Week 4 (Projects 1)

Topic:  Digital Humanities, Projects and Practices

Readings:  Matthew Wilkens,  “Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (assuming their server is back up)

Leslie Johnson, “Before You Were Born:  We Were Digitizing Texts”

Lisa Spiro, “Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects”

 

Explore the following project websites:

USCB’s EBBA (Broadside Ballad archive, with texts, art and even some music. David)

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive (View and compare texts of differing quarto editions of Hamlet. David)

Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (See and hear academic speech presented in its original contexts. David)

Neatline.org (A mapping/timeline project allowing for the juxtaposition of digital text and maps. Sample project is more historical than literary. David)

MIT’s Complete Works of Shakespeare (Does this set of pages qualify as “digital humanities?” As an archive? Does seeing this site after some of the above sites change your answer, or make you less certain of it? David)

Victorian Web (Is this a project? A collection of projects? A wiki in a different form? David)

Blake Online (A Blake archive with some wonderful versions of his art. David)

The Archimedes Palimpsest (Recovering and archiving a text not quite erased. David)

Mining the Dispatch (Computational analysis of the content of the Richmond Daily Dispatch during the American Civil War. David)

And poke around to find at least one digital humanities project site not on the above list.  Then edit this post to insert it.  Be sure to “sign” your parenthetical note on the project. (Use the little “chain” link button above the text window to tag a word or phrase with an active link.)

 

http://wasteland.windingway.org/poem (This is the complete text of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; instead of looking at the bottom of the page for annotations, you can just click on the links to the words and it will take you to a page explaining, say, whatever Baudelaire snippet he’s quoting. That page will also provide a link to the alluded text, a map, or some other point of reference.) Rebecca

Civil War Diaries Transcription Project (Effort to transcribe many scanned diaries/photos and other correspondences from soldiers during the Civil War. The entire database is searchable, and anyone can contribute to the project. Joseph)

18thConnect (A sister site to NINES, it is an online archive and scholarly community in the field of 18th-Century British and American literature and historical studies. Cassandra)

The 18th-Century Common (Public space for 18th-Century scholars to share their research with non-academic readers. Cassandra)

Digitizing “Chinese Englishmen” (Digitizing and analyzing the Straits Chinese Magazine published in colonial Singapore in the late 19th-Century in an effort to give voice to formerly colonized subjects and to “decolonize the archive.” Cassandra)

Foldit (So I know this project was linked in one of the above articles, but I’m going to link it here too because it’s really interesting. It’s always fun/scary to think about crowd-sourcing as a way to wring solutions out of complex problems. Though I don’t like that media coverage of this project could be misconstrued and perpetuate the assumption that games aren’t worthwhile or interesting unless they help SAVE THE WORLD, the project is still cool.—Alex)

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