Sustaining the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Ithaka S+R is a strategic consulting and research service provided by ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. Ithaka S+R focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing our community and acting as a catalyst for change. JSTOR, a research and learning platform, and Portico, a digital preservation service, are also part of ITHAKA.

“A greatly unexplored area”: Digital curation and innovation in digital humanities

“…But collaboration remains challenging in digital humanities and digital curation alike (Abbott, ; Alexogiannopoulos et al, ; Benardou et al, ; Maron & Pickle, ; McCarty, ; Molloy, ; Waters, ). It depends on achieving common understandings of language and terminology, methods and research styles, and theories, outputs, and values (Siemens et al, ).…”

Place matters: Thinking about spaces for humanities practices

“…There are a few contributions that constitute a reflection on the humanities infrastructure and place in the context of the academic organization (Fraistat, 2012;Maron and Pickle, 2014;Nowviskie, 2012), library spaces (Hartsell-Gundy et al, 2015;Kavanagh Webb, 2018;Wilson, 2020), and socio-material conditions (Foka et al, 2018;Pawlicka-Deger, 2020;Smithies, 2017;Svensson, 2018). In 2018, a group of scholars formed the Critical Infrastructure Studies initiative (CIStudies, n.d.), which aims to develop this nascent field that uses infrastructure as a critical lens for analysing socio-cultural concerns (Liu, 2018).…”

Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research

“…As Nancy Maron and Sarah Pickle argue, DH is in an ideal position to demonstrate its impact. 71 DH resources are attractive and accessible to the public in a way that a dataset of scientific data simply cannot be. Not only have we built our resources so that they can be shared, but we can demonstrate that the public has been doing so, and indeed contributing to the content and intellectual endeavour of some digital projects.…”

“…Again, models exist in the sciences and at the edges of the humanities, where in archaeology or, indeed, the biosciences, a discovery may be recorded and made public with only a short observation or note to contextualise it. This should be possible in disciplines such as literature and history as well, not to mention formats such as those developed by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe, 71 or the CENDARI project's Archival Research Guide's 72 gesture toward how this sort of exchange might occur. This kind of 'light-touch' format is valuable not only for its flexibility and potential technical integration (for example, via services to uplift and expose significant named entities within and across works, thereby enhancing visibility in a targeted way for research), but also for the visibility it can bring to less-established scholars, or para-academics in 'alt-ac' (alternative-academic) style roles, or to work that is not best presented in one of the traditional formats.…”

“…44 Surveys from the past five years 45 reveal a great deal of uncertainty in the arts and humanities researchers' conception of data and its academia 13, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 38, 42, 84, 85, 91, 107, 147, 148, 179, 185, 191, 238, 253, 255, 258. See also alternative-academic (alt-ac) career Academia.edu 32, 36, 186, 202, 195,196,199 AnthroProject 238 Antonijević,Smiljana 5,132 Amongst Digital Humanists 5 archiving 12,26,27,37,40,41,42,66,71,74,92,240,243,244,246,250,256,257 3, 16, 26, 30, 33, 34, 43, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 74, 83, 139, 149, 165, 211, 252 authority 4, 6, 9, 11, 22, 39, 41, 42, 51, 64, 66, 68, 73, 105, 111, 115, 116, 117, 145 authorship 13, 27, 35, 36, 110, 116, 137 . ' 15,40,123,124,127,128,131,143,150,153,215 Blackwell's 178,184 Blake Archive 87 blog,blogging 2,4,9,10,15,…”