Digital Humanities is bubbling over with fascinating projects and activities . . . but these often come at a high cost, whether it is in time spent learning new and ever-morphing software (and hardware) or putting together grant applications or assembling teams and overseeing project management, or in terms of ease of access being dependent on having computer labs at hand and sophisticated super-powerful equipment and super-skilled colleagues and administrations that selectively finance “signature” dh projects as part of larger academic institution-branding initiatives. Digital Humanities done “Digital Humanities Center”-style is becoming the default mode in thinking like a digital humanist, especially when updating traditional scholarly outputs to fit with the new opportunities that massive computing power makes possible.

Is there another mode that is possible/viable/desirable/worthwhile? I’m interested in how our expectations might shift if we approach digital humanities from a minimal computing mindset — and how this could impact the who what and why of dh, keeping our social, intellectual, cultural and ethical options more open than DHC-style dh does. If anyone’s interested in discussing minimal computing, I’m up for it! Having been immersed in the DIY ethic of the punk rock underground of the late ’70s is helpful in thinking about this (okay, maybe that’s just me) but there are serious contributory streams from the programming world (minimal computing by choice) and from those thinking about global engagement (minimal computing by necessity). What can happen in the shared space where these spheres intersect?

Some links:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing)

blros.github.io/mincomp/

www.globaloutlookdh.org/minimal-computing/kickstart-workshop/

www.arounddh.org/about/

dpod.kakelbont.ca/2012/11/02/in-a-rich-mans-world-global-dh/

#THATCampOK

I’ve been using various tools (Voyant, RAW, VOSviewer, Excel) to visualize trends and relationships in the database of notecards I created while working on my first book. Bring your own research notes, however you maintain them, and let’s see what kinds of visualizations we can make from them. I’ve been surprised how much I’ve learned about stuff I thought I already knew inside out.

Here are some of the revealing visualizations I’ve come up with from my notes:

In this talk session I’d like to discuss what is digital humanities (DH) and what are some of the implications of DH for the way we approach the study and practice of the humanities. I come from a background as a former literature professor who is now an academic librarian, so I can draw upon my experience in these different positions to address some of the theoretical and methodological dimensions of DH such as distant reading and the use of computational stylistics, GIS/location analysis, and other data visualizations. From there I’d like to discuss some of the variety of DH projects, including digital history projects, to serve as an overview of how digital technology has opened up new possibilities for humanistic inquiry. With that, I briefly want to discuss how DH has opened up new alternative academic/#altac career paths and avenues for collaboration, and how DH has affected the promotion and tenure process (particularly in fields such as literature, history, and academic libraries).

I’m proposing a hands-on session about the freeware concordance tool AntConc, which I am using to analyze the dialogue from the CW Network television program Supernatural (2005-present). Participants should download the appropriate version of AntConc to their laptops.

The Supernatural project looks for patterns in the 218 episodes of the program as a means of understanding things such as story arcs, character development, distinctions between characters, etc. It can also examine text in a variety of ways including by season or by writer.

Before the demonstration of AntConc I will take a few moments to discuss the issues surrounding the creation of the data being used in this project, and I will show Specter, an application that was written specifically for the Supernatural project. No download will be necessary or available for Specter. Specter is the creation of a University of Washington information science graduate student, and it combines two different formats, html and .srt, to produce a .txt file that deletes certain information and retains other information. The .txt files created by Specter are the data I am using in AntConc.

AntConc is more robust than other free textual analysis tools I have found. It has the capacity to accept several files for comparison, to incorporate inclusion and exclusion lists, to use truncation, phrase searching, and Boolean-style operators, to find keywords in context and words in proximity to other words, etc. Further, it does not require a great deal of expertise in computer assisted textual analysis to use.

The University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University are hosting a THATCamp at OU Libraries’ Helmerich Collaborative Learning Center in Bizzell Memorial Library in Norman, Oklahoma.

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” As an unconference, it is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.  Read about the THATCamp movement at thatcamp.org.

To register, click here.

University of Oklahoma, Bizzell Memorial Library

Helmerich Collaborative Learning Center, Bizzell Memorial Library