Introduction to the Digital Humanities
Joey Takeda
User Interface Developer, SFU DHIL
What is/are the Digital Humanities
- The study of texts--broadly defined--using digital methodologies
- The study of the digital--broadly defined--using textual methodologies
- A heavily debated definition!
At its core, then, digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies.Matthew Kirschenbaum, "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?" (Debates in DH)
Digital Humanities @ SFU
The DHIL supports researchers
- Consultations
- Digital project support
- Continuing project support
- Exploratory work
- Research-integrated training
- Course-integrated training
Women's Print History Project
https://womensprinthistoryproject.com
PI: Michelle Levy
Reconstructing Early Circus
https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/circus/
PI: Leith Davis
Gendered Personification Index
https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/gpi/
PI: Rawia Inaim
Textual Digital Humanities
One way to understanding digital humanities is through manipulation, adaptation, transformation, translation, conjecture, play
Words 
Data
Words Numbers
Words Words
Conjectural Criticism
But if the computer can count numbers like a mathematician, it can also play with letters in ways, as we shall see, that poets and textual scholars alike would recognize.
We might, for starters, imagine conjecture as a knowledge toolkit designed to perform "what if" analyses across a range of texts. In this view, the text is a semiotic system whose discrete units of information can be artfully manipulated into alternate configurations that may represent past or future states
"Deformance and Interpretation"
Deformance does want to show that the poem's intelligibility is not a function of the interpretation, but that all interpretation is a function of the poem's systemic intelligibility.
Interpreting a poem after it has been deformed clarifies the secondary status of the interpretation. [...] Good, bad, mediocre poems, by whatever measure or judgment: in so far as they are poetically made, they share this special kind of intelligibility.
Thanks!
- Everyone for listening!
- Leith for inviting me
- The DHIL (Remi Castonguay, Rebecca Dowson, Michael Joyce, Sophia Han, Saba Akhyani)
Feel free to contact the DHIL!
- My email: takeda@sfu.ca
- DHIL: dhil@sfu.ca
Some "Digital Humanities" Projects (unordered and not exhaustive)
- Derrida's Margins (Princeton)
- He Do the Police in Different Voices (San Diego State University)
- Shakespeare and Company Project (Princeton)
- The Map of Early Modern London (University of Victoria)
- Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-Hae Chang) [Note: Lots of quick moving/flashing images]
- High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese (Fred Wah + the High Muck a Muck Collective)
- Database of Early Canadian Women Writers
Note: Not all of these projects necessarily call themselves digital humanities...
Further Reading / Resources / Works Cited
- Johnson, Jessica Marie. "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text, vol. 36, no. 4, 2018.
- Kraus, Kari. "Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts." DHQ, vol. 3, no. 4, 2009.
- McGann, Samuel, and Lisa Roberts. "Deformance and Interpretation" Radiant Textuality, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 105–136.
- Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy.Northwestern University Press, 2019.
- DHIL Resources page (lots of helpful tutorials, links, descriptions)
- Debates in the Digital Humanities
- Digital Humanities Quarterly
Credits
- Spectator transcription adapted from: http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/text/march1711/no1.html
- Modern view style adapted from: https://github.com/lucagez/medium.css/
- Code view adapted from: https://carbon.now.sh/