This document provides an overview of digital tools, trends and methodologies for the social sciences and humanities. It discusses defining digital humanities and gives examples of digital projects and resources. A case study is presented on exploring the lives of 19th century Ontario farmers through digitizing and analyzing journal entries. The document encourages thinking about how digital approaches can inform research and lists upcoming seminars on digital topics.

1. Digital Tools, Trends and
Methodologies for the Social
Sciences and Humanities
Conceptualising a Diverse Field
5 October 2015
Shawn Day
DH@TheLibrary

2. Background
‣ Who Am I?
‣ Why Am I presenting this seminar?
‣ Where am I?: qubdh.uk

3. Agenda
‣ What is the significance of the Digital ?
‣ Where?
‣ Areas of Interest
‣ Trends
‣ Projects
‣ Keeping in Touch

4. Where DoYou Come From?
What Question BringsYou Here Today?

5. Do Social Scientists ask the same Questions that
Humanities Scholars do?

6. Objective
1. Inspire as opposed to impose rigour on the Digital in
the Humanities and Social Sciences
a. as an approach
b. a discipline
c. school of thought
d. any sense of a cohesive whole
2. But instead to appreciate and to see how it may inform
direction in your own research

7. How would you define Digital Humanities?

8. What is Digital Humanities - Josh Honn
1. Humanistic scholarship presented in digital forms
2. Humanistic scholarship enabled by digital methods and
tools
3. Humanistic scholarship about digital technology and
culture
4. Humanistic scholarship building and experimenting
with digital technology
5. Humanistic scholarship critical of its own digital-ness

9. “The **moral** role of
Digital Humanities in a data-driven world”
- ScottWiegart

10. The Shape of Digital Scholarship

11. Digital Repository of Tools (DiRT)
(dirtdirectory.org)

12. A Different Approach
‣ What do you want to do?
‣ What have you got to work with?
‣ With the one caveat/note —> It’s all data!

13. Concepts and Processes
‣ Analyze data
‣ Interpret data
‣ Annotate
‣ Model data
‣ Archive data
‣ Analyze networks between my data
‣ Capture information
‣ Organize data
‣ Clean up data
‣ Preserve data
‣ Collaborate
‣ Program
‣ Comment
‣ Publish
‣ Communicate
‣ Record audio/video
‣ Analyze the content of my data
‣ Analyze relationships between pieces of data
‣ Contextualize data
‣ Share
‣ Convert files
‣ Analyze the geographical aspect of my data
‣ Create
‣ Store data
‣ Crowdsource data enrichment/analysis
‣ Analyze the structure of my data
‣ Design
‣ Analyze the stylistics of my data
‣ Find information
‣ Theorize
‣ Disseminate data
‣ Transcribe audio, video or manuscripts
‣ Add markup to an object
‣ Translate
‣ Enrich metadata about an object
‣ Visualize data
‣ Collect information
‣ Build a website
‣ Add identifiers to data
‣ Write

14. All the Tools Fit to Recommend

15. Digging Deeper in DiRT

16. But there’s Something Bigger Happening
Here
‣ It’s Called TaDIRAH
‣ Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities

17. Aspects of the taxonomy
‣ Activities
‣ Objects
‣ Techniques

18. DHO:DRAPieR

19. What’s At Queen’s for Example

20. What’s At Queen’s for Example

21. How a typical Digital ProjectWorks
Stuff Services Use
Files
Metadata
Classification
Data
Processing
Database
Analysis,
etc.
Display
Search
Interaction
VRE

22. DH MakerBus
● Making culture and education
● Makerspaces in libraries
● Gamification
● Democratizing technology and
mobilizing knowledge
● Art, craft, and design
● Digital humanities and the future
of learning
● Digital literacy
● Cultural heritage management
and the maker movement
● The use of digital tools for
preservation of texts and objects
● Co-working, crowd-funding, and
collaboration

23. The Shape of Digital Humanities

24. Melissa Terras DH Survey 2011
From Melissa Terras’blog: http://

25. Terras: DH Centres
From http://

26. Terras: Quantifying DH
From http:

27. Terras: Accessing DH Resources
From http:

28. Terras: Investment
From http:/
melissaterras.blog
2012/01/infogr
quanitifying-digi

29. Terras: Growth of DH
From http:

30. Around DH in 80 Days
‣ Global
‣ Multidisciplinary
‣ Multilanguage
‣ Transparent - List - Github Jekyll

31. Around DH in 80 Days

32. Case Study
Exploring the ‘ordinary’lives of rural pioneers/farmers in
nineteenth century Ontario

33. Canada

34. Ontario

35. SouthWestern Ontario

36. Farm Journal Raw Materials
‣ 100s of pages
‣ Varying hands
‣ Varying quality
‣ Columns
‣ No Context

37. Medical Diary

38. HistoryFlow

39. Processing
1. Digitisation
2. Text Capture
3. Quality Control
4. Generate word frequency (Voyant, TAPoR)
5. Entity Recognition and Tagging
6. Isolate known farm activities (NLP - LanguageWare)
7. Collocate to link activity references to time, duration,
and resources (Voyant)

40. TaDIRAH: Digitisation

41. TaDIRAH: Text Capture and Quality Control
jEdit and oxyGEN

42. Word Frequency Analysis
Voyant Tools

43. Entity Recognition and Analysis
OpenCalais

44. Visualising the Results
Illustrator

45. Results - New Patterns
1. Less time haying
2. The impact of
technology
3. More tasks faster

46. Value of the Exercise
1. Easier to compare over intervals;
2. Multiple vectors with greater granularity in a
compressed space;
3. The challenge is to find rich enough source materials
to yield substantive datasets.

47. Areas of Interest
‣ Digital History
‣ Digital Literary Studies
‣ Digital Public Humanities
‣ Citizen Science

48. Projects of Note
A Random Survey

49. Programming Historian

50. Yale Photogrammar
‣ Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing,
searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from
1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security
Administration and Office ofWar Information (FSA-OWI).

51. Yale Photogrammar

52. Yale Photogrammar

53. Yale Photogrammar

54. DHO:Discovery

55. Europeana
Europeana
enables people to
explore the digital
resources of
Europe's galleries,
museums,
libraries, archives
and audiovisual
collections.

56. Republic of Letters - Pallad.io

57. Republic of Letters - Pallad.io

58. AHRC ICT Methods

59. arts-humanities.net

60. Corpus of Electronic Texts

61. Transcribe Bentham

62. HistoryPin

63. WhatWas There?

64. Conflict and Politics in NI

65. Rome Reborn 2.0

66. Voyant - Text Analysis

67. TAPoR - Text Analysis Portal for
Research

68. Cool Tools from the RRCNMH
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a
free, easy-to-use
application to help you
collect, manage, and cite
your research sources.
Designed for cultural
institutions, enthusiasts,
and educators, Omeka is
a platform for
publishing online
collections and
exhibitions.
Omeka.net is a hosted
service for your own
Omeka collections,
research, exhibits, and
digital projects.
Short for “The Humanities
and Technology Camp,"
THATCamp is a BarCamp-
style, user-generated
“unconference” on digital
humanities.
Scripto is a free, open
source tool that enables
community
transcriptions of
document and
multimedia files.
PressForward pioneers
new methods to
capture and highlight
orphaned or
underappreciated
scholarship and share
it with dh across the
web.
Scholarpress
Manage your class,
publish research, or
collaborate on a
conference
presentation with
this hub for scholarly
& educational
plugins
Anthologize is a free,
open-source, plugin
that transforms
WordPress into a
platform for
publishing
electronic texts.
Survey Builder
Build online
surveys that are
especially
applicable to oral
histories.
Timeline Builder
CHNM Labs: Easily
create and manage a
timeline of historical
events for your website.
Serendip-o-matic
connects your
sources to digital
materials located in
libraries, museums,
and archives
around the world.
Web Scrapbook
Store all kinds of
media items —
URLs, images, text,
and movies — &
collaborate thru the
CHNM online
scrapbook.

69. NeatLine

70. DH on the Island of Ireland

71. DARIAH

72. Digital Repository of Ireland

73. How to Keep in Touch with the Field
‣ Twitter
‣ Humanist - Over 25 years
‣ Prof Hacker
‣ Global Outlook: DH

74. Upcoming Seminars andWorkshops
‣ 12 October / AHS7001 Digital Transformation of Research
‣ 19 October / Space and Time Tools for Innovation
‣ 9 November / Google Tools for Scholars
‣ 23 November / DataVisualisation for the Humanities
‣ 27 November / AHS7001 Digital Transformation of Research
‣ 7 December / Digital Project Management for Scholars

75. Thank You
Shawn Day
@iridium
s.day@qub.ac.uk
18.0G.006A 18 University Square
http://qubdh.uk