Digital Humanities in Practice

Citation

Weddell, S. (2013), "Digital Humanities in Practice", Library Management, Vol. 34 No. 6/7, pp. 558-560. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-06-2013-0056

“… we show the vibrancy and scope of a growing interest in how to apply digital technologies in the humanities and cultural and heritage sector. We went bottom up, rather than top down, showing what we are doing with DH, rather than trying to define it by what we are doing.” … its not the same‐old‐same‐old roundup of DH topics, instead showing the kind of things we do with ample applied case studies as well as introductions to each topic.” (http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/sneak‐peek‐digital‐humanities‐in.html).

The previous statement by Melissa Terras, one of the editors, succinctly sums up the aims of this title. With a large and growing number of books and papers being published on the subject, the approach taken in this book is refreshing, stating in the introduction that the focus is not on theory but rather on practice of digital humanities as carried out at the University College of London Centre for Digital Humanities. The emphasis is on “the integration of digital humanities research, with practice within and beyond academia; the involvement of the general public in digital resource creation and design; and the application of digital technologies to cultural heritage” (p. xiii).

Chapter one appropriately focuses on the users of digital humanities and how in practice many common assumptions have been challenged, particularly when despite the provision of resources and wide promotion there was no immediate uptake. It seems that those in the humanities unlike those in the sciences have been much slower to see the benefits. In order to improve uptake, the Centre decided to study their users and create digital resources tailored to their needs. While a variety of methods were adopted, a key factor was to visit users in their workplace no matter where that workplace was and thus gain an understanding of their working culture and how digital resources fit in to it. Two case studies are included in this chapter, “The LAIRAH project: log analysis in internet resources in the arts and humanities”; and “The VERA Project.”

The use of social media is the theme of chapter two and the concept in academia is introduced with three case studies included covering such areas as crowdsourcing; conference tweeting; and enhancing co‐creation of content in practice.

For libraries and librarians, chapter three is of particular interest as provision of digital resources and digitisation is fast becoming a key service, particularly in academic libraries. Areas covered include the reasons for digitisation; the growth of digitised content; best practice; digitisation and the humanities; and current issues. Two case studies are included.

Chapter four deals with image processing and provides an overview of the techniques used.

There is an excellent explanation of what it is and its use in the humanities and the two case studies provide good examples of the diversity of use – “The Griphos Project: reassembling ancient frescoes” and “Developing image capture and processing techniques to enhance the legibility of incised texts”.

3‐D imaging of surfaces is introduced in chapter five and its application for museums is discussed, the two case studies are informative and interesting. The first being the development of E‐Curator a new virtual reference tool for the arts and humanities by UCL Museums and Collections. The second outlines the Solomon Islands war canoe 3D scanning project.

Chapter six follows on from the discussion on digitisation of resources covered in chapter three by looking at text encoding and scholarly digital editions and begins by asking the question “what is a scholarly digital text? The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), its origins, and its guidelines are outlined; Markup; and the disadvantages and limitations of TEI are also discussed. The case studies look at “The Webbs on the Web Project” and “DALF: Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders” At the end of the chapter, the author, Julianne Nyhan, reminds digital humanities practitioners of the importance of staying informed about the main developments in this area.

Librarians will find lots of interest in chapters seven and eight. Chapter seven looks at historical bibliography in a digital world covering books as technology and a reflection on the development of the book from the printing press to e‐Readers. Versioning, electronic catalogues, electronic books as well as Google books are also discussed. Academic librarians in particular, will also be interested in chapter eight which covers open access and online teaching materials in the digital humanities. The last decade has seen a significant rise in the availability of open educational resources (OER) globally and this and the development of communities of practice and learning communities are covered. The benefit to universities; and the sustainability of OERs is discussed and the two case studies provide plenty of food for thought, raising a number of questions on the future direction of open access and OER.

The final chapter focuses on institutional models for digital humanities and the author, Claire Warwick, addresses a number of questions and challenges: “The signs are that digital humanities is headed, increasingly, for the academic establishment, but how has it arrived at this point, and what can previous developments help us to learn for the future of the discipline? How is it organised? And what kind of institutional infrastructure will help it to thrive?” (p. 194). As in all the chapters, the case studies in this chapter are a key part of the discussion.

The layout of this book is simple and the themes flow logically. A nice feature is the use of QR codes at the beginning of each chapter taking the reader to the “Digital Humanities in Practice” Blog http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh‐in‐practice/and providing a short guide to the content. All case studies are well laid out and presented in a different font to set them apart from the main text. Bibliographies, References, Further Reading and Notes are included at the end of each chapter.

This is a very useful book to have on your shelves, whether you are a librarian, an archivist, or a researcher just beginning or already fully immersed in the digital humanities. It is easy to read and my understanding has improved over the course of writing this review. My copy has been well thumbed already and I know it will be a useful resource as I start to involve myself in the field, albeit in a very small way, within my own institution.