MLA 500U: Research Methods: Digital Humanities

Article by Lisa Spiro from the "Journal of Digital Humanities" explores the why and how of digital humanities.

"Based on the Introduction to Digital Humanities (DH101) course at UCLA, taught by Johanna Drucker (with David Kim) in 2011 and 2012, this online coursebook (and related collection of resources) is meant to provide introductory materials to digital approaches relevant to a wide range of disciplines. The lessons and tutorials assume no prior knowledge or experience and are meant to introduce fundamental skills and critical issues in digital humanities."

"[A] community-based Q&A board for digital humanities questions that need (just a little) more than 140 character answers."

"The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous trimester."

StoryMap is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.
Example: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/12e4b17156ac0e2d23a5c2d42d0cd635/global-citizen/index.html

Different from StoryMaps. Story Maps are useful in presenting a narrative using interactive maps, images, video, and text. Although story maps can incorporate analytical tasks, they are not intended to do the heavy lifting of geographic information systems. They use the tools of GIS, and often present the results of spatial analysis, but don’t require their users to have any special knowledge or skills in GIS.

"Carto is a cloud based mapping, analysis and visualization engine that lets users build spatial applications for both mobile and the web."

Neatline was designed to work with an instance of Omeka (only the hosted version). In addition to annotating maps, Neatline can annotate images.
Example: http://urbancampus.richmond.edu/neatline/show/temple-university-campus-development
For more about Neatline: http://neatline.org/

Historypin is a way for people to come together to share and celebrate local history. It consists of a shared archive, a mutually supportive community and a collaborative approach to engagement with local history.

"Mapping Paintings is an open-source platform that allows users to tailor-make their own individual scholarly mapping projects. The platform facilitates the realization of these types of projects with an easy uploading of data collected and assembled by scholars without the need for learning GIS or other technologies. Although we have limited the platform in concept to paintings, users can include paintings, drawings, and prints—and really any artwork. Users can make their projects private or public. The uploaded data, once approved by our admin team, becomes part of the global library, which is available to all users of the site.

The project is a scaled up version of Mapping Titian (www.mappingtitian.org), which is still useable; the data from that site is also available on Mapping Paintings. The data for the Titian project continues to be refined and edited, and users of Mapping Paintings are similarly encouraged to submit their data for in-progress projects.

The platform is created and administered by Jodi Cranston (cranston@bu.edu), Professor, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University; developed by the software team at Prela, LLC; and generously funded by the Kress Foundation and Boston University.

We are always looking for collaborators, whether individuals or institutions! Please join our community!"

"MapAnalyst is a software application for the accuracy analysis of old maps. Its main purpose is to compute distortion grids and other types of visualizations that illustrate the geometrical accuracy and distortion of old maps."

Use a spreadsheet to add points to a map.

Turn your spreadsheet location data into maps.

"SimplyMap is a[ ] web-based mapping application that changes the way you use and interact with complex data. SimplyMap enables non-technical and advanced users to quickly create professional thematic maps and reports using powerful demographic, business, and marketing data."

Tool layering historic maps on GoogleEarth maps. Cities covered include Rome, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London.

"For designers, developers, cartographers, and everyone else working with data, Mapbox Studio is the most powerful tool for making beautiful custom maps. It's open source – download it for free and start mapping."

This mobile app allows you to create maps using GPS and incorporating photo, video, audio, and blogging. Great tool for documenting the cityscape and landscape with commentary.

The Image Research Guide will provide you with sources for finding, creating, and storing the images you want to use in your digital humanities projects.

This site addresses many of the questions you will have when embarking on your Digital Humanities project, whether intended for research, in the classroom, or both.

This web-based tool allows you to analyze the text on both web pages and documents you upload from your computer.

Part of the Machine Learning of Language Toolkit (MALLET), Topic Modeling can analyze large volumes of text to deterring clusters of words that frequently occur together. This tool is installed locally and has specific instructions for document analysis.

Scripto is an open source community transcription tools for document and media files.

TAPoR is a gateway to the tools used in sophisticated text analysis and retrieval. You can browse tools by type or tag; search and use tools; read and create tool reviews; and contribute and advertise tools.

"The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics."

"Stanford NER is a Java implementation of a Named Entity Recognizer. Named Entity Recognition (NER) labels sequences of words in a text which are the names of things, such as person and company names, or gene and protein names. It comes with well-engineered feature extractors for Named Entity Recognition, and many options for defining feature extractors. Included with the download are good named entity recognizers for English, particularly for the 3 classes (PERSON, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION), and we also make available on this page various other models for different languages and circumstances, including models trained on just the CoNLL 2003 English training data. The distributional similarity features in some models improve performance but the models require considerably more memory. "

"WordSeer is a text analysis environment that combines visualization, information retrieval, sensemaking and and natural language processing to make the contents of text navigable, accessible, and useful."

"The most significant difference between Annotation Studio and other digital annotation projects is its emphasis on student-centered design and pedagogy. Most other annotation tools assume user familiarity with TEI, and a well-developed understanding of the relationships between literary sources, manuscripts, editions, and adaptations. Annotation Studio makes sophisticated yet easy-to-use commenting tools immediately accessible to students with no prior experience with close textual analysis or TEI."

"A.nnotate is an online annotation, collaboration and indexing system for documents and images, supporting PDF, Word and other document formats. Instead of emailing different versions of a document back and forth you can now all comment on a single read-only copy online. Documents are displayed in high quality with fonts and layout just like the printed version. It is easy to use and runs in all common web browsers, with no software or plugins to install."

"Our team is building an open platform for discussion on the web. It leverages annotation to enable sentence-level critique or note-taking on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more. Everything we build is guided by our principles. In particular that it be free, open, non-profit, neutral and lasting to name a few."

Build interactive timelines using images and a Google spreadsheet. Since it is open source it can be customized using JSON.

"Tiki-Toki is web-based software for creating beautiful interactive timelines that you can share on the internet." The free account affords the user one timeline. Special pricing for educators and their students.

"Palladio is a product of the NEH Implementation grant (July 2013-June 2016), Networks in History: Data-driven tools for analyzing relationships across time. Our goal was to understand how to design graphical interfaces based on humanistic inquiry. We oriented the project around the development of a general-purpose suite of visualization and analytical tools based on the prototypes created for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, which examines the scholarly communities and networks of knowledge during the period 1500-1800."

"Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."

Turn your spreadsheet location data into maps.

Many Eyes is a data visualization tool from IBM.

NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Microsoft® Excel® 2007, 2010 and 2013 that makes it easy to explore network graphs. With NodeXL, you can enter a network edge list in a worksheet, click a button and see your graph, all in the familiar environment of the Excel window.

For more up-to-date list of tools. "The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software."

Create interactive images by linking to other websites, images, video, audio, etc.
Example: Historic Map of Florence, Italy
Example: https://www.thinglink.com/scene/799308140477677568

StoryMap for images. Like ThingLink you can add annotation and links to an image.

Neatline was designed to work with an instance of Omeka (only the hosted version). In addition to annotating maps, Neatline can annotate images.
Example: http://urbancampus.richmond.edu/neatline/show/temple-university-campus-development
For more about Neatline: http://neatline.org/

This is a Chrome browser extension. It arrays all images on a given web page (i.e. Google image search results) and allows you to delete them to create a seamless quilt.

Software for Digital Humanities.
ImagePlot - A macro used to create high resolution visualizations showing all image in a collection in a form of a scatter plot.
ImageMontage - Creates a 2D grid of images.
ImageSlice - "Creates a "slice" view of an image collection."
VisualSense - "Interactive exploration of image sets using image plots, bar graphs, and pie charts."

Tin Eye is a reverse images search engine whereby you search for images using images.

Omeka allows you to create rich digital exhibitions. This is the installed version on a local server. It is more robust and has more plugins than the free version, listed below. The Neatline plugin can only be used with this instance. Contact Chris Kemp for information about setting up a locally hosted version of Omeka for your project.
The creation of metadata can be streamlined by using our installation of SharedShelf (our campus teaching image database). Contact Jeannine Keefer for more information.
Example: http://urbancampus.richmond.edu

Like Omeka.org, this version allow you to create digital exhibitions, but the themes and plug-ins are limited. You can set up an account on your own.
The creation of metadata can be streamlined by using our installation of SharedShelf (our campus teaching image database). Contact Jeannine Keefer for more information.

"Artsteps is a a web-based environment that allows its members to create virtual art galleries in lifelike 3D spaces. It is an application for artists, art organizations and art enthusiasts to model actual or virtual exhibitions by designing realistic 3-dimensional room complexes. Virtual exhibitions may include 2-dimensional artifacts (e.g. paintings, photos and posters), 3-dimensional artifacts (e.g. sculptures or small installations) and streaming videos.
Virtual exhibitions can be explored on the Artsteps web site or can be embedded on any web page, site or blog. They can also be rated, discussed and shared through a multitude of options, including posting on popular social sites"

Historypin is a way for people to come together to share and celebrate local history. It consists of a shared archive, a mutually supportive community and a collaborative approach to engagement with local history.

"Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that's designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required."

"CollectiveAccess is software for describing all manner of things, and allows you to create catalogues that closely conform to your needs without custom programming."

"We are a dynamic community of professionals working in the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences. We collaborate to design, develop, and share a platform for collections information management that: supports traditional collections management activities; enables the integration of emergent and dynamic new technologies into the information ecologies of museums; and is an effective and affordable alternative to one-off applications developed in-house and proprietary offerings. CollectionSpace is freely distributed under the
ECLv2 license."

"Open Exhibits is an initiative that looks to transform the way in which museums and other informal learning institutions produce and share computer-based exhibits. Open Exhibits is both a collection of software and a growing community of practice."

"Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author’s website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation."