nias

Digital Humanities: a Whirlwind Tour

Andrew PrescottKing’s College London

Utrecht Psalter, produced in Epernay between 816 and 823

Silver nitrate photographs of the Utrecht Psalter commissioned by the British Foreign Office to assist in dating the manuscript, 1872

Photographs of the Utrecht Psalter made in the British Museum using the autotype process, 1876

Detail from autotype facsimile of the Book of Kells prepared for the New Paleographical Society under Bond’s supervision

Lessons of the Utrecht Psalter controversy

• Potential of new technologies to explore historical artefacts in new ways

• Importance of maintaining scholarly and critical approach• Need to engage with technology, bringing specialist

understanding to bear• Need to take opportunities as they present themselves…• …while developing a strategic approach• That strategic approach nevertheless in itself reflects many

cultural assumptions• These are all lessons that resonate in current

understanding of digital humanities

Digital image under ultra-violet light of fragment of 11th-century life of St Mary of Egypt in British Library, Cotton

MS Otho B.x

‘The digital humanities are what happens as soon as you start to use computers to study the humanities’ Willard McCartyAs soon as we started creating Electronic Beowulf, we immediately became engaged with: • New research questions• New forms of access• New methods• New skills• New forms of presentation• New forms of collaboration and of working together

Debates in the Digital Humanities

Formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism – grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data. Instead of looking for new ‘isms’, digitally savvy humanists now argue, we should start looking at how technology is currently changing our understanding of what it means to do liberal arts.

New York Times, November 2010

Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities

completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?

Stanley Fish, January 2012

Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

Areas of Debate in the Digital Humanities

• Transformative or tool? Desirability of transformation?• Necessarily quantitative?• Big tent? Theory or building?• Where does a critical understanding fit in? How

important is it?• Modes of expression? Can scholarship be tweeted?• Is definition important, and do these questions matter?• Anglophone (and American) nature of much activity –

how do we interpret this?

Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgow

Library of Congress catalogue card

Analysis of 11,616 SIGACT (“significant action”) reports relating to the war in Iraq from December 2006: jonathanstray.com

Blue=‘criminal event’

Green= ‘enemy incident’

Tim Berners Lee talk for TED on Open Data, Feb. 2010: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/788

Map showing location of bombs falling on London during the Blitz, 1940-1941:www.bombsight.org

Paveley Drive, Whistler’s Drive and other streets marked in this area were not built until the 1970s. The area was previously

occupied by factories.

The green area marked here (Falcon Park) did not exist in 1940. It was a residential area.

Bomb on Balham tube station, 14 Oct. 1940: omitted from the bomb census.

Destruction of Coronation Buildings, Stoke Newington, 13 Oct. 1940. Also omitted from the bomb census for that week.