Serendipity35 - Digital Humanities

The Internet Is Not Forever

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:08:00 +0000

In an article by S.E. Smith on The Verge, the author says that "Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty."

A recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. Pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish. This happens with personal website and blogs but also with scientific journals and local news sites.

Yes, there are places like the wonderful Internet Archive that tries to preserve some sites and pages, but even that is incomplete if their archived version links to a dead page. I can find some archived versions of my own logs and websites in that archive but it is hardle complete. A complete archive would be an impossible task.

The article was titled What happens when the internet disappears? but the Internet itself is not disappearing, though significant prts of it are already gone.

During my time working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I had quite robust personal website. This blog actually was hosted there at the beginning. Thankfully, Tim and I moved Serendipity35 before both of us left the university. I was able to change links on my website to point to new locations of mine, but although for some reason my webspace still is online, I don't have privileges to change anything anymore. That means that things that are out of date or just plain wrong are still there - and people do find those pages.

A page I have there about some early experimenting I did with the crude chatbot ELIZA was found by a researcher writing about the chatbot's history, and a producer from BBC Radio found it and did an interview with me about it for a program. I wish I could update it, but that's not possible on that server.

Smith says in that article "Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives."

Books and letters crumble, artwork disintegrates and photography fades, and though we try to save the most important things, we don't know what will be important in the next century.

Digital Humanities - The Future

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 09:35:00 +0000

To finish this week of posts about digital humanities, I thought I should look to the future of DH. I have no more powers of prognostication than other people in education, and predicting trends that involve technology is particularly difficult -and often very inaccurate.

The future of digital humanities is likely to be shaped by at least three things: ongoing technological advancements, changes in scholarly practices, and evolving research questions. As challenging as it is to predict specific developments, there are some trends and potential directions that may characterize the future of the field.

Integration of AI and Machine Learning: As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies continue to advance, we can expect to see increased integration of these tools into digital humanities research. AI algorithms could be used for tasks such as text analysis, image recognition, and data mining, enabling scholars to uncover new insights and patterns in large-scale humanities data.

Virtual and augmented reality technologies have the potential to revolutionize how we engage with cultural heritage sites, historical artifacts, and literary works. Future digital humanities projects may leverage these technologies to create immersive experiences that allow users to explore historical environments, interact with digital reconstructions of ancient texts, or experience literary narratives in new ways.

Digital humanities research has become increasingly reliant on data-driven methodologies and digital technologies, and like scholars in other fields, DH scholars will need to grapple with ethical and social implications. This includes issues related to data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the democratization of access to digital cultural heritage.

The DH community is already more global and is likely to become more diverse and globally interconnected, with scholars from around the world collaborating on projects that reflect a wide range of cultural perspectives and traditions. One would hope that this could lead to new insights into global history, literature, and culture, as well as a greater emphasis on decolonizing digital humanities scholarship.

The interdisciplinary collaboration I wrote about earlier should also put some additional focus on interdisciplinary education and training. Students need to be better equipped with the skills and expertise needed to navigate the complex intersection of technology and the humanities. This could involve partnerships between humanities departments and computer science programs, as well as the development of new curricula that integrate digital methods into traditional humanities disciplines.

Digital Humanities and the Public

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:45:00 +0000

I wrote earlier this week about what I see happening in the digital humanities, some history, and the biggest shift I have observed. Today I'm thinking about what is called the "public humanities."

The term public humanities refers to activities, initiatives, and scholarship within the humanities that engage with broader public audiences outside of academia. It encompasses a range of practices aimed at making humanistic knowledge and perspectives accessible, relevant, and meaningful to diverse communities beyond the traditional confines of the university.

I think the goal of public humanities is to bridge the gap between academia and the wider public. This can mean democratizing access to humanistic knowledge. It is an effort to foster a deeper appreciation for the value of the humanities in contemporary society. It reflects a commitment to the idea that the humanities have relevance and significance beyond the walls of the university and can contribute to the enrichment of public life and the promotion of democratic ideals.

How can this be accomplished? It often involves collaboration with community organizations, cultural institutions, and non-profit groups. A meaningful dialogue and partnerships with local communities can help address issues of shared concern and interest. This kind of civic engagement may encourage promoting critical thinking, cultural literacy, historical awareness and may also address social justice issues and advocate for positive social change.

DH programs can include public lectures, workshops, film screenings, exhibitions, and other events that bring together scholars, artists, activists, and members of the public to explore topics of cultural, historical, or philosophical significance.

Digital technologies can help the humanities reach wider audiences through online platforms, digital archives, social media, and interactive multimedia projects.

Public scholarship is something that public humanities scholars often produce. This is work that is accessible to non-specialist audiences, such as books, articles, podcasts, and blog posts. They may also contribute to public debates and discussions on contemporary issues, drawing on insights from the humanities to inform public discourse.

I found this recent article on humanitieswatch.org listing ten forms of public humanities.

1.     public-facing academic work
2.     knowledge derived from practitioners
3.     humanistic knowledge created through collaboration with people that come from various publics
4.     data on the humanities in public
5.     activism informed by humanities research
6.     policymaking related to the humanities
7.     the value of the humanities in the public, and of the public humanities in academia
8.     graduate programs in public humanities
9.     pedagogy for public humanities;
10. histories, theories, and critiques of the field of public humanities.

A Shift in Digital Humanities

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:22:00 +0000

I claim no expertise in the digital humanities (DH) but I feel like I have been involved or immersed in it since the 1990s. I wrote earlier this week about defining the field and about some history. In the past two decades, several shifts have occurred in the field.

Early on, DH projects often involved individual scholars or small teams working within specific disciplines. A major shift was in the growth of interdisciplinary collaboration. Scholars from diverse fields such as computer science, linguistics, history, literature, cultural studies, and others has led to developments in the digital humanities.

Interdisciplinary collaboration led to the development of innovative methodologies that draw on insights and techniques from multiple disciplines. For example, computer scientists may contribute expertise in data mining and machine learning, while historians provide domain knowledge and research questions.

Collaboration across disciplines also expanded the scope of research in the digital humanities, enabling scholars to tackle complex questions that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. This has led to new approaches to studying culture, history, literature, and other subjects.

Collaboration helped facilitate the development of shared infrastructure and resources, such as digital archives, data repositories, and software tools. These resources are often freely available and contribute to the growth of the digital humanities community.

Interdisciplinary collaboration has also enabled digital humanities scholars to engage with broader public audiences by creating accessible and engaging digital projects that communicate scholarly research in innovative ways. More about the public audience in a future post.

Digital Humanities - Some History

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:27:00 +0000

I wrote earlier in this week's series a bit about Digital Humanities history which goes back to what was called "humanities computing" in 1940s and 50s. An early example being Roberto Busa's efforts in the 1940s to create, using an IBM mainframe, a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings.

The term "digital humanities" is believed to have been coined in the late 20th century. There isn't a single definitive origin point, but I first started to hear the term in academic circles in the 1990s. I recall a bunch of people doing research and writing dissertations on the intersection of computing technologies and humanistic inquiry.

In 1996, John Unsworth, a professor at the University of Virginia, used the term in his essay "What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?" The term "digital humanities" (DH) has become increasingly common in academia and it encompasses a broad range of activities that involve applying digital tools and methods to humanities research and scholarship.

DH includes a number of new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. For some older faculty, there was resistance because DH brings to the study of the humanities a recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association was founded in 1973. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) were founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.

Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was developed and launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994. This led to Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a tagging scheme for digital editing.

Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print. In the 1990s, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive, and The William Blake Archive[demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature.

The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text.

The shift from calling this work "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004). The newer term created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition.

In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" in the United States. DH got a big boost at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."

What comes next?

What Happened to the Digital Humanities?

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

A former colleague recently asked me, "What happened to 'digital humanities' which seemed so big twenty years ago?" It was his opinion that the digital humanities (DH) was dead. We talked. I disagreed about it being dead but I agree that it seems a bit lost or less visible. Our conversation will play out this week in several posts here under the Digital Humanities category.

The definition of the digital humanities is continually being formulated by scholars and practitioners. Since the field is constantly growing and changing, specific definitions can quickly become outdated or unnecessarily limit future potential. Digital humanities are not dead. It is still an active interdisciplinary field.

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to the 1940s and 50s. Pioneering work by Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa beginning in 1946, and English professor Josephine Miles in the early 1950s might be considered its origin.

Busa and his team worked with IBM to create a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings that was known as the Index Thomisticus. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts by hand.

The field grew as archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.

Digital humanities projects often involve collaboration between scholars from diverse disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, history, literature, and cultural studies. Today, natural language processing and AI offer new opportunities for text mining and ways to analyze large amounts of text and find patterns, trends, and insights.

You have probably heard of the efforts to digitize and make accessible a wide range of cultural heritage materials, including manuscripts, artworks, photographs, and historical documents, through online archives and repositories.

Google Will 'Help Me Write'

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:08:00 +0000

Google recently introduced a new feature to their Workplace suite that they call "Help Me Write." This generative AI will first appear in Gmail and Google Docs. At the moment, it's available to a select audience of invited testers.

Like other generative AI, you will be able to enter a prompt and have a first draft created. for you.,An example Google shared is not having it write a paper for your English class, though it will probably be able to do that. They show the example of having it create a job description for a regional sales representative/

It's another AI tool that might frighten teachers because it seems to help students unfairly but I think this may be a misperception. As with other AI tools, such as the much-discussed chat GPT, I think the best thing educators can do is to introduce this to students and guide them in the ways that it can be best used and best used legitimately.

The evolution of digital literacy in classrooms will never end. Yes, these kinds of AI- assisted-writing tools present boyj opportunities and challenges for educators. But ignoring them or trying to ban them from student use is certainly not the solution. This tool and others like it are an opportunity to improve student writing skills and critical thinking.

Google Announcements
https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-developers-google-cloud-workspace/
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai

Google Demo

Facebook for Educaton

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 11:50:00 +0000

Facebook is probably not at the top of most educator's list of sites to access for resources, but Facebook for Education’s free resource hub is being used to help support learning communities.

The website features access to:
Get Digital: Free lesson plans, videos and activities to help you lead discussions with students about online wellness, digital empowerment and inclusivity in the classroom and at home
Tech Prep: Personalized coding tools and resources to help your students build foundational knowledge and tech careers
Products: How-tos and best practices for Facebook products like Messenger and Pages
Programs: Information on Facebook programs, including Computer Science programs like Facebook University, which provides hands-on internships to college students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

You might not think of the lower half of K-12 as an audience for this but the K-12 section of the site. offers resources for that wide range. I would say that most of what is offered is focused on developing skills toward STEM careers.

The cynically-minded might say that they have heard that Facebook is working on an under-13-years-old version of Instagram and that anything they offer as "educational" is really just a way to get the next generation into the Facebook world. There is truth to that and since Facebook wants to be a big player in the metaverse that those kids might grow into, early indoctrination is key.

More optimistically-minded folks will say that you always have the option to use or not use Facebook or any social media and also the ability to use it in smarter ways - which is where educators can help. Their computer science programs can help support learners on that tech skills road. "Code Forward" is an online program for 4th-8th grade educators and organizations that uses videos and interactive activities to inspire interest in computer science and tech.

I suspect that some students will discover and use these resources before their teachers discover and use them. That's a start but I would feel a lot better if they entered this world of tech with some guidance.