ENG 499c Digital tools

Word cloud of terms associated with digital humanities

We’re all familiar with the digital tools museums and libraries have offered us. Online catalogues and databases (like the MLA) have aided our research, and the advent of the internet has allowed us the opportunity to see rare materials, collections, and locations we would not be able to experience otherwise (to give but one example, here’s the British Library’s database of book bindings).

But there is more to digital humanities than the text encoding initiatives that grant open-access to works (c.f. Project Gutenberg), gaining online access to a journal articles in full-text databases like JSTOR, or taking a virtual tour of the Globe Theatre. Digitization also allows us to do new and interesting things with texts (including aiding archaeology, redefining what we mean by “text” and reconsidering evidence [or data] in English studies).

Before I go on to list some accessible tech tools you might find useful, I want to draw your attention to tools that you probably don’t even think of as “digitization” because they have become so thoroughly normalized–citation generators. The “digitization” of the humanities hasn’t just granted us virtual access to style and usage guides; it has also given us tools with which we can generate bibliographic entries that can easily be reformatted in different styles:

Viva la digitization! (to coin a phrase)

Tools by Type

Accessible Artificial Intelligence (granting more and more users access to large language models that have the potential to revolutionize the practice and pedagogy of composition)

Annotation software (allowing readers to interact with digital texts, both individually and socially–we’ll be socially annotating some of our texts this term!)

  • hypothes.is: allows readers to annotate web pages
  • Annotation Studio: requires the uploading of materials, allows for individual and group annotation
  • Recogito: annotation software that allows users to export data to other tools (makes information more “open”)
  • VoiceThread: requires the uploading of materials, allows for voice and video annotation
  • Video Ant: allows viewers to annotate YouTube videos (here’s an example)

Textual analysis software (we normally think of “textual analysis” as the product of an individual reading carefully–but technological tools can mine texts for data in order to uncover patterns)

  • WordSeer: textual analysis that allows for visualization (there’s a reason why this section is prefaced with a “word cloud”–visualization is all the rage)
  • AntConc: free software that aids concordancing
  • Ngram viewer: Google product that allows users to track changes in word usage (in Google books) over time
  • Voyant: a web-based tool for analyzing digital texts (data and tools can be exported or imbedded in other sites)

Visualization software (or illuminated manuscripts for the information age–infographics to the left of me, infographics to the right!)

Much of the computational push in “digital humanities” has been in the direction of openness–open source and open access. (A recent example from a former MSU Professor, Joe Dunman: Religion in the Law: An Open Access Casebook.) Although neither the “Open Syllabus” project nor Butler, Sargent, and Smith’s Introduction to College Research are limited to the humanities, their intended scope and purpose(s) are typical of many digital humanities projects.

This does not mean, of course, that the digital direction has been without its attendant complications. New areas of analysis have also generated new issues and problems (including those based on older forms of inequality, such the economic disparity in the digital divide or racial bias in algorithms).

For a good overview of the concepts and issues associated with the digital humanities, see the MLA Common’s “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.” Blackwell’s A Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also available on the web. If you’re looking for a fun exploration of what textual analysis computational tools can offer a literary corpus (in this case, The Baby-Sitters Club book series), see The Data-Sitters Club.

And because we should never, ever forget the Battle of Hastings (or its meme-making potential), our web surfing should eventually land on the shores of the Bayeux tapestry site.

Meme of Bauyeaux tapestry that says "such battle, so hastings, very tapestry"
Source: Taylor Hayman’s twitterfeed

Final focus: literary expertise is not coterminous with luddite tendencies, and traditional English majors are no more technologically deficient than the average Business major. Don’t let anyone encourage you to think that you are somehow woefully lacking because you may not know the particular tricks for functionality within a given program. You can learn the particulars of widely used programs via Google and YouTube searches. What you can’t and won’t discern from that online searching is the fundamental purpose (and philosophical usefulness) of the tech you are expected to use–that discernment comes from the critical thinking your discipline encourages.