Digital Humanities Journal #3: Digital Tools and Environments

- A visualization of my summer 2023 research created in QGIS. You can read more about it here.

The advancement of digital technologies affects traditional humanistic practices. Additionally, a point seldom explored is how the digital world involves the environment in which the humanist works. Through this blog post, I hope to outline a few examples of the digital tools and environments that shape the methods of digital humanists. Like my previous posts, I will use Primer by Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto as my primary reference. I also plan to draw from a few of my experiences working in DH environments in this post.

In layperson's terms, digital tools generally indicate the essential software we use to enhance our digital experience. This includes apps, programs, websites, and general technologies we use daily. From a more comprehensive point of view, text, data, image and sound, and outcome-based tools also fit into the digital category. Like many other areas of DH, these features bring new possibilities to humanists' traditional work. Gardiner and Musto use the image of Saint Jerome in His Study to depict the stereotype of a scholar sitting in their study surrounded by books and other ephemera, writing ceaselessly (1). They then ask whether this way of working still pertains today. How can we go from books and blank pages to Word documents and internet access? The authors relate the computer as a portal to the digital realm, replacing the dependency on tactile research and writing and pairing the traditional work of the humanist with digital tools. Some of these tools are text-based. They analyze, interpret, transcribe, mine, convert, and encode written and digital text to better advance the usability of information in the digital age (2). Gardiner and Musto describe how data, image/sound, and outcome-based tools impact humanistic work. One example I would like to highlight fits into the data category, with that being geographic information systems. Many GIS programs have different features, with the primary function being a software program to visualize data (numbers, text, statistics) per a defined georeferenced space. GIS is one of the most exciting programs in the digital revolution, as I have seen firsthand how it can influence historical research. The picture at the top of the page references a research project I participated in during the summer of 2023 at the University of Southern Mississippi. I had the opportunity to research and develop a collection of letters from Mississippi during the United States Civil War and visualize a trend that occurred through GIS. This included creating and joining metadata into QGIS, an open-source program, and making adjustments and selections to tell my story effectively. To read more about my experience, please explore this website.

To transition briefly to the environment section, Gardiner and Musto preface that an environment can be both a physical space and the tools the humanist utilizes (3). I am fascinated by the idea of workspaces and organizations that cater their services in a specific direction, whether that is with the tools they provide or the audience they cater to. Across Chapter 6, the authors describe institutional environments, campus-based centers, collaborative environments, the funding environment (grants, etc.), and the global environment. I am fascinated by institutional environments, particularly the resources allocated by libraries, museums, or universities toward educating and creating a space for patrons to study and work in a unique setting. To connect to further reading, digital humanities lecturer Adam Crymble writes about SCALE-UP spaces and the rise of the digital humanities lab. In Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age, Crymble writes about how, at University College Cork, Ireland, staff converted a lecture hall into a space where students in digital humanities style courses could be "flexible" in choosing where they wanted to work.

"Their new room included a large central space with moveable furniture, a corner of the room that looked... (like a) cafe for a more focused discussion, a series of computer stations, a segregated digitization suite, and a series of restaurant-style booths for small group work (4)."

As an undergraduate student in the digital humanities, I have seen how digital tools mix with environments to create, in some ways, a safe space for scholarship. By having a room with the resources necessary for work and a functional space that encourages individuality and creativity, I can work for long hours, just as Saint Jerome might have with his blank paper. I hope there will be a word for this way of thinking, creating and optimizing digital tools and environments in a greater context.

Once again, thank you for reading!

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Below are two shots of the Digital Humanities Lab at Messiah University. Dr. Joseph Huffman (standing) and Dr. Bernardo Michael (bottom left) provide a lesson at the first Messiah History Club Genealogy Night—photos by Kelan Amme.

Notes:

1. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 67-68, https://archive.org/details/digitalhumanitie0000gard/page/n9/mode/2up.

2. Gardiner and Musto, The Digital Humanities, 72-75.

3. Gardiner and Musto, The Digital Humanities, 82.

4. Adam Crymble, Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021) 96.