About

Howdy, I’m Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library. (Although I’m not planning to say anything wildly controversial, I should note that I speak for myself and no one else.) I hope that the title “Digital Scholarship in the Humanities” doesn’t seem too pretentious–it seemed like the best summary of what I’m hoping to consider in this blog. I plan to explore how digital resources and tools are affecting scholarship in the humanities and consider the potential for digital scholarship. I’ll look at tools and methods, reporting on the ongoing conversation about digital scholarship as well as my own efforts to transform my dissertation on nineteenth-century American bachelorhood from a fairly conventional print-based work to a piece of digital scholarship that makes use of digital tools and resources. Along the way, I’ll consider questions like:

• What kind of resources do I find by relying on databases and search tools? What kind of searches work best? What hasn’t yet been digitized or is difficult to find?
• Does tagging help me to organize and share my research?
• What new insights come out of using text analysis and text visualization tools? What’s hard about using these tools?
• How do you make available not only research conclusions, but also the detailed research process that undergirds these conclusions–the successful and unsuccessful searches, the queries run in text analysis software, the insights offered by colleagues and commentators?
• How will all of this information be preserved for the long-term?
• What effect will making the research practice transparent have on the way that research is conducted, and what kind of scholarly community will come out of this work?

I invite other folks to participate in this effort by adding comments to my research project, Bachelors of Arts. I’m using the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress to enable readers to make detailed comments. Feel free to send me an email at lspiro@rice.edu.

Links:

• DiRT: Digital Research Tools wiki
• Lisa’s research portal
• Bachelors of Arts 2.0 (Masters of Art?): Comment on work in progress
• “Smoke, Flame, and Ashes”: A “Reverie” from Ik Marvel’s (Donald Grant Mitchell) Reveries of a Bachelor (1850)–An Electronic Critical Edition
• Delicious bookmarks on Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
• The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research, a study of American literature scholars and their use of digital resources