LibGuides: History: Digital Humanities

Introduction to Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities Resources

Digital Humanities Quarterly
an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.
Reviews in Digital Humanities
"Reviews in Digital Humanities, edited by Dr. Jennifer Guiliano and Dr. Roopika Risam, is the pilot of a peer-reviewed journal and project registry that facilitates scholarly evaluation and dissemination of digital humanities work and its outputs."

Story Telling Tools

Map Warper
"A free to use, open-source map warper / map georectifier, and image georeferencer tool for individuals and small groups." It allows for researchers to compare two maps.
Story Maps
"Transform your maps and geographic information system (GIS) work into interactive content that informs, inspires, and engages stakeholders"
Timeline.js
"Using Java and a Google Sheets template, you can quickly create interactive timelines with images, videos, and other content."

Digital Humanites

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities is "an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines." Digital humanities uses metadata to analyze, understand, display, and enhance traditional research methods. It can be as simple as a timeline and a word cloud or it can be as complicated as simulations and models of massive datasets.

What is Metadata?

Metadata is "data about data." It is used to summarize basic information about data to make tracking and working with specific data sets easier. There are three basic types of metadata:

Descriptive metadata - enables discovery, identification, and selection of resources. It can include information such as title, author, subjects, dates, etc.
Administrative metadata - facilitates the management of resources. It can include elements such as technical, preservation, rights, and use.
Structural metadata - generally used in machine processing, describes relationships among various parts of a resource, such as chapters in a book.

For basic digital humanities projects, you will mostly use descriptive metadata to visualize or enhance datasets.

Data Mining and Data Visualization Tools

Google Books Ngram Viewer
"An online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019."
Infogram
Infogram is a great tool for graphically visualizing your data. This web-based tool has the capability to create over 30+ charts and graphs, including maps, to visualize data for research. When your project is created through the site, you can publish your visualization and/or generate an embed code to post onto a blog or website.
Voyant Tools
"Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts" It can be used to reveal word and text statistics in personal or professional academic documents.
Word Cloud Generator
Visualize your data in a Word Cloud by graphically showing the most frequently used words in an article or publication.

Select Digital Humanities Projects

Anderson University & Church of God Archives Online Collections and Exhibits
Online collections and exhibits created by students, in collaboration with the archivist, to provide digital access to archival materials. The archives also produces online exhibits.
City Readers
"The New York Society Library, which opened in 1754 as a subscription service for the city’s public, has had some eminent patrons over the years. Its database project City Readers allows you to see what patrons borrowing between 1789 and 1805 read, how long they kept their books, and which subject areas they favored."
Histography
An "interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time."
Mapping Prejudice
"Mapping Prejudice identifies and maps racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, our interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations."
Mapping the Republic of Letters
"Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination and the criticism of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects. But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, in collaboration with international partners, seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture."
Slave Voyages Database
"The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more."