How Digital Humanities adds to PhD Projects Gary Stringer Digital Humanities Lab University of Exeter

What is “Digital Humanities”? Inclusive umbrella term Digital tools and computational approaches to explore humanities questions Digital publication and dissemination of humanities texts, objects, and data Critical approaches to the ‘Digital Turn’ Focus on collaboration and interdisciplinarity Small scale to big data (single poem to the internet as corpus) Simple to highly complex (from Excel to supercomputers)

What kinds of approaches does DH cover? (non-exhaustive!) Working with text text editing and encoding text analysis and natural language processing Working with visual material and audio 2D imaging 3D scanning and photogrammetry audio materials/oral histories digital preservation/relationship with galleries, libraries, archives, museums Working with data data visualisation, mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) crowd sourcing, data management network analysis, statistical analysis, qualitative analysis

Examples of Digital Methods Gazetteers and mapping – Recogito and other tools Photogrammetry – digital surrogates for artefacts Reflectance Transformation Imaging – texture enhancement Text Encoding Initiative – creating enriched digital editions Network analysis – understanding and visualising connections Podcasts and Video – recording facilities and publishing Document photography – advice and facilities

Case Study: Hardy and Heritage Identification of unstudied collection of letters written to Thomas Hardy from various correspondents Understanding context and themes Reconstructing conversations Photographing, transcribing, editing, publishing Digital edition in Text Encoding Initiative format

Advice, Training, Collaboration Advice available locally from DH team, and from web, social media, mailing lists, blogs, etc. Training programme at Exeter, and regional/national workshops Talk to us about your project! The DH community is extremely friendly, and no question is too basic!

Questioning the digital A copy or a new object? Same thing, new medium? Different thing? How does the digital affect our methods of research? What are the stated and unstated barriers and edges to your access? What decisions around selection, editing, and representation inhere within the digital object? What labour is acknowledged or obscured? Are you a reader, a user, a creator of the (digital) text?

Where to go next? Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab and information pages, e.g. https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/digital-lab/, Exeter’s LibGuide http://libguides.exeter.ac.uk/digitalhumanities Online training, e.g. Digital Classicist http://www.digitalclassicist.org/ The Programming Historian https://programminghistorian.org/ Mailing lists, e.g. Exeter’s DH community list digitalhumanities@exeter.ac.uk, Humanist http://dhhumanist.org/ Summer schools, e.g. Digital Humanities Summer School Oxford http://www.dhoxss.net/ Twitter!