week 5
September 30, 2008
The articles assigned for this week discussed digital scholarship. “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital collections” by Daniel J. Cohen discussed specialized search engines and how beneficial they will be for academic research. He describes how tools such as H-Bot and Syllabus Finder aren’t perfect, but they are a great staring point for future tools. He discusses three key aspects on a creating a more successful specialized search engine. 1. More emphasis needs to be placed on APIs (application programming interfaces) for digital collections. 2. Free resources are more valuable than those user-restricted or qualitatively better. 3. Quantity may make up for lack of quality.
“Doing Digital Scholarship: Presentation at Digital Humanities 2008″ is Lisa Spiro’s recreation of her own speech from Digital Humanities, 2008 in Oulu, Finalnd. Spiro points out that when trying to define digital scholarship, one must not leave out ”collaboration.” She argues that it is a key component of this field. Spiro also offers suggestions on how to improve digital scholarship. Among her suggestions are discovering (being aware of online tools such as Google Books and also being aware of these sites’ limitations), comparing (text analysis, frequently occurring words can be used to determine context or even mood of the literature), and representing (tools allow for a more media-rich, interactive way to share a typical print article). She closes by stressing the importance of sharing tools and discusses a wiki called DiRT (Digital Resource Tools) which provides a directory of digital resource tools, primarily free and categorized by their functions.
“Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” from the Journal of American History, was taken from an online discussion about digital history. Among the participants are Daniel Cohen, Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William Turkel. The JAH posed questions and collected the responses from these professionals. The professionals were asked to define digital history. I found one of the definitions particularly useful: an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the Internet network, and software systems. Among the other topics discussed were how to teach graduate students about digital history, to what extent should historical scholarship be free, and is digital history similar to museums.
Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences defines and discusses the possibilities, challenges, and framework for cyberinfrastructure. it is defined as more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project specific date collections. The goal of creating a digital cultural record can only be achieved by expert and amateur collaboration and commitment in designing a new cultural infrastructure. Among some of the challenges are copyright laws, the ephemeral nature of digital data, and insufficient resources, will, and leadership to build cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. The necessary characteristics include public accessibility, sustainability, provided interoperability, facilitate collaboration, and support experimentation.
