The field, or practice, of digital humanities is rapidly changing, and as change comes faster and faster it can be hard to keep up with what you should know. Fortunately, there are many digital tools and resources that can help you keep abreast of things.
Subscribing to blogs
Many blogs and websites can send new content to you if you subscribe. Subscribing is easy if you have a Google account, which we all have now through NYU.
- Go to the homepage of the blog or site you want to subscribe to. Here let’s use Dan Cohen’s blog at http://www.dancohen.org/.
- Look for the RSS feel symbol–
. Some sites will have a number of different ways that you can subscribe, using other social media sites like twitter, facebook, stumbleupon and others. - Click on the RSS feed. You will have a choice of seeing the blog posts through Google Reader or Google Homepage. Use whichever you prefer. I use Google Reader.
- Open Google Reader and you will see the latest postings from the blogs and sites that you have subscribed to. You can access this as often as you like, every day, once a week, or less frequently.
- Google Reader also has a tool that you can move to your browser’s toolbar to make it easy to subscribe to websites.
- You can also subscribe to a canned blog search that will gather articles that contain your search phrase.
Blogs and discussion lists
- Humanist Discussion Group http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/ (this one is an e-mail discussion list)
- Digital Humanities Now [http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/] (If you only subscribe to one, this is the one, it gives a compilation of what’s going on.)
- ProHacker (Chronicle of Higher Education’s technology blog) http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/
- Lisa Spiro’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/
- Dan Cohen’s blog http://www.dancohen.org/
- Craig Bellamy’s blog http://www.craigbellamy.net/
- Digitization 101 blog http://networkedblogs.com/6POEh
- Spellbound Blog http://www.spellboundblog.com/
- The Secret Mirror http://thesecretmirror.com/about on archives, libraries and information technology.
- Thomas Crombez’s Doing Digital History http://doingdigitalhistory.wordpress.com/
- ArchivesNext, Web. 2.0 for archivists http://www.archivesnext.com/
- AudioVisual Preservation Solutions’ Blog http://www.avpreserve.com/avpsresources/blog/
- British Library Manuscripts Digitization Blog http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/
- New England Digital Humanists Blog http://dhnewengland.wordpress.com/
- Digital Events and Conversation (Southern California) http://dhsocal.blogspot.com/
- Digital Humanities Now http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/
- National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities http://www.neh.gov/odh
- The HUMlab Blog [http://blog.humlab.umu.se/]
- Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities blog [http://mith.umd.edu/blog/]
- Blog of the Hyperstudio at Massachusetts Institute for Technology [http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/blog/]
- Scholarly Kitchen [http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/]
- Melissa Terras’ blog [http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/]
- The Mind Tool: Edward VanHoutte [http://edwardvanhoutte.blogspot.com/]
- Matthew K. Gold [http://mkgold.net/blog/]
Also a defunct blog, Digital History Hacks, has a useful list of Digital history blogs http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2006/06/roundup-of-digital-history-blogs.html]
If you are more inclined to short and sweet updates, Twitter might be more to your liking. Most of the major digital humanities experts tweet about what they are doing and what they are interested in. If you are inclined, follow some of these feeds or look at #digitahistory and #digitalhumanities.
- Digital Humanities Now [http://twitter.com/dhnow]
- Dan Cohen [http://twitter.com/dancohen]
- Matthew K. Gold [https://twitter.com/mkgold]
- See a list of digital humanists on Twitter to explore
Getting Help
- Digital Humanities Questions and Answers (Association for Computers and the Humanities) [http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/] – a forum for posting questions and answers to questions on all aspects of digital humanities.
- DH Commons matches digital humanities projects seeking assistance with scholars interested in project collaboration. [http://dhcommons.org/about]
- That Camp – The Unconference for Digital Humanities [http://thatcamp.org/]
Organizations
- NYU Digital Humanities group [https://wikis.nyu.edu/display/nyudh/NYU+Digital+Humanities+Home]
- Association for Computers and the Humanities http://www.ach.org/
- Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing http://www.allc.org/
- Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations http://digitalhumanities.org/
Online Journals
- DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
- D-Lib Magazine (focused on library issues) http://www.dlib.org/
- Journal of the Association for History and Computing http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jahc/
- Journal of Digital Information http://journals.tdl.org/jodi
- Journal of Electronic Publishing http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/
- Scholarly Editing http://scholarlyediting.org/
- AcademHack (Tech Tools for Academics) http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/
Metadata Standards
- A Glossary of Metadata Standards http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/seeingstandards_glossary_pamphlet.pdf
- Dublin Core Metadata http://dublincore.org
- Guide to using Dublin Core http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/
- Encoded Archival Description http://www.loc.gov/ead
- Guide to using EAD http://www.loc.gov/ead/ag/aghome.html
- Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) http://loc.gov/standards/mets
- MODS Metadata Object Description Schema (Library of Congress) http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-overview.html
- Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines http://www.tei-c.org
- Guide to using TEI P5 http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/
Digital Humanities Centers
These centers run workshops and other courses, host digital projects, and are good to be familiar with.
- Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities-MITH (University of Maryland), http://mith.umd.edu/
- Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities -IATH (University of Virginia) http://www.iath.virginia.edu/
- Center for Research in the Digital Humanities – CDRH (University of Nebraska) http://cdrh.unl.edu/
- Center for History and New Media – CHNM (George Mason University) http://chnm.gmu.edu/