Required Summer Reading: The Entire Contents of the Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online journal managed by editor-in-chief and professor Julia Flanders at Northeastern University. Through a collaboration of editors from institutions across the globe, the DHQ publishes scholarly articles, editorials, book or media reviews, and much more. Its mission is to make a wide-range of materials produced in the digital humanities openly accessible online. As a public history student with a special interest in seeing texts and objects preserved digitally, I approached Prof. Flanders about an introduction to the digital humanities in January 2014. By the summer, I found myself working on an enlightening research project that got me thinking about the relationship between public history and the digital humanities.

My first task: learn more about the field. Much like “public history,” the term “digital humanities” receives raised eyebrows from many people outside of the academic world. The DHQ provides a concise definition:

“Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods.”^[1]

As a digital humanist, an English professor or historian blurs disciplinary lines between computer science and the humanities. Due to the development of the internet and advanced computer programming, a digital humanist can go through physical manuscripts in an archive, make a digital copy of a text, and share that source with anyone who has an internet connection. The digital humanist can contribute to a massive database of digital sources maintained for future research and/or design an engaging, interactive website that allows sources’ stories to speak directly to a classroom of students. In addition, the digital humanist can analyze students’ reactions and collaborate with fellow teachers to develop the best techniques for educating through digital engagement. To visualize the results of research and collaborations, see examples of publicly available projects, like MIT’s Global Shakespeares, an extensive video archive of Shakespeare plays performed around the world, and the Visualizing Emancipation project, an astounding interface mapping event associated with the end of slavery, including documented abuse of African Americans.

With a basic understanding, I undertook a research project for the DHQ. My mission: Generate a keyword vocabulary for the DHQ and assign keywords to all of the existing articles. By the summer of 2014, the DHQ had published 178 articles, so that was a lot of reading, but this project was really all about the journey rather than the destination. For a summer, I read and learned a ton about a field that fascinated me. That sounds pretty cool to me!

Before I started reading all of the articles in the DHQ, Prof. Flanders pointed me to other publications and advised me to analyze how other digital humanities publications assigned keywords to their articles. She described the purpose of my assignment: To provide some organization to the many kinds of articles that fall within the field of digital humanities and help researchers easily find articles that fall within their specific topics. With this in mind, I needed to put myself in the shoes of a researcher and identify the major themes of each article with a few distinctive terms. By skimming articles and their keywords in other publications, I built a preliminary vocabulary list of the most important fields of study discussed in the digital humanities as well as terms and practices explored by digital humanists. Some examples include: computer science, classics, digital archives, digitization, interdisciplinary collaboration, metadata, pedagogy, preservation, and text analysis.

After I got the jist of each article, I assigned keywords from my preliminary vocabulary list. I found my task more difficult than I expected as I started to understand the many factors impacting my keyword assignments. Would a researcher want to know which technical tools the article mentioned? Do tools and computer programs classify as keywords? If an article discusses an archive, should the article’s keywords include “archive” or “archival science” or “information science?” If an author wrote an article on a computer program they developed that analyzes Shakespeare text, should I keyword “Shakespeare,” the program, both, or neither? These were all questions that came up along the way, but Prof. Flanders made herself available to discuss my internal conflicts over these issues. She reminded me to always take a step back and see the major argument of each article as a guide toward the most distinctive features being discussed by each author. If a term did not make it on my original vocabulary list, it was up for consideration.

As I write this blog, I am approaching the end of my list of keyword assignments. Once the list is as complete as possible, I will contact the authors of the articles and ask for their feedback on my keywords. They will provide us with their edits and suggestions for keywords that they associate with their article. We will learn more about the distinctions between author and reader intentions in research and reassess my assignments to create a living vocabulary managed by the DHQ.

When I think about the future of my keyword list, I frequently think back to the first article that I read in the DHQ. Sarah Buchanan, a librarian at the Meadows School in Nevada, published an article on the results of a 2009 workshop, “Building the Future of Archival Education and Research,” which was run by the first Archival Education and Research Institute. Buchanan describes a global community of archivists that view the management and preservation of digital projects as synonymous with the collection of physical documents and objects. For this reason, the community is changing its education on archival theory to include and focus on curation of digital materials. In the conclusion of her report, she calls on digital humanists to look to archivists for a “crucial partnership in issues of long-term stewardship in the digital humanities.”^[2] Buchanan highlights the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the digital humanities as digital humanists build collections of digital sources and “trained archivists bring an inherent set of graduate-level skills regarding the management and administration of collections.”^[3] Both parties must work together for the sustainability of their fields. With this in mind, I think a next step for my keyword vocabulary would be a full evaluation by an archivist or librarian. I would welcome their wisdom in structured language for cataloging materials.

Finally, Buchanan’s call for partnerships between digital humanists and archivists reminds me of the necessity for public historians to establish these same kinds of partnerships. When a museum curator wishes to reach a wider audience through a digital platform, digital humanists offer the skills and resources necessary for launching a visually enticing and interactive website. However, when a digital humanist is building a site, they must remember that museum professionals understand their intended audience. Museum educators and public programmers stand at the front lines, interpreting collections and building an understanding of how to reach their vast and complex patrons. By collaborating with digital humanists, a library and museum, like the Newberry Library and Chicago History Museum, can produce digital projects accessible to the public beyond the academic sphere, such as the Lincoln at 200 online exhibition. As these fields continue to work together, I do not think the disciplinary lines need to be so clear.

^[1] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html

^[2] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000084/000084.html

^[3] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000084/000084.html

 

By Lindsay Day, MA student in Public History