative realm of science and toward the more broadly rhetorical and exegetical practices of the humanities. This article presents the author’s creation of StageGraph -- a tool for
the visualization of dramatic structure -- as a “narrative of process” and uses it to consider the implications of such a change against the broader backdrop of literary studies. By embracing a more humanistic vision of
computational work, the author argues, text analysis can take its rightful place in the spectrum of critical tools."
Renear, Allen H. "Text Encoding ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
"This chapter will provide a general orientation to some of the historical and theoretical context needed for understanding both contemporary text encoding practices and the various ongoing debates that surround those practices. We will be focusing for the most part, although not exclusively, on "markup", as markup-related techniques and systems not only dominate practical encoding activity, but are also at the center of most of the theoretical debates about text encoding."
Rockwell, Geoffrey. "MIMes and MeRMAids: On the Possibility of Computer-aided Interpretation ." TEXT Technology 14.1 (2005): 79-90.
"One problem in humanities computing is the automatic interpretation of electronic texts. Can computers interpret texts or do they aide in the interpretation? In this paper we propose variants on the Turing Test to imagine
if computer-assisted interpretation is possible. We argue that a way forward for developing models for successful machine interpreters is to work with regular expression recognition and manipulation, which is built into
most programming languages in a common fashion."
Rommel, Thomas. "Literary Studies ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Thomas Rommel's referenced article on the uses of Digital Humanities in Literary Studies, from Companion to Digital Humanities .
Schreibman, Susan and Ray Siemens. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies
A comprehensive introduction to Digital Literary Studies. Available also in print format.
Sinclair, Stéfan. "Towards Next Generation Text Analysis Tools: The
Text Analysis Markup Language (TAML) ." TEXT Technology 14.1 (2005): 99-107.
"There is a demonstrated need for literary text analysis tools that take
advantage of networked resources and the potential of graphical interfaces. Despite several initiatives over the years, there has been little success in developing text analysis tools collaboratively or in creating an
interoperable framework for tools development. This article presents initial work towards a Text Analysis Markup Language (TAML) that would foster the distributed development of literary text analysis tools. Any standardization of a vocabulary requires difficult choices, but it also entails a
beneficial examination of the needs and practices of a community. TAML is both a technical specification and a product of sociological introspection."
––––– and Geoffrey Rockwell. Heremeneuti.ca: The Rhetoric of Text Analysis Heremeneuti.ca
This is e-Book discusses "text analysis and expressing." It includes three sections: "Introduction: Correcting Method," and a number of case studies. The discussion centres around the use of Voyeur Tools , a text analysis tool developed by Sinclair and Rockwell.
––––– and Geoffrey Rockwell. Methods Commons Heremeneuti.ca
"Computation has produced new and exciting ways of studying texts. Many of these methods do not require the use of expensive programs or detailed programming knowledge, but only the know-how to combine freely accessible resources to perform various tasks.
––––– and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyeur Tools: See Through Your Texts Heremeneuti.ca
"Voyeur is a web-based text analysis environment. It is designed to be user-friendly, flexible and powerful. Voyeur is part of the Hermeneuti.ca, a collaborative project to develop and theorize text analysis tools and text analysis rhetoric. This section of the Hermeneuti.ca web site provides information and documentation for users and developers of Voyeur.
use texts in a variety of formats including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF and MS Word
use texts from different locations, including URLs and uploaded files
perform lexical analysis including the study of frequency and distribution data; in particular
export data into other tools (as XML, tab separated values, etc.)
embed live tools into remote web sites that can accompany or complement your own content
Voyeur is a work in progress – it is currently in beta. Some things don't work properly, some planned features aren't available yet. In particular, here are some weaknesses that we recognize:
lack of more advanced linguistic processing (lemmatization, parts of speech, semantic awareness)
lack of XML-aware analytic features (though XML is a valid input format)
the current default skin (configuration of tools) is not well-suited to reading texts
some of the user documentation is a bit bare
other funcitonality:
proximity searching of terms
multi-word (n-gram) views (though you can search for specific phrases)"
Smith, Martha Nell. "Electronic Scholarly Editing ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
A fully referenced exploration of the differences between print and electronic scholarly editions, and the implications of and potential offered by the latter, from Companion to Digital Humanities .
Underwood, Ted. "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough ." The Stone and the Shell . (Wordpress Blog) 7 April 2012.
"Right now, humanists often have to take topic modeling on faith. There are several good posts out there that introduce the principle of the thing (by Matt Jockers, for instance, and Scott Weingart). But it’s a long step up from those posts to the computer-science articles that explain 'Latent Dirichlet Allocation' mathematically. My goal in this post is to provide a bridge between those two levels of difficulty."
Weingart, Scott B. "Topic Modeling and Network Analysis ." The Scottbot Irregular . (Blog) 15 November, 2011.
"According to Google Scholar, David Blei’s first topic modeling paper has received 3,540 citations since 2003. Everybody’s talking about topic models. Seriously, I’m afraid of visiting my parents this Hanukkah and hearing them ask 'Scott . . . what’s this topic modeling I keep hearing all about?' They’re powerful, widely applicable, easy to use, and difficult to understand — a dangerous combination. converted aware of its potential."
Willett, Perry. "Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
A referenced introduction to the history and functions of electronic texts, from Companion to Digital Humanities .
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Digital Humanities and History The employment of the tools and methodologies of Digital Humanities to the study of history is one of the largest and most important subareas in the field today. Below can be found a variety of theoretical discussions of "Digital History,", as well as some practical guides for approaches to the field. Some specific tools for the practice of Digital History can be found in the "Digital Tools " section of this page.
Ayers, Edward L. "History in Hypertext ." The Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH ), University of Virginia, 1999.
An early discussion of the potential offered by the application of hypertext to historical digital archives, focused upon the case of the Valley of the Shadow Project at the University of Virginia.
Ballor, Jordan J. "The Dynamics of Primary Source and Electronic Resource:
The Digital Renaissance and the Post-Reformation Digital Library ." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 16-19.
From a special issue, "Digital Humanities and Information Visualization: Innovations and Integration," ed. Joan Beaudoin and Sarah Buchanan.
Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.
"This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years."
–––––, Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William J. Turkel, "Interchange: The Promise of Digital History ." The Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 442–51.
Transcription of an online discussion between a number of practitioners of Digital Humanities in history about the nature of the digital enterprise, and its function in and impact upon the discipline.
Hagood, Jonathan. "A Brief Introduction to Data Mining Projects in the Humanities ." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.4 (2012): 20-23.
From a special issue, "Digital Humanities and Information Visualization: Innovations and Integration," ed. Joan Beaudoin and Sarah Buchanan.
Rosenzweig, Roy. "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era ," The American Historical Review 108.3 (2003).
A discussion of the ephemerality of digital historical and cultural documents, whether born-digital or digitized, and the importance of preserving this increasingly important facet of the historical record.
Takats, Sean. "Only a Historian ," The Quintessence of Ham , (Blog), 26 March, 2012.
A discussion of "thinking" vs "doing", and the practices of the profession of "historian" in the context of Digital Humanities.
Thomas, William G., II. "Computing and the Historical Imagination ." A Companion to Digital Humanities . ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
William G. Thomas's referenced article on the uses of Digital Humanities in History, from Companion to Digital Humanities .
Turkel, William J. "A Workflow for Digital Research Using Off-the-Shelf Tools ." William J. Turkel (Wordpress Blog) n.d.
A linked list of posts that "describe a complete workflow for finding, harvesting, clustering, excerpting, and keeping track of digital sources, using programs that run on your own computer."
––––– and Alan MacEachern. "The Programming Historian ." NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (2007-11).
"The Programming Historian offers a range of lessons that build upon one another. Introductory lessons teach you how to:
install Zotero, the Python programming language and other useful tools
read and write data files
save web pages and automatically extract information from them
count word frequencies
remove stop words
automatically refine searches
make n-gram dictionaries
create keyword-in-context (KWIC) displays
make tag clouds, and
harvest sets of hyperlinks"
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Pedagogical deployments of a variety of digital tools (ranging from presentation tools to interfaces for online learning) have become an important aspect of Digital Humanities, even if there frequently seems to be a lamentable paucity of
dialogue between the "teaching" and "research" branches of the field. In addition to the tools listed below is a separate page on Learning Management Systems , below.
Other potentially useful resources may be found on the Digital Tools page.
General
Harris, Katherine D. "Digital Pedagogy at DH Commons, MLA 2012 ." Triproftri (Wordpress Blog) 5 January, 2012.
"This morning at the DH Commons workshop, I served on the panel “How to Get Started in Digital Humanities.” (See Twitter hashtags #dhcom and #mla12.) After sitting between the fabulous Amanda French and inimitable Julia Flanders, we broke into table sessions for two rounds. Much to my surprise and glee, both sessions were filled (over-filled, even) with various levels of the DH curious and skilled alike. After brief introductions, it became obvious that we need a dynamic portal for storing, archiving, demonstrating, and evaluating digital pedagogy — beyond a print text. During the in-between conversations, the attendees wanted more — more information, more access, more experts, more informal chatting about all levels of digital pedagogy. Below is a sketchy list of needs, desires, curiosities from both sessions"
–––––. "NITLE Digital Pedagogy Seminar ." Triproftri (Wordpress Blog) 27 March, 2012.
"Today, Jentery Sayers and I spent an fast-paced hour talking about digital pedagogy with Rebecca Frost Davis at NITLE. With upwards of 50 participants, an active Twitter backchannel (see Storify version of some of the tweets and Rebecca’s full Storify of the entire tweeted session) and a chat within the seminar itself, there was a lot of technology to read, address, and contemplate with all of our versions of pedagogy. The session has been recorded and is available online.
Seminar Description : As new digital methods of critical analysis reshape academic practices in profound ways, scholars have begun to use digital tools and platforms to rethink their assumptions about what can or should happen in the college classroom. From work in the online archive to encoding texts to multimodal composition, digital tools and methodologies are changing how students learn and how instructors teach. Many of these developments move beyond the physical classroom into emerging domains for hands-on learning, including the humanities lab, the library, and the open web. How do these developments lead us to rethink learning outcomes, power dynamics, assessment, etc.? Where do we draw the line between digital pedagogy and Digital Humanities or should we? In this seminar, two experienced practitioners of Digital Pedagogy will share their experiences with digital teaching and learning and consider the implications for digital pedagogy."
Classroom Tools
Prezi
"Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. The result: visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery."
Markup
"Markup is a simple tool that a user adds to her web browser bookmark list. It allows users to annotated content on the web with a couple of simple graphic tools and share the content. For example, while reading a news story, a student can highlight a paragraph or jot down textual notes. Markup will create a new link for the annotated page and prompt the student to share the link via Twitter, email, or another method." ("Concordance of Tools," Hybrid Pedagogy
Collaboration and Communication Tools
Twitter
Deevy Bishop, "A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic ," BishopBlog, (Blogspot Blog), 14 June 2011.
Delicious
A very popular social bookmarking web site. "Delicious helps you find cool stuff and collect it for easy sharing. Dig into stacks created by the community, and then build your own!"
Wordpress
Wordpress is one of the more popular free blogs, and is often employed in education. It is, on the whole, fairly easy to use and manage. One of its more useful features is its detailed metrics on site usage. Wordpress also offers a Content Management System; see Content Management Systems .
Blogger
Blogger is a popular free blog publishing service owned and managed by Google. Blogger accounts are tied into your Google account. Like Wordpress, it is a fairly simple tool to use.
Sharon Leon, "Blogging for Engagement and Understanding ," Bracket: Images, Teaching, Technologies . 4 March, 2012.
A good discussion of the value of blogging as a means of nurturing student engagement.
Wikidot
"Are you a researcher, teacher or lecturer? With your Wiki For Education you can easily co-operate with your students. Thousands of our users found Wikidot a great tool to:
discuss research topics and collaborate with coworkers,
publish lesson / lecture notes and materials, including any PDF files or PowerPoint slides,
inform students about upcoming topics and events, also using RSS feeds to keep them up-to-date,
publish homework tasks,
create forums to discuss topics,
organize whole classes using Wikidot,
create separate wikis for groups or for each student."
Wetpaint Wikis in Education
Wetpaint Wikis in Education "is a a place where educators come together to share tips about using wikis to enhance the learning experience." In addition to permitting educators to create their own free educational wikis, the site also includes discussion groups and a variety of tips, examples, and resources addressing the educational use of wikis.
Connexions
"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology. Connexions delivers content for free over the Internet for schools, educators, students, and parents to access 24/7/365. Materials are easily downloadable to almost any mobile device for use anywhere, anytime. Schools can also order low cost hard copy sets of the materials (textbooks)."
Crocodoc
"A recent start-up company has created an online writing and collaboration tool that provides some perks that Google Docs does not. Crocodoc permits users to upload, share, and annotate various forms of online documents. Instructors can create folders, tag them as public, and give students a link to submit their papers. Once uploaded, every member of the class can see everyone else’s work for annotation, collaboration, and peer review. Unlike Google Docs, Crocodoc texts are frozen upon upload. This allows users to comment on a static draft, without the author’s ability to change things as or after they comment. It’s a good tool to mark the changes that occur between drafts." (Pete Rorabaugh, "Document Sharing and Markup," Hybrid Pedagogy
Diigo
"Diigo is a social bookmarking and annotation tool that permits users to collect web content, annotate it, and share groups of bookmarked content with others. Diigo can be helpful for teams of students collaborating on a research project; all team members can add content to a common Diigo list and attach commentary to each marked page. Collections of web documents are helpful to demonstrate bibliographic skills. Additionally, an instructor can add content to a shared Diigo page, essentially making a course pack of free content for students to use like an online textbook." Hybrid Pedagogy
Journals and Periodicals
The CITE Journal Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education ), Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE ).
"The CITE Journal is an online, peer-reviewed journal, established and jointly sponsored by five professional associations (AMTE, ASTE, NCSS-CUFA, CEE, and SITE). This is the only joint venture of this kind in the field of teacher education."
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching MERLOT
"MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) is a peer-reviewed, open access, online publication addressing the scholarly use of multimedia resources in online education. JOLT is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. The objectives of JOLT are to:
Enable faculty to use technology effectively in online teaching and learning by learning from a community of researchers and scholars;
Enable academic programs to design and deploy academic technology to optimize online teaching and learning;
Build a community around the research and scholarly use of multimedia educational resources for online teaching and learning."
Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology
"Hybrid Pedagogy
: combines the strands of critical and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses of technology and digital media in the classroom.
: asserts that teaching and learning must become hybrid – concrete and digital – for both physical and online classrooms.
: avoids valorizing educational technology, but seeks to interrogate and investigate technological tools to determine their most progressive applications.
: invites you to an ongoing discussion that is networked and participant-driven, to a journal that is both academic and collective.
"
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy JiTP )
"The mission of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ISSN 2166-6245) is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship – and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed – by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats.
EDUCAUSE Review
"EDUCAUSE Review takes a broad look at current developments and trends in information technology, what these mean for higher education, and how they may affect the college/university as a whole."
EDUCAUSE Quarterly
"EDUCAUSE Quarterly is a practitioners journal for college and university managers and users of information resources—information, technology, and services—published quarterly by EDUCAUSE."
EdITLib — Educational and Information Technology Digital Library Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE ).
"The vision for EdITLib, the Digital Library for Education & Information Technology, is to facilitate learning, discovery and innovation by connecting scholarly research on Educational Technology/E-Learning with learning opportunities."
International Journal of Heritage in the Digital Era Multi Science Publishing .
"Journal devoted to scholarly reflections upon the digital preservation and modelling of international heritage."
LaBonte, Karen, comp., Teaching & Learning in the Digital Age ScoopIt .
"A ScoopIt page with links to articles and resources on Technology and Pedagogy."
Organizations and Discussion Groups
The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE )
"The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) helps liberal arts colleges and universities integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and technology. With our NITLE Network members, we work to enrich undergraduate education and strengthen the liberal arts tradition. Established in 2001, NITLE is the key organization for liberal arts colleges and universities seeking to engage students in the unique learning experience that liberal education provides and to use technology strategically to advance the liberal arts mission."
Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE )
"The Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education is an international association of individual teacher educators, and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and faculty/staff development.
EDUCAUSE
"EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."
EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR )
"The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make better decisions about information technology."
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI )
"ELI is a strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores innovative technologies and practices that advance learning."
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching )
MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.
MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.
"HASTAC Pedagogy Group ," HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory )
"Working towards open, innovative (when appropriate), and forward thinking methods of pedagogy across disciplines while exploring all the hiccups in between."
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
One of the most important endeavours of Digital Humanities has been the creation of open source tools for the analysis and manipulation of digital texts and data of a variety of kinds. Some of the most popular and useful of these are listed below.
Lists of Digital Tools
"Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects) ", UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
"'Toy Chest' collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used on a free trial basis). Also on this page are "paradigms" -- books, essays, digital projects, etc. -- that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create."
DiRT: Digital Research Tools Wiki
"This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers."
Text Analysis Tools
Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR)
"The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) is a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. The tools can be used without an account at TAPoR Tools. With an account you can save results and manage the e-texts and tools you want to work with. Features include the ability to "manage electronic texts including TEI/XML texts,"
and "[e]xperiment with online text tools" (TEI Wiki s.v. "TAPoR").
TAPoR at Alberta Wiki
A wiki by TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) projects at the University of Alberta.
MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge)
"MONK is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study."
"MONK TutorialsMONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge)
"Tutorials and context-sensitive help by Navadeep Khanal, Adam Kehoe, Amit Kumar, Andrew MacDonald, Martin Mueller, Catherine Plaisant, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair, and John Unsworth."
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyeur Tools: See Through Your Texts Heremeneuti.ca
"Voyeur is a web-based text analysis environment. It is designed to be user-friendly, flexible and powerful. Voyeur is part of the Hermeneuti.ca, a collaborative project to develop and theorize text analysis tools and text analysis rhetoric. This section of the Hermeneuti.ca web site provides information and documentation for users and developers of Voyeur.
use texts in a variety of formats including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF and MS Word
use texts from different locations, including URLs and uploaded files
perform lexical analysis including the study of frequency and distribution data; in particular
export data into other tools (as XML, tab separated values, etc.)
embed live tools into remote web sites that can accompany or complement your own content
Voyeur is a work in progress – it is currently in beta. Some things don't work properly, some planned features aren't available yet. In particular, here are some weaknesses that we recognize:
lack of more advanced linguistic processing (lemmatization, parts of speech, semantic awareness)
lack of XML-aware analytic features (though XML is a valid input format)
the current default skin (configuration of tools) is not well-suited to reading texts
some of the user documentation is a bit bare
other funcitonality:
proximity searching of terms
multi-word (n-gram) views (though you can search for specific phrases)"
Juxta: Collation Software for Scholars Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online (NINES )
"Juxta is an open-source tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. Originally designed to aid scholars and editors examine the history of a text from manuscript to print versions, Juxta offers a number of possibilities for humanities computing and textual scholarship.
WordHoard
"The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a 'digital page' or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form."
WordSeer
"More and more source text gets digitized in the humanities every day. Scholars who want to study these new collections in depth need computational assistance because of their large scale. To help, we built WordSeer, a text analysis tool that includes visualizations and works on the grammatical structure of text.
McCallum, Andrew. MALLET: MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit
"MALLET is a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.
Graham, Shawn. "Getting Started with MALLET and Topic Modeling ." Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research . Wordpress. 30 August, 2012. Web. 12 May, 2012.
A brief introduction to installing and getting started with topic modeling using MALLET. Includes as well links to a number of online articles on the subject of topic modeling.
Collaboration and Communication Tools
Twitter
Deevy Bishop, "A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic ," BishopBlog, (Blogspot Blog), 14 June 2011.
Storify
"Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social."
Rorabaugh, Pete and Jesse Stommel, "How to Storify. Why to Storify. " Hybrid Pedagogy 13 April, 2012.
"Intended to serve as a stop-motion camera for the torrent of information we get from social media, Storify allows the user to arrange pieces of conversations to construct a narrative. When we first began teaching with Twitter, we wanted to contain conversations that would eventually evaporate. Twitter allows us to go back through someone’s stream to see everything, but the simple organization that a hashtag brings to an organic conversation has about a two-week window. If we start a back-channel conversation in a lecture one day, Twitter requires that we look at it, learn from it, and let it go soon after. Storify emerged on the scene last year to cull these kinds of social media contributions (not just on Twitter) and freeze them."
Edmodo
Wikidot
Wetpaint Wikis in Education
Wetpaint Wikis in Education "is a a place where educators come together to share tips about using wikis to enhance the learning experience." In addition to permitting educators to create their own free educational wikis, the site also includes discussion groups and a variety of tips, examples, and resources addressing the educational use of wikis.
Disqus
Crocodoc
Delicious
Diigo
ShareThis
ShareThis is a widget for the creation and customization of "share" buttons on web sites, blogs, and other online pages.)
TEXTUS Open Knowledge Foundation .
"What is TEXTUS?
Collaboratively annotate texts and view the annotations of others
Reliably cite electronic versions of texts
Transcribe texts from scanned images and upload new scans of texts
Search for texts and authors
Create bibliographies with stable URLs to online versions of those texts
Export annotated versions of texts"
Gray, Jonathan. "Curating the Commons with TEXTUS ." Jonathan Gray (Blog) 9 April, 2012.
Jonathan Gray works for the Open Knowledge Foundation , the developer of TEXTUS , and provides in this blog post an introduction to the functions of that tool.
Prism University of Virginia Scholar's Lab
"Prism is a tool for 'crowdsourcing interpretation.' The concept emerged from a decade-long conversation on categories of textual interpretation which took place at the University of Virginia, and specifically from transparency mark-up games designed by Bethany Nowviskie for her Media Studies students and her colleagues in SpecLab:
the original game involved shared, Xeroxed page images, transparent overlays, dry-erase markers, a common interpretive prompt, and a moment in which somebody yelled ‘Stop!’ and the transparencies were stacked up for discussion.
At SpecLab, Jerome McGann further developed the concept, which became known as the "Patacritical Demon" — the best bit of vaporware to emerge from UVa at the turn of the century.
Visualization Tools
Voyant: See Through Your Text
Voyant is a new text analysis and visualization tool. Text can either be entered directly into the interface, or linked via a URL; the tool will provide an analysis of word frequency and use.
"Timeline ," SIMILE Widgets (MIT )
"Visualize temporal information on an interactive drag-able timeline." Downloadable code for the customization of interactive timelines.
"Build Your Own Interactive Timeline ," SIMILE Widgets (MIT )
"Using the extraordinary Exhibit and Timeline scripts written by MIT's SIMILE project and the flexible power of Google Docs spreadsheets, it's now possible to build custom, interactive, and searchable timelines for use in your research and your teaching." First of three video tutorials for SIMILE's "Timeline" tool.
Rickshaw Shutterstock .
"Rickshaw is a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.
Viewshare National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (Library of Congress )
"Viewshare.org is a free web application for generating and customizing unique, dynamic views through which users can experience cultural heritage digital collections. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials. Contact us at ndiippaccess@loc.gov to request a free account. The site is administrated by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress.
HyperCities
"HyperCities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. "
The Miso Project
"Miso is an open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content.
Annotation, Citation, and Referencing Tools
Zotero
"A free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself."
Mendeley
"Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research."
Annotator and AnnotateIt
"Annotator is a piece of code that runs in your web browser and helps you add commentary to the web. There’s an Annotator “bookmarklet” — like the one used by Pinterest and many other web applications — which allows you to create annotations on any web page simply by selecting content with your mouse. This will work no matter where on the web you are; whether you’re reading a Shakespeare play, a news article, or a Wikipedia page. These annotations usually contain simple text content, but in principle they can contain any kind of data you like. There are already a number of plugins that store extra data on the annotations such as tags or details of who created them, but you could include links to other web pages, videos, or audio content. All the annotations you make can be saved to a central service for long-term storage. You can find a demo of the Annotator software on the Annotator website."
Evernote
Evernote is a popular annotation, note-taking, and archiving application. There is both a free and a "premium" version. It includes both "stand-alone" and online components; the latter can be used to synchronize one's notes across computers.
Notes can include text, web pages (or portions thereof), and images.
Web Site Creation Tools
Wix Website Builder
"Both Weebly [see below] and Wix simplify web-page design for users who want to quickly publish content to the web. Users can build a simple web site with a variety of template choices. Users can build a variety of different pages with buttons that link from the main page. Both sites are good primers for web publishing beyond the simple blogging platform. Web pages built on both sites remain free for users as long as the company’s name remains part of the page’s URL. Weebly pages are HTML-based. Wix pages are more dynamic and Flash-based." ("Concordance of Digital Tools," Hybrid Pedagogy )
Weebly
"Both Weebly and Wix [see above] simplify web-page design for users who want to quickly publish content to the web. Users can build a simple web site with a variety of template choices. Users can build a variety of different pages with buttons that link from the main page. Both sites are good primers for web publishing beyond the simple blogging platform. Web pages built on both sites remain free for users as long as the company’s name remains part of the page’s URL. Weebly pages are HTML-based. Wix pages are more dynamic and Flash-based." ("Concordance of Digital Tools," Hybrid Pedagogy )
HTML5 Boilerplate
"HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional frontend developers's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-safe site.
Programming
Python Progamming Language: Official Web Site
"Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. You can learn to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs."
"Beginner's Guide to Python ," Python
"New to programming? Python is free and easy to learn if you know where to start! This guide will help you to get started quickly."
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Text Markup: Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) The Text Encoding Initiative is both one of the oldest and most important tools for digital humanists, providing those working with texts of all sorts with a detailed and carefully-considered XML-based markup set. The TEI has long been the scholarly standard for the creation of digital
editions, as well as the markup of text for computer-aided linguistic analysis; it has seen some use in the creation of historical digital archives as well.
TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. In addition to the Guidelines themselves, the Consortium provides a variety of supporting resources, including resources for learning TEI, information on projects using the TEI, TEI-related publications, and software developed for or adapted to the TEI."
"Introducing the Guidelines ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"This section provides a very ‘basic’ conceptual introduction to the TEI Guidelines for new users. It should be supplemented by the documentation, tutorials, and other informational links provided on this site."
"A Gentle Introduction to XML ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
A brief but useful introduction to the general principles, structures, and function of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the form of markup language for texts upon which the TEI guidelines are built.
"TEI: P5 Guidelines ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
The full specifications for TEI markup, version P5 (released November 1, 2007), which is "a major revision of the Guidelines that offers many new and improved features."
The guidelines can be read online, or are available in various formats for download.
"TEI Lite ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"TEI Lite is a specific customization of the TEI tagset, designed to meet "90% of the needs of 90% of the TEI user community". Due to its simplicity and the fact that it can be learned with relative ease, TEI Lite has been widely adopted, particularly by beginners and by big institutional projects that rely on large teams of encoders to markup their documents."
"Getting Started with P5 ODDs ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"This document describes how to produce a customization of the TEI P5 schema." The TEI employs "a source format called ‘ODD’ (‘One Document Does it All’) which includes the schema fragments, prose documentation, and reference documentation for the TEI Guidelines in a single document."
"OxGarage Conversions ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"OxGarage is a web, and RESTful, service to manage the transformation of documents between a variety of formats. The majority of transformations use the Text Encoding Initiative format as a pivot format. It is a good tool for conversion from TEI to Word (.docx), or Word (.docx) to TEI, but also does many other formats" (TEI Wiki
"TEI Roma: Generating Validators for the TEI ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
Enables the generation of customized DTDs, XML Schema, or RELAXNG files
"TEI Wiki ," TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
"This is a wiki devoted to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It is created by TEI-ers for TEI-ers, and if you wish to contribute something or join the discussions, you are most welcome – all you need to do is login or register." The Wiki includes content under the headings "Technical matters: building and manipulating TEI XML," "TEI Community matters," and "TEI Wiki." The first of these categories includes samples of markup, customizations of TEI schemas (ODD files, DTD extensions), and stylesheets and scripts (XSLT, CSS, XQuery, etc.).
TEI By Example
"TEI By Example offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Besides a general introduction to text encoding, step-by-step tutorial modules provide example-based introductions to eight different aspects of electronic text markup for the humanities. Each tutorial module is accompanied with a dedicated examples section , illustrating actual TEI encoding practise with real-life examples. The theory of the tutorial modules can be tested in interactive tests and exercises . The tutorial materials are contextualised with a tools section , providing both an annotated overview of state-of-the-art XML encoding technology, and a TBE validator application , allowing you to test your TEI encoding as you type!"
Bauman, Syd and Julia Flanders. "Resources for Teaching and Learning Text Encoding ," Women Writer's Project . (Brown University).
A superbly detailed and easy-to-follow series of tutorials and resources on TEI.
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, "To Mark Up or Not To Mark Up ," Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.
A short article, part of Cohen and Rosenzweig's guide Digital History , which addresses the pros and cons of using TEI markup for historical projects.
TEI SIG on Libraries, "Best Practices for TEI in Libraries ," Text Encoding Initiative , ed. Kevin Hawkins, Michelle Dalmau, and Syd Bauman, October 2011
"This document is the third version of a document formerly known as TEI Text Encoding in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices, which has been updated to comply with the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange (P5). These guidelines are intended for use in large, library-based digitization projects, but may be useful in other scenarios as well. This version of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries was created and is maintained by the TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices Working Group."
Lockers, Matthew J. "Auto Converting Project Gutenberg Text to TEI ," Matthew J. Lockers (Blog) 26 August 2010.
A Python script that automatically converts "a Gutenberg text into a minimally encoded and TEI-compliant XML file. The script builds a teiHeader that includes the author and title of the work (unfortunately, Project Gutenberg texts do not include publication dates, why?) and then adds "text", "body", div, and all the p tags. The final result is a document that meets basic TEI requirements."
O'Sullivan, James "Automating TEI encoding (using the Overtoom/Jockers Python script) ," josullivan.org (Wordpress Blog) 3 April, 2012.
"Textual encoding is a tedious process, particularly if you are working with a large corpus. Thankfully, Michiel Overtoom set about writing a Python script to automate the conversion of Project Gutenberg plain texts files to a format more suited to his own purposes (this included removal of the Gutenberg boilerplate). Stanford’s Matt Jockers (@mljockers) took this a step further in terms of textual scholarship, adapting Overtoom’s script so that it converts the Gutenberg text to a TEI-compliant XML file."
"Plugins/TeiDisplay ," Omeka
"TeiDisplay is a plugin created by the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library. This will render an uploaded TEI file attached to an item in the display. The default XSLT stylesheet allows for two display types: entire and segmental. The entire display type will render out the entire document in HTML while the segmental display type includes a table of contents for displaying a selected div1 or div2, which is a useful feature for larger documents. The display type and XSLT stylesheet can be customized for each TEI File in the database through the TEI Config tab in the administrative interface. Additionally, metadata from the TEI Header is automatically mapped to Dublin Core fields for both the item and file."
"Drupal TEI Content Module ," Drupal
"The TEI Content module allows the display of textual documents encoded according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Texts are stored in the Drupal database and displayed through an XSL transformation using the content filter mechanism. The module provides specific support for many of the features that are part of the TEI Lite (P5) set of elements."
TEI Boilerplate
"TEI Boilerplate is a lightweight solution for publishing styled TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 content directly in modern browsers. With TEI Boilerplate, TEI XML files can be served directly to the web without server-side processing or translation to HTML."
TEI-L List
A TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list.
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Content Management Systems (CMS) Content Management Systems (CMS) are software designed to facilitate the structuring of simple or complicated online resources and archives, generally in a collaborative work environment. They generally offer easy-to-use interfaces designed for
users with a relatively simple level of technological expertise, and streamline such things as interface design and workflow. Content Management Systems can be open or close sourced, and range
from the freely available download to the very expensive proprietary system. Below are listed some of the more popular free open-source CMS currently in use in
Digital Humanities.
Drupal
"Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world."
Omeka
"Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog."
Greene, Colleen. "Sample workshop assignment for teaching Omeka ," Colleen's Commentary (Wordpress Blog) 7 April, 2012.
"Have you been considering teaching an Omeka workshop at a conference or for a public or digital history class? Do you conduct professional development for heritage institutions? Are you a history (or humanities) librarian that would like to offer a hands-on Omeka workshop at your library? Are you considering leading an Omeka session or workshop at an upcoming THATCamp?
Wordpress as a CMS
Wordpress offers a very popular CMS system, which is both easy to use and comes with a great many plug-ins. "It can be a fully functioning content management system (read: online software), letting you build and manage your site without breaking the bank. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use WordPress for your website."
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
Learning Management Systems A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software application designed to offer a variety of online tools for teachers. Typically a LMS provides an interface for the delivery of online content, interactive environments for the online engagement of students,
and the means for both student evaluation and the storage of student grades and progress reports. There are a great many LMS available as either free open-source software, or proprietary software systems. Western University is currently in the process of a transition
to Sakai , a free open-source LMS. Below are listed some tools and aids associated with Sakai , as well as a link to a very popular competing open-source system, Moodle .
Sakai Project
Sakai is a collaborative, open source learning module system. It will replace WebCT as Western University's primary LSM in September of 2012.
"The Sakai Teaching and Learning Community ," Sakai Project
Faculty members and instructional technologists share practices and guide the enhancement of Sakai. . . . The T&L community holds a virtual one-hour meeting each month to coordinate initiatives, and a quarterly virtual community gathering to update and solicit feedback from the community. Outside these meetings, smaller groups collaborate on key initiatives.
The group shares its work on the OpenEd Practices site, which includes discussion groups, work samples and project information.
"Sakai User Guides ," Oregon Health & Science University
Links for Student and Instructor guides and tutorials to Sakai.
Edmodo
"Edmodo is an online learning environment designed for teachers and students. It is free to use, and it's interface looks almost identical to Facebook. Students and teachers, once they are linked together in a course, can post messages and share web content with each other. Instructors can build assignments in Edmodo, compile grades, and start discussion forums. Edmodo can functions as a stand alone LMS, but can also serve merely as a portal for class communication and reflection on specific content." ("Concordance of Digital Tools," Hybrid Pedagogy )
Moodle
"Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. Moodle.org is our community site where Moodle is made and discussed. Please use the menus to explore and join in! . . . A free, open-source PHP web application for producing modular internet-based courses that support a modern social constructionist pedagogy."
Moodle Support Page , Moodle
A page with links to various forms of documentation and support for Moodle users and administrators. Headings include "Documentation," "Forums," "Books and Manuals," and "Commercial Services."
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
The Digital Humanities has always valued collaborative work and dialogue, and there are therefore an unsurprisingly large number of available online venues for discussion and the exchange of ideas. In addition to those listed below, which are some of the more popular
online discussion groups, digital humanists are very active bloggers and employ Twitter extensively as a means of engaging with the larger community.
"Digital Humanities Questions & Answers ," (Association for Computers and the Humanities )
A "community-based Q&A board for Digital Humanities questions that need (just a little) more than 140 character answers."
Humanist Discussion Group
"Humanist is an international online seminar on humanities computing and the Digital Humanities. Its primary aim is to provide a forum for discussion of intellectual, scholarly, pedagogical, and social issues and for exchange of information among participants."
TEI-L List
A TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list.
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
A number of organizations now exist to promote the Digital Humanities and foster discussion and engagement within the field,, as well as to establish scholarly and technological standards for its practice. Below are listed some of the most important of these. Additional organizations servicing those working the application of technology to teaching can be found in the Pedagogy and Technology section of this resource.
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
"The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) promotes and supports digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines, acting as a community-based advisory force, and supporting excellence in research, publication, collaboration and training."
Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
"ACH is your professional society for the digital humanities! We support computer-assisted research, teaching, and software and content development in humanistic disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy."
The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI)
"SDH/SEMI is the scholarly association for Digital Humanities in Canada and beyond."
HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory )
"HASTAC ("haystack") is a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities. We are motivated by the conviction that the digital era provides rich opportunities for informal and formal learning and for collaborative, networked research that extends across traditional disciplines, across the boundaries of academe and community, across the "two cultures" of humanism and technology, across the divide of thinking versus making, and across social strata and national borders."
CenterNet
"centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular."
The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC )
"The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1973 with the purpose of supporting the application of computing in the study of language and literature.
Arts-humanities.net
"arts-humanities.net aims to support and advance the use and understanding of digital tools and methods for research and teaching in the arts and humanities by providing:
Information on projects creating and using digital content, tools and methods to answer research questions
Information on tools and methods for creating and using digital resources
A listing of expert centres and individual researchers
A library documenting lessons learned through case studies, briefing papers, and a bibliography"
The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE )
"The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) helps liberal arts colleges and universities integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and technology. With our NITLE Network members, we work to enrich undergraduate education and strengthen the liberal arts tradition. Established in 2001, NITLE is the key organization for liberal arts colleges and universities seeking to engage students in the unique learning experience that liberal education provides and to use technology strategically to advance the liberal arts mission."
The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T )
"Since 1937, the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has been the society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
The Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory
