Tag: #burdick

Notes on Chapters 3&4 of Burdick Text

Chapter 3: The Social Life of the Digital Humanities (DH)

  • Focuses on social aspects & impacts of DH
  • Analyzing economies humanities were created in & how it’s changed (with open-source models, IT, and social media)
    • These models have reshaped contemporary practices and promote social transformations that have an affect on the relevance of humanities work
  • 2 economies this article contrasts: the 1st Industrial Revolution and the globalized economy of this networked information age
  • Viewing universities as an ‘ivory tower’ doesn’t work anymore – it’s becoming more of a “nodal point” amidst the constant change

Chapter 4: Provocations

  • Humanists are working across the digital/analog environments (it’s slowly becoming a more blurred line)
  • Complex adaptive systems theory (p.106)
  • Much of DH work is team-based (like in STEM fields) and involved bringing in different experts to work on projects together
  • Large amounts of historical materials are being collected/documented now – resulting in a backlog of work
    • Solution: new models for preserving and processing the work be created and models become user-centered rather than object-centered
  • Creation of digital archives – can become dated, each piece of information is effected by each interaction involving it, helps tackle cultural memory
  • Comprehensive models for graduate training in humanities has gained more traction with the increase in the number of subfields
    • Doctoral students now become experts in a specific area and determine how they can tie that specialization into other areas (theory is often used as a bridge between areas)
  • Because outside skills are becoming more incorporated into careers today (computer programming skills, library science, digital media/design skills) – making the job market more diverse and making it even more complicated to find
    • Question: How do fellow grad students think the job market is going to change as we continue in our degrees? What skills will be more highly valued?
  • Tech skills and research questions aren’t synonymous, but with the growth of DH it’s more & more important to understand how having the tech skills can assist in research

Experimentation & Emerging Methods/Genres

           In this blog post, I am focusing on the code, software, and platform studies aspect of Digital Humanities (DH) research. In terms of the Veterans Legacy Project (VLP), this “emerging area” carries a lot of potential impact. VLP is a growing project in terms of its scope and the projects that fall under its umbrella. Its projects focus on spreading information to visitors to cemeteries, veterans, and there are projects specifically for teachers to use with their students. As a PhD student, I have been continually seeking out a better understanding of coding and programming so that I will be able to use it in my dissertation research as well as be more employable after my degree is complete.

            As Burdick states on page 53, “The basic binary language of digital media is the foundation of all programming code, but software and computer languages have their own history as forms with grammar and syntax.” One of the most important balancing acts of a digital project is the balance between coding the what the code is going to represent, what information the website created by the code is able to impart. Being able to create an effective web presence for a project such as VLP (or any Digital Humanities project) requires having a web developer, or someone with the skills to build the website using at least three front-end programming languages (usually HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript). Even more important than finding someone with these technical skills is finding a developer with the ability to understand the project and its needs so that they are able to create the web presence needed to help propel the project forward.

Burdick  also goes on to discuss the scholar’s point of view in regards to the use of encoding in technology and other fields: “Scholars fascinated by the encoded protocols and instructions that constitute the language of software also look at the cultural contexts in which business, defense, or communications industries fueled the development of increasingly sophisticated approaches to encoding” (pg.53). This fascinated perspective could offer further support for the need for recruiting experts to DH projects so there will be a professional that is able to keep the potential uses of encoding and coding in perspective in terms of long-term and short-term goals. As a budding coder and web designer, there have been multiple instances of associates telling me stories of having to manage a client’s expectations because the client wanted a final website produced in the fraction of the time it would actually take.

In going forward in consulting with VLP, it has been important to understand that any work created throughout the iteration of this course would be a draft or beta test that would be fleshed out and built upon throughout the summer. As it is stated in the fifth case study of the Burdick piece, “The prototype will be employed to beta test a new way of accessing information, interacting with knowledge, and experiences data research in physical and virtual space” – any product created for VLP would have to go through beta testing as well to ensure it is functioning correctly without any nasty surprises. Besides consulting for VLP, any coding and programming that I do for my own research projects would also be completed in a similar process of creation, beta testing, debugging, and finally release/publishing. The Digital Humanities is a field with enormous potential to incorporate technical experts into the projects, and this would probably improve the field overall. If a project team included a humanities expert working with a software developer, and the two were able to understand the other’s perspective, the potential products could be unlimited.