Digital Humanities

Digital humanities is a broad term that encompasses multiple disciplines within the humanities, including history, art history, African and African American studies, women and gender studies, English language and literature, writing and rhetoric, and more. At the most basic level, digital humanities simply refers to the use of digital tools and methods to further scholarship. At its more complex, digital humanities involves re-imagining the way we approach sources and data, research, narrative, and the publication and interpretation of scholarship.

DiSC and GMU University Libraries support digital humanities research and scholarship in a variety of ways:

  • access to and support for digital humanities tools such as Voyant, Google Ngram Viewer, StoryMapJS, TimelineJSPalladio, and Gephi
  • support for Omeka S and Omeka Classic users
  • workshops and tutorials on digital humanities platforms, software, and skills, including how to legally and ethically text data mine
  • access to content from selected full text primary source databases in a form that can be data mined
  • access to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software such as ABBYY FineReader
  • access to flatbed and document scanners, and to a document camera

Resources for the Digital Humanities:

Data Visualization
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/data-visualization

Digital Humanities
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/digitalhumanities

Learn R
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/learn_r

Network Analysis
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/networkanalysis

Omeka Classic
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/omekaclassic

Software for Digital Scholarship
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/software

Text & Data Mining Sources
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/text-mining

Text Analysis Tools
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/textanalysistools

Tropy
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/tropy

Working with Data
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/data-work

Local Digital Humanities Projects:

Anthologies of African American Writing
Alok Yadav, GMU Department of English
https://silverbox.gmu.edu/dscff/s/aaaw/page/About

Appalachian Trail Histories
Mills Kelly and his students, GMU Department of History and Art History 
http://appalachiantrailhistory.org

Elizabeth Fairfax Cookbook
GMU University Libraries’ Arts & Humanities Team 
Launching soon, this project will include an Omeka site with recipe transcriptions and images, background context, and data visualizations.

Digital Humanities at GMU:

Graduate certificate in digital public humanities
https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/programs/la-cerg-dph/overview

Undergraduate minor in digital humanities
https://catalog.gmu.edu/colleges-schools/humanities-social-sciences/history-art/digital-humanities-minor/#overviewtext

Digital humanities-based coursed offerings
https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/about/new-media

Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media
https://rrchnm.org/

Contact:

Alyssa Fahringer, Digital Scholarship Consultant