The Digital Humanities: From the Edge to the Center

1. The Digital Humanities: From the Edge to the Center Goals Tools and Projects Getting Started ------------- Learning and Teaching Career Paths Predictions

2. Hanger 51 “Hanger 51.” Retrieved: October 29, 2012 from http://indianajones.wikia.com/wiki/Hangar_51.

3. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies “Edward Casaubon, Retrieved on October 31, 2012, from: http://elfestindehomero.blogspot.com/2012/06/el-senor-casaubon-academico-fracasado.html

4. DH: Some General Goals • Collaboration: Foster active scholarly conversations; engage the public as partners. • Innovation: Use digital tools to ask new questions and create new forms of scholarship in new mediums. • Academic Engagement: Adopt high-impact educational practices such as collaborative research. Cultivate both the traditional and the digital. • Professional and Public Service: Build a new scholarly infrastructure and create resources that serve more diverse local local and global needs. • Alternative Career Paths: Develop sustainable alternatives to the tenure track, while working to expand what “counts” for tenure and promotion. • Strengthen the Humanities: Justify ongoing support from institutions, foundations, academic administration, the government, and the public, including students and parents.

5. DH: Tools and Projects • Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Wiki. • Multimedia Publications: Southern Spaces. • Digital Archives: Walt Whitman Archive, Who Speaks for the Negro? Many others, see IATH-Sponsored Archives. • Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Cleveland Project, Civil War Washington. • Digital Simulations: Digital Roman Forum, World’s Columbian Exposition. • Peer Editing: “Writing History in the Digital Age,” also countless blogs. • Data Mining and Visualization (“Culturomics”): Google Ngram Viewer, TagCrowd.

6. Some DH History The “Next Big Thing”: Father Roberto Busa (1913-2011), The Index Thomisticus (1949-2005): acorpus analysis tool including 188 books by Aquinas and 61 other authors, originally 70,000 pages, now online. Roberto Busa – in the background the Index Thomisticus (2006). Retrieved October 29, 2012, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roberto_busa_e_index_thomisticus.jpg

7. DH: Getting Started • What interests you? What kind of pilot project could you develop? Seek inspiration and support. • Visit “Getting Started in Digital Humanities” and NITLE’s Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki. • Read Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matt Gold; A Companion to Digital Humanities by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemans, and John Unsworth. • Find solutions on “Digital Humanities Questions and Answers.” • Become familiar with scholarly best practices for DH in your discipline (MLA and AHA guidelines). • Identify sources of grant support, especially the NEH’s Office of DH, see their library of funded projects. • Participate in the DH community • Look for DH sessions at your disciplinary conferences. • Attend a THATCamp or training workshops like the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. • Read and respond to DH blogs like Dan Cohen’s. • Follow DH’ers on Twitter. • Advertise your project on DH Commons. • Find collaborators: other students, faculty, IT staff, and librarians; look beyond your campus, especially at the DH centers. • Present at conferences (such as ADHO), build projects into your syllabi, and publish. • Present your project at conferences; apply for grants; publish.

8. DH: Learning and Teaching • “High Impact Educational Practices” (George D. Kuh). • Undergraduate Research • Collaborative Assignments and Projects • Common Intellectual Experiences • Service Learning • Diversity Experiences/Global Learning • Learning Communities • Capstone Courses and Projects

9. DH: Teaching • Hybrid teaching; the flipped classroom. • Social Media: Twitter, Facebook • Public writing--individual and collaborative: blogs, wikis, Google Docs. • Cross/multi-institutional courses; enhanced specialization • Project-based classes that assemble teams from across disciplines. • From student to author and project manager. • Alternatives to the research paper, by itself. • No more “Indiana Jones Warehouses,”Keys to all Mythologies. • Consider: Early Novels Database, Looking for Whitman. • DH Syllabi Wiki.

10. DH: Alternative Academics • Affiliated with DH, based in universities but usually located outside of departments. • Includes graduate students, librarians, technologists, grant administrators, and faculty researchers. Also workers in museums, cultural organizations, and government. • Often grant-fundedand project-based. • Feedback from off-campus programs: “We need research, writing, presentation skills—also tech skills, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship—in one person.” • Online Journal: #alt-academy.

11. DH: Predictions: 1 • Traditional scholarly publication, including peer review, will move online and will incorporate DH approaches. • Collaborative research and writing will become more accepted in the humanities. • Hiring, promotion and the tenure process will recognize and support DH. • DH will become part of teaching at all levels of the curriculum, driven by student/market demand—a big faculty development challenge. • There will be relatively fewer tenure-track positions but a wider range of alt-ac positions; academic careers will become more fluid and mobile.

12. DH: Predictions: 2 • Undergrads will become even more skeptical of traditional graduate training. • Humanists will be expected to find external support for their projects. • Plan for long-term sustainability, collaborative partnerships, public engagement, and assessment. • DH skills soon will cease to confer much advantage on the academic job market: they will be assumed. • Digital Humanities methods will become part of the ordinary practices of the humanities.