Author: Alexander Ritchie

[Open Hours – Week 4] DH as.is.under.against Neoliberalism

Join us on Friday 16 November for a one hour discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub in the fourth of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Neoliberalism, the Academy, and the Digital (in the) Humanities

This session circles back on digital wing to address one of the named spectres haunting Stewart Varner’s ‘What DH Could Be?’ piece from Open Hours Week One: Digital Humanities as ‘neoliberalism in the humanities’.

Join us for some respectfully robust discussion about neoliberalism in the academy and how ‘Digital Humanities’ might cause, enable, benefit from, and/or resist the current neoliberal organisational milieu in which we live and work.

Reading – The Dark Side of Digital Humanities

These four short pieces from North American scholars are versions of papers presented at  2013 MLA Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
 

Projects – Occupy MLA

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/occupying-mla/45357

A netprov (networked improvised narrative) initiated by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig in 2011 inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Anonymously as OccupyMLA, they used new media both to explore methods of creating literary fiction, and also to encourage discussion of the issues affecting non-tenure track (NTT) and other contingent academic staff within higher education in the USA and beyond.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 16 November 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

LIBRARIANS: alexander ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz and Christopher Seay christopher.seay@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours – Week 2] – A ‘New Modesty’? Reading and analysing texts with computers

Nau Mai Haere Mai ! Join us on Friday 2nd November between 12 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for the second of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Digital Methods and Tools for Analysing Text

Following on from last week’s spirited discussion about what Digital Humanities (DH) could be, this week we will be exploring weird and wonderful possibilities for reading and visualizing texts using quantitative methods and statistical analysis.

Reading – Seven ways humanists are using computers to understand text | Ted Underwood

“In short, there are a lot of new things humanists can do with text, ranging from new versions of things we’ve always done (make literary arguments about diction), to modeling experiments that take us fairly deep into the methodological terrain of the social sciences.”

This 2015 blog post gives a useful, engaged overview of ways in which Humanities scholars are reading and analysing texts in digital realms. The author, Ted Underwood, teaches in both Information Sciences and English Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in North America. 

Image - Textual Map of different approaches to digital text analysis - Ted Underwood
A few things you might do with text by Ted Underwood

Projects & Tools – QueryPic and VoyantTools

QueryPic – http://dhistory.org/querypic/create/

A tool developed by Tim Sherratt, Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at University of Canberra to offer an additional way of seeing, searching and understanding the digitised newspapers made available by Trove and Papers Past.

VoyantTools – https://voyant-tools.org/ 

VoyantTools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts, developed and maintained by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell. It can be used to model and visualize textual corpora, as in the wordcloud below which uses The LA Review of Books Special Interview Series The Digital in the Humanities to attempt a distant reading definition of ‘Digital Humanities’.

Join us in the Hub to explore, enquire and discuss!

WHEN: 12pm – 2pm, Friday 2nd November 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

LIBRARIANS: Chris Seay – christopher.seay@otago.ac.nz, and Lisa Chisholm – lisa.chisholm@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours Week 1] – What Could Digital Humanities Be?

Join us this Friday 26th October between 12 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for our first Open Hours!

Topic – Possibilities for the digital with/in Humanities

Rather than add to the definitional drama that the “what is…” formulation provokes, we thought that we’d start by asking a slightly different guiding question: What could Digital Humanities be?

Reading – What DH Could Be | Stewart Varner

Our first reading, and the inspiration for this approach, is a 2016 blogpost by Stewart Varner, Librarian and Managing Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, entitled What DH Could Be. His musings were inspired by Élika Ortega, scholar at NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks at Northeastern University in Massachussetts, USA. She was in turn inspired by the twitter hashtag #WhatifDH2016 – an digital intervention to suggest improvements for the annual Digital Humanities conference.

Projects – William Blake Archive & Invisible Australians

To accompany the questions and possibilities that Varner traverses, I propose two projects to explore:

Join us in the Hub to explore, enquire and discuss!

WHEN: 12pm – 2pm, Friday 26th October 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

DUTY LIBRARIAN: Alexander Ritchie – alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz

Announcing Open Hours @ Te Pokapū | The Hub

Wondering what the ‘Digital’ Humanities are and what all the fuss is about?

Hoping to connect with others for pointers on digital tools or resources?

Looking to start a digital project but don’t know where to begin?

Starting from Friday 26th October, Open Hours will provide a weekly opportunity to explore the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui, and chat with a Humanities Librarian to find out more about the ‘Digital Humanities’ (or DH) at Otago and beyond. Continue reading “Announcing Open Hours @ Te Pokapū | The Hub”