Topics and Areas of Specialization

Black Digital Humanities is “an approach to community, methodology, praxis, and theory in digital humanities that centers black thought and cultural production” (The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook). Black Digital Humanities is a field of study at the intersection of black studies and digital humanities, combining two complex interdisciplinary areas of scholarship and methodology. Examples of Black Digital Humanities projects and initiatives include the Black Gotham Archive, , Black Girls Code, and The Mis-Adventures of the Awkward Black Girl.

More Information can be found at the following resources:

• Black Code Studies special issue of the Black Scholar edited by Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal.
• Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources: A List

Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on the computational modeling of any natural (human) language. The field of study is also interested in applying computational approaches to answer linguistic questions. Computational linguistics is practiced by computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and a variety of other scholars.

More information can be found in these sources:

• The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing(2013) edited by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox, Shalom Lappin.
• The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics(2004) edited by Ruslan Mitkov.

Digital Art History is the use of digital technologies by art historians to further the study of art history. Using digital methods, scholars can process large volumes of digitized images of works of art.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• The Getty Foundation Digital Art History.
• International Journal for Digital Art History.

Digital Humanities Feminism is a community of scholars focused on increasing the role of women and feminists in technology and the digital humanities. Digital Humanities Feminism is also interested in the study of technology with a feminist lens.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018). Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, Editors.
• Women in the digital humanities started by Jacqueline Wernimont.
• All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave Moya Z. Bailey, Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (Winter 2011).

Digital Pedagogy is the use of digital technologies for both teaching and learning. Digital pedagogy can encompass online teaching, online full lesson plans, web annotated primary sources, and using technology for assignments such as having students create a blog post, video recording, or audio podcast instead of a traditional paper or exam.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
• Global Resources: MOOCs/Online courses
• CMU Eberly Center Technology for Education
• Wikipedia Digital Pedagogy
• Hybrid Pedagogy. An open-access journal of learning, teaching, and technology

Digital Public History is the use of digital media to advance historical research. This field of study is primarily concerned with engaging online audiences with historical content. Examples of digital history scholarly outputs include: oral histories, digital archives, digital exhibits, 3D modeling of historical buildings, and interactive maps and timelines.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• The Historian’s Macroscope (2015) by Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott B. Weingart
• The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook | Digital History (2019) by Sheila Brennan. 

Distant Reading is the application of computational methods to literary data, often derived from digital libraries to study literary theory. In contrast to the term, "close reading" (the careful reading of passages of text in literary studies), distant reading studies the literary themes from a computational lens, using stylometry and text and data mining methods. See also Text Analysis and Stylometry in this glossary for more information.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (2019) Ted Underwood.
• Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (2013) Matthew Jockers.
• Conjectures on World Literature (2000) Franco Moretti.
• A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018). Katherine Bode.

Global Digital Humanities is an effort “focused on making space for communities orthogonal to global power structures” (The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook). The effort brings together the excellent digital humanities work of researchers and institutions from all geographic regions and economic backgrounds.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Global Outlook::Digital Humanities
• Around DH in 80 days
• MSU Global DH

Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) is the application of mapping software and geographic data to historical and spatial analysis. See Falvey’s GIS Subject Guide for more information on Geographic Information Systems

More information can be found at the following sources:

• H-net HIGS
• Historical Geography and GIS SSHA
• Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008) Edited by Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier.
• Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (2007) Ian Gregory and Paul Ell.
• The Routledge Companion to Spatial History (2018) Edited by Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, and Don Lanfreniere.

Network Analysis uses graph theory to study relations among actors in order to analyze the social structures that emerge from those relations. Two examples of network analysis projects in the digital humanities include: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and the Carolingian Networks

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Network Analysis Literacy: A Practical Approach to the Analysis of Networks (2016) Katharina A. Zweig.
• The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis edited by John Scott and Peter Carrington.

• The Programming Historian Network Analysis Lessons

Oral History is the practice of collecting oral testimonials about individuals on either audio or video through the process of interviews. Oral history is often conducted in the field of Digital Public History.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Doing Oral History (3rd Edition, 2015) Donald A. Ritchie.
• Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement (2014) Douglas A. Boyd

Stylometry is the quantitative study of literary style through text analysis (See also Text Analysis and Distant Reading) methods and distant reading. It is based on the observation that authors tend to write in relatively consistent, recognizable and unique ways.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• The Programming Historian Introduction to stylometry with Python
• Stylometry: A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship, Textual Intergrity, and Chronology(1988) Holly Franking.

Text Analysis or text and data mining aims to extract machine-readable information from unstructured text in order to enable data-driven approaches towards managing content. Text Analysis often relies on natural language processing (NLP), a field that explores the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Some examples of text analysis includes named entity recognition, topic modeling, stylometry, distant reading, or sentiment analysis (See also Stylometry and Distant Reading in the glossary).

More information can be found at the following resources:

• Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach (2017) Julia Silge and David Robinson.
• Text Analytics with Python: A Practical Real-World Approach to Gaining Actionable Insights from your Data (2016) Dipanjan Sarkar.
• Text Mining and Analysis: Practical Methods, Examples, and Case Studies (2013) Goutam Chakraborty, Murali Pagolu, and Satish Garla.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a community of practice that defines a specific branch of eXtensible Markup Language (XML). A markup language is a text processing system that annotates documents in ways that are both human and machine readable. Both XML and TEI support numerous languages through Unicode. The goal of TEI is to maintain a standard for representing digital editions in order to further their study by scholars from a variety of fields such as literary studies, history, and linguistics.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Text Encoding Initiative
• What is the Text Encoding Initiative?: How to add intelligent markup to digital resources (2014) Lou Burnard.
• XML in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (3rd Edition, 2004) Elliottee Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means.
• Learning XML: Creating Self-Describing Data (2nd Edition, 2003) Erik T. Ray.
• The Programming Historian Transforming Data for Reuse and Re-publication with XML and XSL.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer simulation that attempts to construct an imagined world, or reconstruct a physical world. VR has additional siblings, including Augmented Reality (AR) (in which a real world situation is enhanced by computer-generated information) and mixed reality (in which artificial things are displayed in the real world). VR includes 3D modeling of objects and environments.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do (2018) Jeremy Bailenson.
• Learning Virtual Reality: Developing Immersive Experiences and Applications for Desktop, Web, and Mobile (2015) Tony Parisi.
• Tinkercard, a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding
• Sketchfab: 3D Assets
• Mozilla Hubs: Create and share virtual rooms in Mozilla Hubs
• Blender, a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
• Unity, a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies. The engine can be used to create three-dimensional, two-dimensional, virtual reality, and augmented reality games, as well as simulations and other experiences
• A-Frame is an open-source web framework for building virtual reality experiences. It is maintained by developers from Supermedium and Google. A-Frame is an entity component system framework for Three.js where developers can create 3D and WebVR scenes using HTML and CSS.

Web Archiving is the act of creating an archive of information stored on the World Wide Web. Web archives frequently automatically access and download full copies of publicly accessible websites through the process of web crawling. The idea is to preserve information stored on the web for research purposes.

More information can be found in these sources:

• The Internet Archive.
• The Wayback Machine.
• Web Archives for Historical Research Group
• SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018). eds. Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan.