The Center for the Humanities promotes the study and production of Digital Humanities. In Digital Humanities, scholars, professionals, and the public alike collaborate to curate online exhibits, analyze social media, mine textual data, produce podcasts, and more in a process that expands our abilities as participants in the information networks and digital literacy of modern culture.
What Is Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities is a field that intersects Information and Communication Technology (ICT), or computer technology, with the traditional study of human experiences and expressions. Rapid advancements in digital technology are increasingly changing the face of modern culture. Digital Humanities examines the changing nature of our technology and culture as well as produces digital artifacts of culture.
Early versions of Digital Humanities research in the late 1990s revolved largely around quantifying and classifying information (e.g. textual analysis) as well as establishing technological infrastructures for controlling information (e.g. databases). Researchers used digital technology primarily as a tool to analyze traditional products of the humanities, such as paintings, literature, and historical events. By the late 2000s, the field had grown to include the production of generative texts, such as e-literature (blogs, interactive web-based fictions, and other hypertexts). That is, by the late 2000s, researchers began to approach ‘culture’ as that which includes the ‘born digital,’ and digital technology became not just a tool but a subject of study in itself. Today, Digital Humanities includes all of these prior focuses but, in addition, it examines the ways technology shapes culture and the way we understand reality and identities. For example, the Internet has made it easier for anyone to contribute to or manipulate the databanks of human knowledge from anywhere at any time. Digital Humanities looks at how this has consequently destabilized the canon of knowledge, making it more challenging to discern what is factual while pluralizing a sense of what is important.
Why Study Digital Humanities?
Digital technology repackages analog information, whereas “the analog” is the world we live in. There are seemingly boundless spectrums of information in the real, or analog, world in terms of color, sound, texture, taste, smells, and so forth. However, when this information is digitized, it is translated into discrete or finite values (e.g. #000000 for black and #000001 for very nearly black). This means digital technology poses limitations on what we can express, and this in turn shapes how we experience information. However, there are also benefits of digital technology:
- it helps to preserve information over long periods of time;
- it can compress large amounts of information and thereby make it easier to find patterns;
- it makes it easier for multiple participants to retrieve the information, and;
- it makes it easier for multiple participants to contribute to information collection and analysis regardless of their location.
In the end, Digital Humanities scholars argue that university education is no longer simply about preparing us to be rational, free-thinking individuals (as it was in the eighteenth century) or forward-thinking cultivated peoples (as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); instead education is defined by our ability to prepare ourselves to navigate as active participants in the networks of information and digital literacy.
Story Booth: What’s Your Story
Story Booth is a series hosted by the Department of Humanities and Politics (DHP) that fosters community and diverse cultural and social expressions. Stories are universal and they help us to make sense of the world by sharing our experiences. DHP's Story Booth partners with student organizations across the university as well as NSU’s Center for the Humanities to hear how each of us makes meaning. From remembering our first stories to conversations about the power, good and bad, of fiction, Story Booth connects us. What’s your story? For more information, contact Dr. Aileen Miyuki Farrar afarrar@nova.edu.
See our stories here: https://nsudhp.wixsite.com/storybooth
The Story of Home: Immigration Narratives about Homelands and Homecomings
“…homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.” - Zadie Smith, White Teeth
At a time like now when the news is rife with discussions about immigration policy, a related discussion also taking place asks the question, “Where is home and what does it mean to be American?” “The Story of Home” is a digital humanities project that undertakes the mission of curating stories about how we become Americans and asks participants to not only focus on their family’s journey to and within America, but also on the array of myths and family lore that have been part of their family’s immigration experience.
What are the stories that you grew up hearing about your family’s journey to America? What stories do you find yourself most often telling about your own immigration experience? How have those stories affected and inspired you?
The purpose of this project is to curate immigration family lore within the NSU community and aims to include a variety of Americans, including Native Americans, recent immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. The project hopes to create an enriched understanding of the human experience of immigration and of becoming American by highlighting the stories we tell about the home we left and the home we have created.
Anyone in the NSU community interested in participating in the project should submit the following to Dr. Aileen Miyuki Farrar, Director of the NSU Center for the Humanities, at humanities@nova.edu:
- A short narrative that conveys an account of a family story relating to immigration. Feel free to include some commentary on what this story has meant to you. You may share this story as a written narrative of up to 400 words (approximately one double-spaced page) or as an audio recording of up to three minutes.
- Up to six digital media files such as photos, videos, and audio recordings of anything that figures into your family’s immigration stories. Image examples include scenes or maps of your family’s hometown, photos of relatives and sentimental family objects, and genealogical records like passports as well as birth and marriage certificates. Please note that all photos, audio, and video recordings should be owned by you or licensed for free use.
- A photo of you or link to an online photo you want us to use.
- The name of the city/town and the country to which you would like your story pinned on the digital map of the world that will be part of the project.
This project grew out of ideas proposed by Dr. Vicki Toscano, faculty in the Department of History and Political Science. The project is managed by Dr. Aileen Miyuki Farrar, Director of the NSU Center for the Humanities, with support from NSU student interns at the Center for the Humanities.
Visit our project here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Shortlist/index.html?appid=fb4634b865be4717beeb2f815109dc21
“Be Woman: A Hypertext”
HONR 1010B “The Healthy Woman: Mothers to Cyborgs” is a medical humanities class taught by Dr. Aileen Miyuki Farrar that focuses on women and the specific question, “What defines a healthy woman?” As one of the final projects in this class, students are asked to compose creative artifacts that apply course concepts and theories to communicate what it means to be Woman. The following is their collective story: http://honr1010b.weebly.com/
“Tweet the Rising”
“Tweet The Rising: Telling the Story of the 1916 Easter Rising Through Social Media” is an innovative project coordinated by Dr. David Kilroy that used Twitter to bring the history of the Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising to life, providing a unique opportunity for people everywhere to immerse themselves in the events of that week and ultimately to draw their own conclusions about what is arguably the most important event in Irish history. Twenty fictional but historically accurate characters were featured in the project and some of their Twitter story is retold here: https://wke.lt/w/s/4k5X2F
Individual Projects
Nadia Miah, “Filmy Journals”
Major: Behavioral Neuroscience
Minor: Psychology
Year: Class of 2022
Center for the Humanities Intern, Winter 2020
Project: “Filmy Journals”
Stephanie Fleming, “Vietnam War”
Major: International Studies
Minor: Communications
Year: Class of 2021
Center for the Humanities Intern, Winter 2020
Project: “Vietnam War”
Elizabeth Rai, “Horror Films and Societal Fears”
Major: English
Minor: Film Studies
Year: Class of 2021
Center for the Humanities Intern, Summer 2020
Project: “Illuminating the Darkness around Us: Horror Films and Societal Fears”
Kristin Addison, “Religious Interpretation of Scientific Progression”
Major: Biology
Minor: History & Humanities
Year: Class of 2020
Center for the Humanities Intern, Fall 2020
Project: “Religious Interpretation of Scientific Progressions”
Major: History
Minor: Honors Transdisciplinary Studies
Year: Class of 2022
Center for the Humanities Intern, Winter 2021
Project: “Death by Poverty: Immunodeficiency in an Unequal World”
Dagme Aguayo, "Global Rights to Education"
Major: International Studies
Minor: Political Science & History
Year: Class of 2023
Center for the Humanities Intern, Winter 2021
Project: “Global Rights to Education”
University of Miami
1st Place, 2021Crossroads Digital Humanities Contest
Project: “A Different Image, Another Sound: Resistant Rhetoric and Black Identity”
Nova Southeastern University
2nd Place, 2021Crossroads Digital Humanities Contest
Project: “A Meta-Analytic Review: The Implications of Virtual Reality with Immersion on Secondary Language Acquisition”
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
3rd Place, 2021Crossroads Digital Humanities Contest
Project: “Griot to DJ: Remixing and Blending Globalizing Culture”
Digital Humanities Tools
E-Literature Managers
- Chapter and Verse: Chapter and Verse is a free software tool to create chaptered audiobooks for iPod, iTunes and Quicktime.
- Calibre: Calibre is a powerful and easy-to-use e-book manager.
Research and Collaboration
- Trello: Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way.
- Zotero: Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
- Evernote: Evernote helps you capture and prioritize ideas, projects, and to-do lists, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Data Visualization
- Tableau Public: Tableau Public is a free data visualization software. It allows users to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web.
- Palladio: Visualize complex historical data with ease.
- Voyant: Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public.
- ArcGIS Explorer Online: Connect people, locations, and data using interactive maps. Work with smart, data-driven styles and intuitive analysis tools. Share your insights with the world or specific groups.
Publishing Platforms
- Scalar: Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
- Omeka: Omeka provides open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.
- Neatline: Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation.
Need Something More?
- DiRT: The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mind-mapping software.
Grants
- Office of Digital Humanities: The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) offers grant programs that fund project teams developing new technologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, open access publishing, as well as for those studying digital culture from a humanistic perspective.
- Digital Humanities Advancement Grants: Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) support digital projects at different stages throughout their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and sustainability.
Further Readings
- The NSU Alvin Sherman Library Digital Humanities Library Guide
- Berry, David. “The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities.” Culture Machine, vol. 12, 2011, pp. 1-22. https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/49813/1/BERRY_2011-THE_COMPUTATIONAL_TURN _THINKING_ABOUT_THE_DIGITAL_HUMANITIES.pdf
- Profession, 2011: A series of articles evaluating digital scholarship associated with the Modern Languages Association (MLA). https://www.mlajournals.org/toc/prof/2011/1
Examples
- Project Vox- “Project Vox is a feminist philosophy project dedicated to expanding the philosophical canon in the early modern period by highlighting the lives, works, and key contributions of women who were and are too often ignored. The project is a digital archive about several significant women during this time, including their works, a digital image gallery of texts and paintings to broaden typical approaches to philosophy, and syllabi examples for courses that intentionally incorporate women philosophers.”
- Refugee Family Papers: An Interactive Map- “This digital map gives you the opportunity to browse and search the Wiener Library's collections of refugee family papers. Several hundred of these collections have been donated to the Library over the years by Jewish refugees and their families, who escaped Nazi antisemitic persecution by emigrating from Germany and Nazi-dominated countries, including Poland, Austria, and France.”
- Beijing of Dreams- “This is a website which shows the lost ‘Beijing of Dreams,’ using old photos surviving from the time when Beijing was the greatest walled capital city anywhere in the world. We have concentrated at first upon showing the vast walls and gates of Beijing, all but a few traces of which are gone now.”
- Victorian Women Writers Project- "The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare."
- Animated Atlas of African History 1879-2002- “This map gives a year-by-year presentation of selected themes in the history of Africa between 1879 and 2002.”
- A Frankenstein Atlas- “Frankenstein Atlas explores Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein from a spatial perspective. Inspired by research and theoretical approaches in literary mapping and historical geography, A Frankenstein Atlas provides scholars and students with a platform to study and experiment with Shelley's text.”
- Visualizing Emancipation- "Visualizing Emancipation is a map of slavery’s end during the American Civil War. It finds patterns in the collapse of southern slavery, mapping the interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and the actions of enslaved men and women on countless farms and city blocks. It encourages scholars, students, and the public to examine the wartime end of slavery in place, allowing a rigorously geographic perspective on emancipation in the United States."
- Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico- “Power of Attorney constructs a geography of indigenous legal culture through digital maps and visualizations.”
- Digital Humanities Projects at Duke University - A selection of digital humanities projects from Duke University
- Digital Humanities Projects at Berkeley - A selection of digital humanities projects from UC Berkeley
- Digital Humanities Projects at Stanford - A selection of digital humanities projects from Stanford University
- Digital Humanities Projects at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - A selection of digital humanities projects from University of North Carolina
- Digital Humanities Projects at Dartmouth - A selection of digital humanities projects at Dartmouth College