doing a dissertation: how the digital humanities can help you
DESCRIPTION
Notes from a lecture I gave to a third year dissertation preparation module class at Department of English and Creative Writing, University of RoehamptonTRANSCRIPT
Doing a dissertation: How the Digital Humanities can help you
Dr James BakerCurator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
University of Roehampton, 23 October 2014
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More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014)
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Pieter Francois: Winner of British Library Labs 2013 Bob Nicholson: Winner of British Library Labs 2014
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“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013) http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
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disciplinecamp and camps sentence
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‘Early users of medieval books of hours and prayer books left signs of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The darkness of their fingerprints correlates to the intensity of their use and handling. A densitometer -- a machine that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface -- can reveal which texts a reader favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’, Journal of Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)
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Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)’, Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009)
© Franco Moretti
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Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)’, Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009)
© Franco Moretti
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“Zotero’s citation functionality was always imagined merely as bait: by providing this labor-saving
functionality, Zotero would encourage each user to move
her research into what amounted to a fully searchable and
shareable relational database that could be subjected
to text mining and other analysis. Here researchers could begin to do truly remarkable and new things with their evidence.”
Sean Takats, ‘Zotero Versus’, The Quintessence of Ham (6 May 2011)
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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative Commons Licensed
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Thank you!@[email protected]://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://slidesha.re/1DwGUEs