Defining digital scholarship in the humanities: Ten-fingered humanists?

“Digital scholarship” seems to have become a new buzzword in academia. The term is invoked by those advocating for open access to scholarly knowledge (e.g. Charles Bailey’s Digital Scholarship) as well as those promoting innovative research methodologies. Universities, libraries, and funding organizations are beginning to recognize the need to support digital scholarship. Witness:

The [...]

Woman vs. machine? Analyzing texts…

Since it took me five years before I could steel myself to look at my dissertation again, I had forgotten some of the main points that I made in it. To uncover key terms in Chapter 1, which explores the popular literature of bachelorhood in 19th century America, I decided to use text analysis [...]

Why blog?

Now it’s time to blog about… blogging. It’s a popular topic in blogs, mentioned between 1000 and 6000ish times per day in blogs indexed by Technorati.
English posts that contain Blogging per day for the last 30 days:

But how many blogs are actually read? According to Derek Gordon, Technorati’s vice president for marketing, over 99% [...]

Doing Digital Scholarship

Here is a description of my research project, which I submitted as a paper proposal for Digital Humanities 2008:
Doing Digital Scholarship

When I completed my dissertation Bachelors of Arts: Bachelorhood and the Construction of Literary Identity in Antebellum America in 2002, I figured that I was ahead of most of my peers in my use of [...]

Yikes! Hooray! Information Overload and Wright American Fiction

Following the publication of Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor in 1850, Americans became entranced by the sentimental bachelor. When I investigated the bachelor in 19th C American fiction in the late 1990s, I relied on Lyle Wright’s extensive bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. Since it would have been way too labor intensive for [...]

Collaboration Tools: Scary or Revelatory?

Words like community bring out the warm fuzzies in me, until I start to think about the complexities of actually working in a community and negotiating among different perspectives. I’m wondering what scholarship might mean in an intensely collaborative and social Web 2.0 environment, so I began by trying to wikify my research project [...]

Welcome to Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

As someone with a strong interest in the digital humanities, I’ve been excited by recent reports calling for more support for digital scholarship, such as the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report. At the same time, I’m aware that digital tools such as text analysis software have not yet been widely adopted by humanities scholars. I [...]