Digital Humanities

Originally dubbed “humanities computing,” the term “digital humanities” came into widespread use only in the past couple of years. WHP, founded in 1997 with support from the Center for the Study of Women in Society, has been functioning as a digital humanities center since long before many of its counterparts across the nation.

WHP directors and staff have been active in a number of associations and projects from which we have drawn consultants and advisors to various WHP projects and with whom we have engaged as the discipline (or “interdiscipline”) has been emerging. Principal among such individuals are:

  • Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project (Formerly Brown Women Writers Project), and her associate Syd Bauman, consulted our Mapas Project regarding text encoding from early in its inception. We have also taken TEI workshops with them.
  • Willard McCarty, Queens College, London and founder and editor of the Humanist continues tp provide sage advice on all manner of topics.
  • Dot Porter, Metadata manager, Digital Humanities Observatory, a sponsored center of the Royal Irish Academy. Ms. Porter consults our Mapas Project and is one of the principals leading the TILE Project in which we are participating. We have also participated in her workshops.
  • Allen Renear, Associate Dean for Research and an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has also periodically counseled us on the ins and outs of organizing a digital humanities center.
  • John Unsworth, Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois and former Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, has been an ongoing informal advisor to WHP on many occasions.

Since 1998, we have actively participated in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (and its predecessor associations), an international group where we have given papers, organized poster sessions, and attended skill-building workshops.

Text Image Linking Environment (TILE) Project — We are currently engaged, as participating members, in a two-year international effort, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to develop a standardized environment for linking text and image. The larger TILE group is led by Doug Reside of the University of Maryland and Dot Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory, Royal Irish Academy.

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) — WHP directors and staff have attended a number of workshops in Sweden, the U.S., and Canada to learn the basics of TEI, a way of encoding digital text in a standardized way for advancing its analysis and preservation.

If you are interested in developing a Digital Humanities Center on your campus, we have compiled a number of resources that might be helpful:

  • an excerpt from Diane Zorich’s CLIR 2008 report about what a DHC is
  • a review of the funding recommendations for DH proposals from June 2009
  • a recommended list of EdTech Web Sites of Interest (excerpted from the EdTech Teacher Newsletter of April 2010)
  • a list of Digital Knowledge Environments, Tools, and Devices (adapted from a questionnaire circulated by the University of Victoria’s Implementing New Knowledge Environments group, January 2010)

Please write Stephanie Wood for copies of any of these documents (swood AT uoregon DOT edu).