Hi Lisa! Glad to see that you are blogging. Hope all is well at Rice. Jean-Claude Bradley April 14, at pm Reply. Sarah Fahmy June 14, at pm Reply. Lisa, Hope that this post finds you well. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.
Email required Address never made public. Name required. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3. Search for:. Whereas the values statements of the academic organizations emphasize what scholars do pursue inquiry and how they do it with integrity , the ALA focuses on providing service and upholding the public good through access, lifelong learning, and intellectual freedom. Bridging these two communities, the digital humanities community brings together core scholarly values such as critical dialogue and free inquiry with an ethic focused on the democratic sharing of ideas.
In a sense, the digital humanities reconfigures the humanities for the Internet age, leveraging networked technologies to exchange ideas, create communities of practice, and build knowledge. The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2. Whereas the traditional humanities typically value originality, authority, and authorship—an ethos based in part on the scarcity of information and the perceived need for gatekeepers—the Digital Humanities Manifesto instead promotes remixing, openness, and the wisdom of the crowd.
For the digital humanities, information is not a commodity to be controlled but a social good to be shared and reused.
Internet values themselves grow out of the humanistic mission to explore and exchange ideas. With the development of the Internet and of open-source technologies come new ways to communicate information and ideas, build communities, and promote the growth of knowledge.
Indeed, Internet values, as manifested in the ethos of open source, infuse the digital humanities. It works like the Internet. Like the Internet, the digital humanities community is distributed rather than centralized, built on trust and the freedom to invent. Yet we might also say that, like the Internet, the digital humanities community needs protocols—values—to guide its development.
In some ways, the values of print culture which is identified with the traditional humanities clash with those of Internet culture. At their core, both sets of values aim to promote the exchange of ideas and the progress of knowledge, but print at least in the tradition of academic prose typically gives greater emphasis to authority and ownership, while digital scholarship values access, conversation, fluidity, and collaboration.
Likewise, Paula Petrik contrasts the ethos of traditional humanities scholarship with the ethos of digital humanities scholarship. Grounded in humanistic values but catalyzed by Internet values, the digital humanities seeks to push the humanities into new territory by promoting collaboration, openness, and experimentation. Although no professional organization in the digital humanities has, to my knowledge, crafted a values statement, we can find sources for such a statement in ongoing discussions in blogs and articles, the mission statements of DH centers, and digital humanities manifestos.
Running throughout these statements is an overarching sense that the digital humanities should promote traditional humanistic values such as access to knowledge and civic responsibility by embracing collaboration, cross-disciplinarity, innovation, participation, and openness.
Drawing from manifestos, model statements of value, and my own analysis of the rhetoric of the digital humanities, I propose the following initial list of digital humanities values. My intent is not to speak presumptuously for the community and decide on my own what it values but rather to open up the conversation.
Although I wanted to keep the list of values concise, I recognize that others should probably be added, such as sharing public knowledge, curiosity, multidisciplinarity, and balancing theory and practice.
With each value, I explain what it is and why it is embraced by the digital humanities community, and I also offer a few examples of how the value manifests itself, aggregating ongoing discussions in the digital humanities. This set of values signifies what the digital humanities community aspires to achieve, not necessarily what it has fully met.
Openness operates on several levels in the digital humanities, describing a commitment to the open exchange of ideas, the development of open content and software, and transparency Zorich, The digital humanities community embraces openness because of both self-interest and ethical aspirations. In order to create digital scholarship, researchers typically need access to data, tools, and dissemination platforms.
We can see openness at work throughout the digital humanities community, such as in open-source software tools, freely accessible digital collections, and open-access journals and books. Likewise, some digital collections important to the digital humanities, such as the Rossetti Archive, use Creative Commons licenses; even more make their content freely accessible without explicitly using such open licenses. Openness thus supports related values such as transdisciplinarity, collaboration, and the democratization of knowledge.
Digital humanists are beginning to press for open access not only to digital collections, tools, and scholarship but also to educational resources and even course evaluations. Rather than cheapening knowledge by making it free, embracing openness recognizes the importance of the humanities to society. Indeed, the digital humanities community promotes an ethos that embraces collaboration as essential to its work and mission even as it recognizes that some work is better done in solitude.
In part, that emphasis on collaboration reflects the need for people with a range of skills to contribute to digital scholarship. Instead of working on a project alone, a digital humanist will typically participate as part of a team, learning from others and contributing to an ongoing dialogue.
By bringing together people with diverse expertise, collaboration opens up new approaches to tackling a problem, as statistical computing is applied to the study of literature or geospatial tools are used to understand historical data. There are many indicators of the importance of collaboration to the digital humanities community. For instance, at the Digital Humanities Conference, a number of papers, posters, and workshop sessions addressed collaboration, whether as a key component of the humanities cyberinfrastructure e.
In my own preliminary analysis of collaboration in the digital humanities community, I found that, between and , 48 percent of the articles published in Literary and Linguistic Computing , a major DH journal, were coauthored, a much higher percentage than is typical of humanities journals Spiro. Collegiality and Connectedness. As part of its commitment to openness and collaboration, the digital humanities community promotes collegiality, welcoming contributions and offering help to those who need it.
If the underlying goal is the promotion of public knowledge, why not share? We can see this commitment to collegiality in both virtual and physical spaces that bring together digital humanists. Between September of and April , Digital Humanities Questions and Answers has attracted over one thousand posts, attesting to the willingness of the DH community to help. Rather than establishing an agenda in advance, THATCamps encourage participants to write short blog posts before the unconference to describe their session ideas, then charge the participants with defining the schedule during the first session.
With the participants in charge of defining the conference, sometimes individuals can dominate the discussion, and some conversations can be less inclusive than others, but the ethic of THATCamp emphasizes collaboration, productivity, and fun French. Recently, this idea of inclusiveness in the digital humanities has come under critique. Still, leaders of the digital humanities community have reacted with concern to the charge of exclusiveness. Even if the DH community has not fully met the value of collegiality and inclusiveness, it certainly aspires to.
The digital humanities embraces diversity, recognizing that the community is more vibrant, discussions are richer, and projects are stronger if multiple perspectives are represented.
Some argue that the digital humanities community pays lip service to diversity but has not engaged with it on a deeper level. Based on my admittedly anecdotal observations at DH gatherings, the community may not have achieved the same degree of diversity in race and ethnicity as it has in professional roles, nationalities, age, disciplines, and gender.
However, the community works toward diversity as a goal. The language of experimentation runs throughout the digital humanities, demonstrating its support of risk taking, entrepreneurship, and innovation. By leveraging information technology to explore data, digital humanities casts intellectual problems as experiments: What is the effect of modeling the data in a particular way?
Defining the values of the digital humanities. Debates in the Digital … , A report for the Council on Library and Information Resources , Digital Scholarship in the Humanties, September , Articles 1—20 Show more. Help Privacy Terms. Archival management software: A report for the council on library and information resources L Spiro Council on Library and Information Resources , Can a new research library be all-digital? Forgot password?
You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?
What Do Girls Dig? If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian. All rights reserved. Powered by: Safari Books Online.
0コメント