Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The advance of digital technologies has added a variety of methods and possibilities to the humanities research and communication toolbox, from digital edition- and archive-making to computational and spatial research, to blogging and collaborative publication. This webpage is designed to broadly introduce digital forms of work in the humanities and resources for undertaking such projects at the University of Florida.

UF Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG)

All UF faculty, staff, and graduate students are invited to join the DHWG, a group of scholars who meet to monthly to discuss current topics and projects in the digital humanities.  The DHWG is co-convened by Sophia K. Acord (Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere), Laurie Taylor (George A. Smathers Libraries), and Dhanashree Thorat (Dept. of English). The DHWG also works to plan the annual Digital  Humanities Day, which is held in April on the first reading day of the spring semester. To view membership, meeting agendas, Digital Humanities Day proceedings, and other materials, please see the Digital Humanities collection and archive.

To stay informed about DHWG meetings and digital humanities work at UF, subscribe to  the Digital-Humanities-L listserv (opens in new tab).

DHWG members are also encouraged to attend the annual THATCamp Florida, organized by the University of Central Florida each spring.

Funding Opportunities in the Digital Humanities

View the list of faculty and graduate student funding opportunities for supporting digital humanities projects.

UF Resources and Collaborators for Digital Projects

Digital humanities projects are frequently collaborative in nature, often involving a team of subject specialists (from humanities disciplines) together with  faculty and staff from the information, computer, and library sciences. Graduate and undergraduate students in the humanities discipline (who may have specific training in digital tools and applications) can play important mediating roles in these projects while also cultivating research and career skills. As described below, there are a variety of UF faculty and facilities interested in such collaborative endeavors. Details on student training opportunities and certificate programs are included where available.

• A first stop for all faculty considering digital projects should be a consultation with Dr. Laurie Taylor, the UF Digital Humanities Librarian.
• Center for Instructional Technology & Training (opens in new tab) – Provides collaborative assistance with digital teaching and learning projects, including online courses, Web development, and pedagogical techniques.
• Department of  Computer & Information Science & Engineering – Interest in faculty/student collaborations in many project areas across the humanities.
• Digital Library Center (DLC) – Collaboration in digitization, edition- and exhibition-making, user-interface design, dissemination, preservation (both physical and digital), learning object design, or web production (e.g., web-based tutorials). Humanities students can also do internships in the DLC to support faculty projects.
• Digital Worlds Institute – Interest in faculty collaborations in many areas including 3D modeling (e.g., of spaces, artifacts), game design, and interactive storytelling. Also offer a 12-credit certificate in Digital Arts and Sciences for undergraduate and graduate students.
• Center for Advanced Construction Information Modeling (DCP) (opens in new tab) – Interest in faculty collaborations to build virtual 3D models and visualizations of physical sites, virtual collaboration and team-building, and the sustainability of virtual models.
• GIS Spatial Information Service Unit – The GIS Librarian is available to consult with faculty, staff and students on all aspects of spatially referenced data and GIS software, including Google Earth. Large format plotting services are available for U.S. Government electronic maps and images, and archival maps in the Map and Imagery Library can be georeferenced for historical analysis. Students can also obtain a 15-credit interdisciplinary certificate in Geographic Information Systems.
• High Performance Computing (HPC) Center – A UF-supported resource that enables faculty to carry out data-intensive research involving, for example, large corpora of data, texts, or images.
• Center for Media Innovation and Research, College of Journalism & Communications – Digital lab facilities for building and examining social interaction in online media environments.

Online Communities and Resources in the Digital Humanities

Before reading below, we advise browsing the guide to Getting Started in the Digital Humanities by Lisa Spiro, director of NITLE Labs (14 October 2011).

• Arts-Humanities.net – A UK hub for research and teaching in the digital arts and humanities that includes information on using digital tools and resources, and a library documenting lessons learned through case studies, briefing papers, and a bibliography.
• Digital Humanities Blog Carnival – A forum for showing, discussing, and developing some of the best work in the field of the digital humanities on a monthly basis. See, in particular, Lisa Spiro’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog and Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities blog (opens in new tab).
• Digital Humanities Now – A real-time, Twitter-based crowdsourced publication that takes the pulse of the digital humanities community.
• Digital Humanities Questions & Answers – A forum of the Association for Computers & the Humanities
• DH Curation Guide – A community resource guide to data curation in the digital humanities.
• Bamboo DiRT (opens in new tab) – A collection and registry of digital reseach tools in the humanities, organized by research task or application. (formerly Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT) (opens in new tab))
• Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) – A consortium of humanist, artists, social scientists, scientists, and engineers committed to new forms of collaboration across disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology.
• Humanist – An international online discussion group (listserv) on humanities computing and the digital humanities.
• Voice of the Shuttle – A database of information about how humanities disciplines are adapting to social, cultural, and technological changes.
• 4Humanities – A blog-based platform and resource for humanities advocacy.

Training and Workshops in the Digital Humanities

• Conferences for Digital Humanities, Digital Archives, Digital Libraries, and Digital Museums (opens in new tab)– An open Google calendar that lists meetings and events of interest across the digital humanities community.
• Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Summer School (opens in new tab) – An annual week-long conference in early July to introduce a range of digital research components to researchers, project managers, research assistants, or students working on any kind of project concerned with the creation or management of digital data for the humanities.
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute, hosted at the University of Victoria, has an excellent reputation and offers week-long workshops on topics such as text encoding, multimedia, Geographical Information Systems, project management, and digital pedagogy, taught by leaders in the field. Scholarships are available, and the ACH provides travel bursaries for graduate students.
• Lynda – UF subscribes to this software training website.
• Nebraska Digital Workshop (opens in new tab), sponsored by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), enables a select group of early career scholars to present their work to and get feedback from senior scholars.
• NEH Institutes  (opens in new tab)explore key topics in the digital humanities and often cover travel costs.  Graduate Students are particularly encouraged to attend.
• NINES Summer Workshop (opens in new tab) offers in-depth training to scholars in 19th C British and American literature
• THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) – Free regional “unconferences”  that include software demos, training sessions, and discussions of research findings of interest to scholars, teachers, and staff at libraries, museums, and cultural organizations. Fellowships are available.
• Women Writers Project (WWP), at Brown University, provides seminars and workshops, frequently on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Associations, Societies, and Centers in the Digital Humanities

• The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) – An umbrella organization whose goals are to promote, support, and recognize excellence in digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines; publishes the refereed Digital Humanities Quarterly.
• The American Association for History and Computing (AAHC) (opens in new tab) – Dedicated to the productive marriage of history and computer technology for teaching, researching and representing history; publishes the refereed  Journal of the American Association for History and Computing.
• Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing – Promotes the development and use of computational methods in research and teaching in the humanities with particular reference to literary and linguistic computing; publishes the refereed LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
• Association for Computers & the Humanities (opens in new tab) – The major professional society for the digital humanities, supporting computer-assisted research, teaching, and software/content development in humanistic disciplines.
• centerNet – An international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular.
• Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) – An independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
• DARIAH – An EU-based hub to enhance and support infrastructure for digitally-enabled research across the humanities and arts.
• Digital Classics Association (opens in new tab) – A working group to foster digital methods that can enhance our understanding of classical antiquity.
• The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia – An institute dedicated to exploring and developing information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research; IATH supports and presents unique research projects that bridge humanities and computer science research faculty, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.
• National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) – NITLE hosts an impressive impressed by digital humanities initiative and hosts a (free) online Digital Scholarship Seminar Series.
• The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), George Mason University– Since 1994, CHNM has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history, in particular through creating unique research tools and databases for teaching, learning, conducting and sharing scholarly research, and building online exhibits.
• Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPOR) – Based at McMaster University, Canada, a human and computing infrastructure for text analysis and the study of electronic texts.

Peer Review and Publication: Guidelines for Evaluating Alternative Scholarly Products

Recognized journals in the digital humanities include:

• Digital Humanities Quarterly
•  Literary and Linguistic Computing
• Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (opens in new tab)
• Journal of Digital Humanities
• The American Historical Review offers an annual Prize in Digital Historical Scholarship for the best born-digital short scholarly contribution.
• Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures (opens in new tab) publishes research in medieval studies made possible by the emergence of digital resources.

Some forms of digital humanities scholarship may not fit into established publication genres. Nonetheless, the significant scholarly investments in these products can be recognized and credited through appropriate forms of peer review as explored below:

• American Association for History and Computing (AAHC). 2000. “AAHC Suggested Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Media Activities in Tenure, Review, and Promotion – Draft Statement.” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 3 (3).
• Anderson, Deborah Lines, ed. 2003. Digital Scholarship in the Tenure, Promotion, and Review Process. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
• Bates, David, Janet Nelson, Charlotte Roueché, and Jane Winters. 2006. Peer Review and Evaluation of Digital Resources for the Arts and Humanities. Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ICT Strategy Project. London, UK: Institute of Historical Research, University of London, September.
• Mandell, L. 2012. Promotion and Tenure for Digital Scholarship (opens in new tab). An Open Letter to the Promotion and Tenure Committee at Texas A&M University, Department of English.
• MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. 2007. MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. New York, NY: Modern Language Association (MLA).
• Presner, T., et al. 2011. How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship. Working Paper from faculty at UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program.
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 2008. Promotion & Tenure Criteria for Assessing Digital Research in the Humanities. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
• University of Victoria. 1998. Guidelines for the Recognition of Computing in Humanities Scholarship. University of Victoria, May.
• Warwick, C., M. Terras, I. Galina, P. Huntington, and N. Eva Pappa. 2007. Evaluating Digital Humanities Resources: The LAIRAH Project Checklist and the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project (opens in new tab). In ELPUB2007. Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access – Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, ed. L. Chan and B. Martens, 297-306. Vienna, Austria: OEKK – Editions.

Digital Databases and Archives

The growing online availability of full-text primary and secondary sources creates new and different opportunities for working with archival sources. Below is a (by no means comprehensive) list of useful digital archives and databases in the humanities.

• • Text Creation Project (TCP) (opens in new tab)
  • Perseus Digital Library
  • LacusCurtius Greek and Roman Texts
  • The Latin Library
  • Internet Medieval Sourcebook
  •  Early English Books Online (EEBO)
  • Archive of Early American Images 
  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
  • GALLICA
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections
  • United States National Archives
  • World Digital Library
  • JSTOR (opens in new tab)
  • ARTstor
  • Wikisource
  • ACLS humanities ebook
  • The Field Book Project
  • EVIA Digital Archive for Ethnographic Video
  • Patrick Sahle’s Catalog of Scholarly Digital Editions (opens in new tab)

The readings below examine the construction, use, and impact of digital archives such as those listed above:

• Brogan, M., and D. Rentfrow. A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature, (opens in new tab) Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Digital Library Federation, 2005.
• Crane, Gregory, and Amy Friedlander. 2008. Many More than a Million: Building the Digital Environment for the Age of Abundance. (opens in new tab)Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), March 1.
• Henry, Charles, Lisa Spiro, Geneva Henry, Paul Courant, Matthew Nielsen, Kathlin Smith, and Roger C. Schonfeld. 2010. The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship (opens in new tab). Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), June.
• Proffitt, Merrilee, and Jennifer Schaffner. 2008. The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities. (opens in new tab) Dublin, OH: Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), July.
• Segal, Jane, Lisa Spiro, and Pamela Francis. 2007. The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research. Houston, TX: Rice University, May.

Recommended Reading: Projects and Bibliography in the Digital Humanities

In no particular order, the examples below provide some indication of the diversity of digital tools and products across the humanities.

• The application of geospatial analysis tools, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for reconstructing and studying the spatial dimensions of historic sites and movements gives life to projects including Aquae Urbis Romae (The Waters of the City of Rome, at UVA), Mapping the Republic of Letters at Stanford University,  ORBIS (The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World), activities at the Spatial History Project (at Stanford University), and the UCLA-based Hypercities Project.
  • 3D modeling technologies allow scholars to recreate ancient/historic structures and artifacts for closer study, as seen in Rome Reborn (UVA) and UF’s own Digital Epigraphy Toolbox (opens in new tab).
  • Large marked-up corpora of digital texts, images, and sounds, such as Early English Books Online (opens in new tab) and the Perseus Digital Library, enable scholars to use computational tools to ask and answer questions related to the evolution of  topics over time.
  • Innovative curated archives can be deployed to develop multimedia scholarly narratives, as seen in the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (UVA), Music in the Afghan North (by Mark Slobin, Wesleyan), or UF’s own Haiti: An Island Luminous.
  • Collaborative online scholarly editions blur the boundaries between edition-making, translation, and archives, such as The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Chopin’s First Editions Online, and the Electronic Enlightenment (Oxford).
  • Authoritative data repositories provide for the peer review and preservation of primary data in a variety of forms, including OpenContext for archaeological data (Alexandria Archive Institute) and the EVIA Digital Archive for ethnomusicological field video (IU).
  • New software tools can facilitate working with online sources, such as the free reference manager Zotero and online exhibitions development tool Omeka, both developed by the Center for History and New Media (GMU). Other software tools can construct virtual collaboration environments for the study of humanities texts and artifacts, such as TextGrid (opens in new tab).
  • Disciplinary hubs online can create a centralized space for sharing and reviewing primary and secondary sources, such as NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), or creating discussion in online communities (such as On the Human).
  • Crowdsourced initiatives that bridge Google Earth and digital resources to build libraries of knowledge, as in the Pleiades Project.
  • Public-oriented websites can provide a place to disseminate refereed scholarship and activities to a wider audience, as seen in the Far-flung Families in Film Project (Royal Holloway), or act as virtual resources for information on a particular place or culture (e.g., VICOS, Peru: A Virtual Tour, Cornell University).

The readings and reports below explore the impact of various digital tools and technologies on research and knowledge production in the humanities.

• • Bobe, K. Reading by the Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London, New York: Anthem Press, 2012.
  • Bobley, B. Why the Digital Humanities?  (opens in new tab)Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2008.
  • Crane, G. “What Do You Do with a Million Books?” D-Lib Magazine, 2009.
  • Drucker, J. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (opens in new tab). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  • Friedlander, A. Promoting Digital Scholarship: Formulating Research Challenges in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computation (A Workshop Co-Sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities by the Council on Library and Information Resources). Council on Library and Information Resources, 2008.
  • Frischer, B, J. Unsworth, A. Dwyer, A. Jones, L. Lancaster, G. Rockwell, and R. Rosenzweig. Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities: Report on Summit Accomplishments, 2005.
  • Gold, M.K. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
  • Gugerli, D. “The World as Database: On the Relation of Software Development, Query Methods, and Interpretative Independence.”Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47.3: 288-311, 2012.
  • Harley, D., S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, C.J. King, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, 2010.
  • Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come, University of Virginia, 2010.
  • O’Donnell, J. J. “Engaging the Humanities: The Digital Humanities.” (opens in new tab) Daedalus 138 (1): 99-104, 2009.
  • Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (opens in new tab), ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2006.
  • Reinvigorating the Humanities:  Enhancing Research and Education on Campus and Beyond (PDF), (opens in new tab) AAU Report.
  • Rumsey, A. Smith. Spatial Technologies and the Humanities,  (opens in new tab)Scholarly Communication Institute 7 (SCI7), 2009.
  • Schreibman, S., R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
  • Spiro, Lisa. 2009. Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. [blog] June 1.
  • Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (eds), Uiversity of Chicago Press, 2011.
  • The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing. Special issue of Culture Machine, edited by F. Frabetti, vol. 12, 2011.
  • Unsworth, J. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” (opens in new tab)Paper presented at the Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice, May 13, King’s College, London, 2000.
  • Unsworth, J.  “What is Humanities Computing & What is Not?” Forum Computerphilologie, 2002.
  • Waters, D. J. Archives, Edition-Making, and the Future of Scholarly Communication (opens in new tab). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Working Paper, 2009.
  • Waters, D. J. Digital Humanities and the Changing Ecology of Scholarly Communications. Opening Keynote: TELDAP International Conference 2012. Taipei, Taiway, 2012.
  • Williford, C., C. Henry, and A. Friedlander. One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (A report on the experiences of the first respondents to the digging into data challenge).  Washington, D.C.: Center for Library and Information Resources (CLIR), 2012.
  • Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship, Report of a Workshop Cosponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities, 2009.

The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere would be grateful for any information regarding additional links we should add to this section. Please email us with updates.