Reading (Module 1)
The Implications of Digital Materials and Digital Humanities
Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens. 2013. The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing. In K. Nawrotzki and J. Dougherty (eds), Writing History in the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press.
Trevor Owens. Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence? Journal of Digital Humanities 1:1.
Does the use of digital materials and computational methods entail new epistemic practices and norms?
Daniel Goldstein et al. 2013. Report on Data Management and Data-Management Plans for the History of Science Society Committee on Research and the Profession.
What is data, and what should we do with it?
Melissa Terras. 2010. DH2010 Plenay: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon.
Many of the issues surrounding the disciplinary identity of digital humanities raised in Melissa Terras' 2010 plenary continue to ring true.
Hallam Stevens. Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 5: Ordering Objects.
An historical perspective on databases in the life sciences.
Semantic Web
Tim Berners-Lee et al. 2001. The Semantic Web: A new form of web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. Scientific American May, 2001: 35-43.
This landmark paper laid out the vision for the semantic web.
Malcolm D. Hyman and Jürgen Renn. Toward an Epistemic Web. In The Globalization of Knowledge in History. MPIWG Edition Open Access.
The semantic web was a huge step forward in helping computers to understand complex concepts. But representing human knowledge in all of its contextual complexity remains an unsolved challenge. This paper lays out a vision for what an "epistemic web" might look like.
Metadata
Sheila A. Bair and Sharon Carlson. 2008. Where Keywords Fail: Using Metadata to Facilitate Digital Humanities Scholarship.
This article provides a nice introduction to the role of names, authorities, and vocabularies in digital humanities.
Christina Manzo et al. 2015. "By the People, For the People": Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generate Metadata. Digital Humanities Quarterly 9 (1).
Can the crowd compete with expert-curated metadata schemas?