ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This is a guest blogpost on the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) website of TAMU, written by Dr. Jacob heil, a post-doctoral researcher for the IDHMC. He writes in an attempt to express the early modernist's perspective of DH. He starts by discussing the issue of definition ("in" or "out"), His opinion is that, "To my mind, I'm not 'in' or 'out' of DH; I'm just doing my work." He embraces the popular ethos of collaboration and a dedication to open-access, though he admits they might be ideals. He argues that reasearch should become resource, speaking of the way in which teachers share their research.

THATCamp stands for "The Humanities and Technology Camp." Its creators refer to it as an "unconference." They do this to distinguish themselves from typical humanities conferences, in which the reading of papers and overly-thick academia lessens the helpfulness and practicality of it all. The website gives a number of bullets describing the idea: THATCamp is "collaborative, informal, spontaneous, timely, productive, lightweight, inexpensive to organize, not-for-profit, small, non-hierarchical, non-disciplinary, inter-professional, open, online, fun, and engaging. It expresses its desire to not only attract scholars, but people with a broad diversity of backgrounds and skills.

centerNet defines itself as an "International Network of Digital Humanities Centers." It has added over 200 members from about 100 centers in 19 countries since its foundation in 2007. Basically, they're attempting to centralize all of Digital Humanities into a single vast network. They aim to be inclusive and avoid defining digital humanities concretely. Instead, they only suggest that "a "center" should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence." The projects can be found by a keyword search, by region, or by clicking on an interactive GoogleMap. The network isn't as flooded as you think; only 200 entries exist on the site as of today, but each one is of very high quality.

Another early announcement of the HathiTrust's Orphan Works initiative, this article discusses the pros and cons of the project, and the potential changes that it may bring. The author speculates on possible benefits while pointing to the important decisions that will have to be made regarding copyrights.

This statement from the Authors Guild explains their disagreement with the ruling in favor of the HathiTrust Digital Library. Accusing the project of carelessness in searching for the copyright-holders of "orphan works," the article expresses disappointment in the lack of action taken by the courts.

This article is an early announcement of the Authors Guild's lawsuit against the HathiTrust Digital Library. It explains the accusations of copyright infringement from the Authors Guild, who seek the complete halt of the HathiTrust's reproduction and distribution of digitized works, not limited to the Orphan Works project.

The author explores a potential new solution to peer review in the the work of scientific journal publisher Elsevier. The director of this project argues that it encourages quality reviews while acknowledging the reviewer's contribution by allowing them to choose whether or not to remain anonymous.

This article helps to give a general overview of the current state of fair use, specifically with regards to the HathiTrust project. The author is hopeful, giving the project's Orphan Works undertaking more credit than the Authors Guild. He argues that the meticulous nature of the work being done is promising, and may lead to solutions to the many and various problems raised by the public domain.

This article presents the Orphan Works project near its inception. It identifies the nature of the problem to be the sheer size of the project's scope, which claims about 73% of the HathiTrust's collection to be eligible for fair use as soon as they are proven to be orphan works.

This program is used by the HathiTrust Digital Library to seek out "orphan works" that have no apparent benefactors, and make them available to the general public. This project's noble purposes have been called into question by organizations like the Authors Guild, who argue that it often fails to find those who are due compensation.

This article gives a brief overview of the environment surrounding the HathiTrust litigation, and gives some added insight to the cases in which Google has been involved. It specifically notes Google's exclusion from the Orphan Works project, citing Judge Denny Chin's assertion that private parties should not be allowed to "establish a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books.

Matthew Ingram discusses the recent ruling on the Author's Guild's copyright infringement lawsuit. The author points out the decisive nature of the ruling, and goes on to explain the reasons that the project clearly falls under the protection of fair use. He argues that this ruling follows the intent of copyright law, to promote research and knowledge.

This overview of copyright law and the application of fair use discusses the deciding factors as they apply to different types of copyrighted work.

Ostracology is a Tumblr for the course "Fragments of a Material History of Literature," taught by professor Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles of metaLAB at Harvard. It illustrates a way in which educators can utilize digital tools to better engage and challenge students. The instructors post lessons in blog-form for students to read, leave comments, and discuss. Also included are random class-related musings, invitations to events, and neat online finds.

Exquisite Corpora is a Tumblr page created by the Harvard metaLAB. The participants are to be in teams of three and craft a detailed abstract for a proposal to a scholarly press based on the genre, platform, and audience cards that they received at the metaLAB grad school. Each one Includes one piece of media (an image, audio file, video, interactive piece, etc.) that illustrates their concept. They have 45 minutes to research, discuss, and compose their proposals before they upload it to the Tumblr. These are similar to the lightning talks we discussed in class.

metaLAB is a research and teaching unit at Harvard University dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities. They're part of the Graduate School of Design and work in Cambridge. It is defined as "a community of scholars, artists, designers, journalists, technologists, architects, and students engaged in team-based experiments that merge research, teaching, publication, social action, and the use and development of digital tools."