Enhancing PhD Projects with Digital Humanities Tools and Methods

1. How Digital Humanities adds to PhD Projects Gary StringerDigital Humanities LabUniversity of Exeter

2. What is “Digital Humanities”? • Inclusive umbrella term • Digital tools and computational approaches to explore humanities questions • Digital publication and dissemination of humanities texts, objects, and data • Critical approaches to the ‘Digital Turn’ • Focus on collaboration and interdisciplinarity • Small scale to big data (single poem to the internet as corpus) • Simple to highly complex (from Excel to supercomputers)

3. What kinds of approaches does DH cover?(non-exhaustive!) • Working with text • text editing and encoding • text analysis and natural language processing • Working with visual material and audio • 2D imaging • 3D scanning and photogrammetry • audio materials/oral histories • digital preservation/relationship with galleries, libraries, archives, museums • Working with data • data visualisation, mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) • crowd sourcing, data management • network analysis, statistical analysis, qualitative analysis

4. Examples of Digital Methods • Gazetteers and mapping – Recogito and other tools • Photogrammetry – digital surrogates for artefacts • Reflectance Transformation Imaging – texture enhancement • Text Encoding Initiative – creating enriched digital editions • Network analysis – understanding and visualising connections • Podcasts and Video – recording facilities and publishing • Document photography – advice and facilities

8. Case Study: Hardy and Heritage • Identification of unstudied collection of letters written to Thomas Hardy from various correspondents • Understanding context and themes • Reconstructing conversations • Photographing, transcribing, editing, publishing • Digital edition in Text Encoding Initiative format

10. Advice, Training, Collaboration • Advice available locally from DH team, and from web, social media, mailing lists, blogs, etc. • Training programme at Exeter, and regional/national workshops • Talk to us about your project! • The DH community is extremely friendly, and no question is too basic!

11. Questioning the digital • A copy or a new object? Same thing, new medium? Different thing? • How does the digital affect our methods of research? What are the stated and unstated barriers and edges to your access? • What decisions around selection, editing, and representation inhere within the digital object? What labour is acknowledged or obscured? • Are you a reader, a user, a creator of the (digital) text?

12. Where to go next? • Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab and information pages, e.g. https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/digital-lab/, Exeter’s LibGuidehttp://libguides.exeter.ac.uk/digitalhumanities • Online training, e.g. Digital Classicist http://www.digitalclassicist.org/ The Programming Historian https://programminghistorian.org/ • Mailing lists, e.g. Exeter’s DH community list digitalhumanities@exeter.ac.uk, Humanist http://dhhumanist.org/ • Summer schools, e.g. Digital Humanities Summer School Oxford http://www.dhoxss.net/ • Twitter!