All Is True

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

I recently wrote about steering academic opinion away from the journal article as “the” form of scholarship.  In sum:

“We need to convince scholars that the quality of their work should be judged not by whether a few editors decide if it is worth publishing in a particular journal—but rather by the extent and quality of its use by the scholarly community once it is published”. [1]

Since then, I have begun to think about what non-article-based scholarship looks like and, at least preliminarily, I would argue that scholarship exists in two forms; there is the published/polished work and the information/data that fuels it.  Traditionally in the Humanities, the two are only tentatively linked by footnotes, bibliographies, maybe the inclusion of an image, etc.  Unlike the Sciences, the Humanities are not really prepossessed with making their “data” public, at least in more ways than those previously listed.  Some might say that this is because the Humanities are trying to “argue” their answer to become truth whereas the Sciences must prove that their answer is correct.  This might be true to a degree but I think it is more an issue of the kinds of data that these two fields have historically worked with, i.e. the humanities is more qualitative and the sciences are more quantitative.

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This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

I have been working with Professor William Bowen on an initiative to create a Digital Humanities Research Centre on the University of Toronto Scarborough‘s (UTSC) campus, much like the HRC on the University of York’s campus.  While the concept of such a centre is very nascent at UTSC, many of the faculty and staff I have talked to seem to share an idea of this centre ultimately being a repository for all of the digital work going on at UTSC whether that means a collection of data points or contacts for various digital tasks.  Due to this, I have been researching a lot about digital humanities centres, including their various functions, ideologies, and output, and I have found that a lot of scholarly writings directly address this idea of a Humanities Research Centre as a digital archive.

The idea of an DHRC and its role as a central archive is complicated, in part because its nature as a digital archive.  Bill Bowen was recently at a conference in Cuba that examined the nature of digital artifacts and their place in digital records/cyberinfrastructure.  When Bill came back, he mentioned that it was very interesting to be at a conference talking about digital technologies when he could use so few of them there.  This got me thinking about digital technology and its innate intangibility.  For instance, what does the complicated structure and high level of organization of a digital database matter if you cannot even access a computer?

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This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

I have been working with Professor William Bowen on an initiative to create a Digital Humanities Research Centre (DHRC) on the University of Toronto Scarborough‘s (UTSC) campus, much like the HRC on the University of York’s campus.  While the concept of such a centre is very nascent at UTSC, many of the faculty and staff I have talked to seem to share an idea of this centre ultimately being a repository for all of the digital work going on at UTSC whether that means a collection of data points or contacts for various digital tasks.  Due to this, I have been researching a lot about digital humanities centres, including their various functions, ideologies, and output, and I have found that a lot of scholarly writings directly address this idea of a Humanities Research Centre as a digital archive.

The idea of an DHRC and its role as an archival centre is complicated, in part because it is difficult to pin down exactly what the HRC should do.  Interested faculty and staff are often just beginning working with the Digital Humanities (DH) and they often are unsure of where to start or who to go to in order to discuss their interests.  As Orville Burton notes, “the web has moved so quickly from having a few sites to being saturated, that guides are needed on how to evaluate sites on the web and where to find history projects and archives” (Burton 209).[1] Coincidentally  the library often does not have the resources to support staff and their research projects so a physical centre is needed to address this.  However, such a communal space does not ensure a functioning digital research community.

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