Abstract
The term ‘digital humanities’ has been defined in this book as the application of computational or digital methods to humanities research. With contributions from 12 experts in the field, the book provides an excellent overview of research and scholarly activities in digital humanities based on the ongoing research and teaching projects at the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL (UCLCDH). As the title suggests, the editors have taken a practical approach, and the book aims to integrate digital humanities research with practice, emphasizing particularly the application of digital technologies to cultural heritage.
The book has a total of nine chapters preceded by an introduction written by the editors. Each chapter discusses specific issues and challenges related to the theme covered in the chapter, and includes case studies of digital humanities projects at UCLCDH to discuss various practical approaches and the progress of research in the field. Each chapter includes an extensive bibliography, and the book ends with a subject index. The QR (Quick Response) codes within each chapter can link an electronic copy of the book to a dedicated website with dedicated content such as further case studies.
In the first chapter Claire Warwick discusses the importance of user studies in any digital humanities research project. It is extremely important to understand the information behaviour of humanities users which is different from that of science and social science users in that humanists often prefer to browse rather than do a keyword search; they often follow specific links and thus adopt the ‘chaining’ or the ‘berry picking’ model of human information behaviour; they often look for much older materials rather than very recent journal articles; or often they focus on just one or a small group of objects – manuscripts, books, images, artefacts, etc., and go deeper to find various themes and their interpretations, critical analysis, etc. In this chapter Claire Warwick discusses different techniques for conducting user studies in digital humanities. She argues that it is important to involve users from the beginning of a digital humanities project rather than leaving it until later, or worse until the end. The chapter includes two case studies: the first is called LAIRAH (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities) and is used to illustrate how user information behaviour in digital humanities can be studied through transaction log analysis; and the second is called VERA (Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology) used to illustrate archaeologists’ use of digital technologies in their fieldwork.
In Chapter 2, Claire Ross discusses the use of social media in digital humanities research. She provides a brief but useful review of the use of social media in research and scholarly activities. She discusses various digital humanities projects at UCLCDH that aimed to investigate how various social media tools and services are transforming scholarly practices in digital humanities. She discusses how crowdsourcing is becoming popular in digital humanities research, and she illustrates this using a case study: ‘Transcribe Bentham: crowdsourcing in practice’. She uses another UCLCDH research project: ‘Babble or backchannel: conference tweeting in practice’, as the case study to show how social media practices such as microblogging can enhance a community of practice like digital humanities. This chapter includes another case study: ‘QRator project: enhancing co-creation of content in practice’ in order to discuss how some social media technologies can be used to change the way scholars communicate in an academic context, and also how they can make their research available to those outside academia.
Digitization of resources is one of the major challenges of any digital humanities project. Three chapters in this book discuss image-based computing techniques in digital humanities. Chapter 3 focuses on digitization while Chapter 4 discusses image processing, and Chapter 5 the 3D imaging used in museums and cultural heritage. In Chapter 3 Melissa Terras discusses the process of digitization covering specific issues like cost, purpose, longevity and use as well as a number of best-practice guidelines and standards. This chapter includes two case studies on digitization. In Chapter 4 the same author discusses how different image-processing methods and techniques can be used to process digitized images to support research and scholarly activities in digital humanities. She uses two case studies to discuss how specific image-processing techniques were used in those projects to aid research in the humanities. In Chapter 5 Stuart Robson, Sally McDonald, Graeme Were and Mona Hess discuss the key principles, advantages and limitations of 3D scanning for museum objects. They discuss different 3D techniques such as photogrammetry and laser scanning, and software for 3D modelling. They also discuss some ethical, aesthetic and practical issues of 3D scanning. This chapter uses two case studies: the ‘E-Curator’ project to show the value of 3D imaging for museum objects, and the ‘Pacific Alternatives’ project to show virtual reconstruction of objects using 3D imaging technologies.
Whilst three chapters discuss the first stage of a digital humanities project, i.e. digital imaging and image processing, Chapter 6 focuses upon the next stage that is about adding the additional layer, i.e. metadata, to aid discovery and processing of the digital objects. Julianne Nyhan discusses the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), its advantages and disadvantages, and how it can be used to mark up digital text to meet different digital processing requirements such as discovery, retrieval, linking, etc. In this chapter two case studies have been used to illustrate the use of TEI in the mark up of different types of digitised manuscripts.
After this the scope and content of the book change significantly. Chapter 7 takes the reader to a different area and addresses some questions raised by the emerging digital technologies that are relevant to digital humanities scholars. Here Ann Welsh explores the use and implications of digital technologies of electronic books, including Google Books, on the discipline of historical bibliography and rare book librarianship. She discusses the similarities and differences between the roles of bibliographers, librarians and digital humanists, and finds some areas of commonalities and synergy between these disciplines. She uses two case studies and points out that over the past few years there has been a shift from digitizing information about resources, i.e. online catalogues and bibliographies, to digitizing the resource itself.
In Chapter 8 Simon Mahony, Ulrich Tiedau and Irish Sirmons discuss open access educational resources and their implications for research and scholarship in digital humanities as a discipline. In order to show how modern digital technologies and crowdsourcing technology influence research and scholarship in digital humanities, they have used two case studies – a traditional digital humanities subject, i.e. Dutch, and the discipline of digital humanities itself.
In Chapter 9 Claire Warwick discusses the nature of research and scholarship in digital humanities in an institutional context. For me this is the most fascinating chapter in the book. While the earlier chapters tell us how to use some specific computing technologies and tools, or what has been done in different digital humanities research projects, this chapter talks about the growth and development of the field of digital humanities itself. It discusses some very interesting issues about the history and development of digital humanities, and its recent emergence from a field of research or a specific service to a discipline. It also raises some intriguing questions about its future and acceptance as a major discipline in universities.
Overall the editors have done an excellent job in putting together a set of chapters that discuss various practical issues and challenges associated with the digital humanities projects undertaken at UCLCDH, and also some chapters that will be particularly useful for teaching digital humanities as a discipline. This book will be a valuable resource not only for students and researchers in digital humanities, but for a variety of other fields of study especially information management and digital libraries.