Killer Applications in Digital Humanities

Abstract

The emerging discipline of "digital humanities" has been plagued by a perceived neglect on the part of the broader humanities community. The community as a whole tends not to be aware of the tools developed by DH practitioners (as documented by the recent surveys by Siemens et al.), and tends not to take seriously many of the results of scholarship obtained by DH methods and tools. This paper argues for a focus on deliverable results in the form of useful solutions to common problems that humanities scholars share, instead of simply new representations.The question to address is what needs the humanities community has that can be dealt with using DH tools and techniques, or equivalently what incentive humanists have to take up and to use new methods. This can be treated in some respects like the computational quest for the "killer application" -a need of the user group that can be filled, and by filling it, create an acceptance of that tool and the supporting methods/results. Some definitions and examples are provided both to illustrate the idea and to support why this is necessary. The apparent alternative is the status quo, where digital research tools are brilliantly developed, only to languish in neglect and disuse.

Annotating for the world: Attitudes toward sharing scholarly annotations

“…In the humanities, “a straw poll showed that half of [the discussants at the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities Summit 2006] wanted to build this kind of tool, and all wanted to use it” (Juola, , p. 80). Despite this expressed desire to have annotation capabilities, most scholars do not use digital annotation systems currently (Juola, ). Humanities sites, such as the Online Chopin Variorum Edition, have not had success in attracting end users to participate and contribute annotations (Bradley & Vetch, ).…”

"Songs of Innocence and of Experience": Amateur Users and Digital Texts

“…meeting in 2005. Juola (2006) also decried this lack of user studies, identifying a "mismatch of expectations between the expected needs of audience (market) for the tools and the community's actual needs" as a likely source of much unrealized potential with digital texts (p. 5). NINCH similarly found that digital texts are often erroneously designed around assumptions about user's needs based on "existing usage of analog resources" (2003).…”

Muslims and the New Information and Communication Technologies

“…They do remain approaches that appear to have had limited impact thus far, however, and there is no evidence of a change in the way in which most individuals deal with the actual text itself. 27 Some of these themes of digital humanities are developed in Juoal 2008 . The question of how the Muslim world makes use of the information and communication technologies to religious ends, and what impact that has on Muslim modes of religious practice through these processes of production and consumption is well illustrated by the Qur'ān on the Internet. As may be seen in so many other sites that allow access to the Qur'ān, in many cases nothing has changed in terms of the approach to textual study and analysis from when texts were available solely as printed books or manuscripts.…”