Digital Humanities

Hello friends, what do you think about digital humanities ? Well I thought it was related to human beings and their morality. But it was not so. This digital humanities have nothing to do with morality. So now you have an idea of what I'm going to discuss today. Before jump to the other things I would like to clear the concept of what digital humanities is ? So let's see.

•What is Digital Humanities ? 

According to Wikipedia source,

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. 

The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing. 

So DH connected with art, science, sociology, history and many other subjects. It is the computational or we can say computing system of study. 

•What is the need of Digital Humanities ? 

The question that comes to our mind is, after all What is the importance and need of digital humanities ? So the digital humanities teaches us how to become Real Human being. That humanities sees that people will not become a Robot. 

Digital humanities have a connection with the English departments. These are the reasons given by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum to explain what DH is doing in English Departments. 

• We see the simultaneous explosion of interest in e-reading and e-book devices like the Kindle, iPad, and Nook and the advent of large-scale text digitization projects, the most significant of course being Google Books.

• The openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis. 

• A modest but much-promoted belle-lettristic project around hypertext and other forms of electronic literature that continues to this day and is increasingly vibrant and diverse.

• The widespread means to implement electronic archives.

• After numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable datatype for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.

• There is the long association between computers and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage.

This is very true, because we as students of the English department use various digital tools. 

Examples :-

Let's understand it through the example. 

The first example I want to give is my own. We have celebrated Virtual Teacher's Day.  For Virtual Teacher's Day I have prepared an auto generated certificate for participants. This was an example of digital humanities. We are using digital tools everyday. So these all are digital humanities. We can get any information through the use of digital tools. Even we analyse all the data with a different perspective also.

Here are also given very interesting questions to discuss in the course. One of them I want to share with you is,

This course also gives questions to think what we have understood after watchi video. The screenshot I have shared is very important question about digital humanities. These digital tools became a part of our everyday life.

Now I would like to discuss CLiC activity. This is a very interesting activity for digital humanities. The full form of CLiC is Corpus Linguistics in Context. It was also a useful Activity to read the data. 

This CLiC activity gives us every little information also. Let's understand it through some examples :-

In this activity we have to look at the noun chin. We can find different ways in which the noun is used to describe fictional characters. To begin with, we can check how frequently chins appear in Dickens compared with other authors, or compared with general usage. You can also try !

Activity 9.1 Looking for chins in Dickens :-

1. Go to the CLiC Concordance tab (http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concodance). 

2. Select DNov – Dickens’s Novels in the “Search the Corpora” box. DNov is a corpus of all of Dickens’s novels. 

3. In “Only in subsets”, make sure “All text” is selected. and select the subset “All text”. 

4. In ‘Search for terms”, enter chin. Hit Return. 

Here is what I got -

This will give you a set of concordance lines in which chin appears across Dickens’s works. 

Let's try another activity.  For the creation of fictional worlds, the setting and atmosphere play an important role. While each novel creates its own particular world, it is still possible to identify similarities across novels and we can interpret accounts of settings against the social and historical context of the time. Charles Dickens is often referred to as an author who was concerned with living and working conditions in the city, Jane Austen, in contrast often shows us social life away from the city. A starting point to compare the type of fictional worlds that these two authors write about is a ‘key comparison’. 

Activity 10.1 Keywords comparing Austen and Dickens :- 

1. Go to the keywords tab either directly here (http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concordance) or by selecting the “Keywords” box on the right side of CLiC. 

2. Select all of Austen’s novels as “Target corpora” (you will have to enter each one separately from the scroll-down list; if you start typing “Aus” into the Target box, then Austen’s novels will be collected at the top, which will save a bit of time). And select all Dickens’s novels as “Reference corpora” (easily done by selecting “DNov”). 

3. Select “All text” from the option box “...within subset” and keep the default settings (which will give you words as 1-gram, and so on), as follows. 

4. This will give you a list of keywords for Austen (in comparison with Dickens) down the left hand side, ordered by their degree of difference from the Dickens corpus. 

5. To find the keywords in Dickens, compared with Austen, simply reverse the choices you entered in the “Target” and “Reference corpora”. 

6. Compare the two keyword lists and try to find words that seem relevant to setting and atmosphere.

And here is what I have received :- 

So in this activity we come to know about the words and it's frequency. How many times they have been used. We also compare them with other works also. 

So all the data gives us very little information which is useful to analyse any text. The other important benefit of this activity is we get any information second with the use of digital humanities. Traditional humanities are very time consuming. But digital humanities take only a few seconds to find the data.