Humanities and Computing Links

This is a huge area about which I, like many, know far too little. Almost all the information that follows comes from Humanist, (you may like to subscribe to the Humanist email list). 'Humanist is an international electronic seminar on the application of computers to the humanities. Its primary aim is to provide a forum for discussion of intellectual, scholarly, pedagogical, and social issues and for exchange of information among members.'

To begin with, then, see the essay "We would know how we know what we know: Responding to the computational transformation of the humanities" by Willard McCarty (the Editor of Humanist) on whose Home Page there are also links to other important essays, especially "What is humanities computing? Toward a definition of the field".

For a survey of what is available, see the list of Humanities computing units and institutional resources compiled by Willard McCarty (King's College London) & Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Kentucky).

Another helpful introduction would be the essay "World Wide Humanities?" by R. Allen Shoaf.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography presents selected articles, books, electronic documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet and other networks. It includes Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources, a great collection of links to related Web sites. An article about it has recently been published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

The Digital Resources for the Humanities conferences are a series of annual conferences whose goal is to bring together the creators, users, distributors, and custodians of digital resources in the Humanities. They are organized through the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) in the School of Humanities at King's College London. The CH Working Papers (or Computing in the Humanities Working Papers) are an interdisciplinary series of refereed publications on computer-assisted research.

For more specialized information, see Arts and Humanities Data Service: Interim Evaluation. The Arts and Humanities Data Service is a national service funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK's Higher Education Funding Councils to collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from research and teaching in the humanities.

On a broader level, the Humanities and Arts higher education Network (HAN) is committed to the improvement of teaching and learning in those subjects. It links educators and researchers into the arts and humanities in higher education throughout the UK.

A very useful book available online from Oxford: Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice by Alan Morrison, Michael Popham, Karen Wikander.

The Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford is running a week-long series of Summer Seminars on humanities computing, from the 10th to 14th July 2000. They will be helpful for beginners and for experts.

One example of work being done is MASTER,  a European Union funded project to create a single on-line catalogue of medieval manuscripts in European libraries. This project will develop a single standard for computer -readable descriptions of manuscripts. It will create software for making these records, test the standard and the software on at least 5000 manuscripts, and mount the records in a single networked catalogue, available to everyone. The catalogue will also include images of many manuscripts. The site includes an introduction to the TEI method for manuscript description. MASTER is funded under the Framework IV Telematics for Libraries call. Its site is based at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK where you will also find the Canterbury Tales Project.

The Pew Learning and Technology Program is an $8.8-million, four-year effort to place the (American) national discussion about the impact that new technologies are having on the nation’s campuses in the context of student learning and ways to achieve this learning cost-effectively.

An online conference was organized out of Indiana University ....International Online Conference on Teaching Online in Higher Education : "ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES" November 8-9, 1999. Preconference Web Site. Many important topics.

Kairos is an electronic journal designed to serve as a peer-reviewed resource for teachers, researchers, and tutors of writing at the college and university level, including rhetoric, composition, technical writing, business writing, professional communication, creative writing, and literature.

Teaching European Literature and Culture with Communication and Information Technologies SELECTED PAPERS Edited By Sarah Porter and Stuart Sutherland  offers a series of papers from a conference on this topic.

Online Teaching: Tools & Projects (by Stuart D. Lee, Susan Armitage, Paul Groves, and Chris Stephens, a report commissioned by the JISC Technology Applications Programme) looks at the various ways the Internet is being used for teaching, and at projects under development at the moment. It refers especially to On-Line Tutorials and Digital Archives (Lee and Groves, 1999) http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/index.htm)

Currents in Electronic Literacy is an electronic journal for the scholarly discussion of issues pertaining to electronic literacy, widely construed. Visit Spring 1999 (No. 1) Special Topic: Electronic Pedagogy in Literature Classes which includes articles on (1) A discussion of lessons learned from teaching traditional literature courses in an entirely electronic environment. (2) Hypertext and Literary Learning: A Discussion of  the Dictionary of Sensibility (3) The Point of PowerPoint in SophLit (4) Interactive Fiction vs. The Pause That Distresses: How  Computer -Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun (5) Crritics and Receptionists: Students as Knowledge Providers.

Cultivate Interactive is a new pan-European Web magazine which is funded under the European Commission's DIGICULT programme. Cultivate Interactive is aimed at the European cultural heritage community including IT staff, information professionals, researchers, managers, policy makers, libraries, museums, archives, galleries, non-profit making organisations.

Announced for early 2001, the Questia service will offer students access to a complete library of digitized texts for research.

Museums and the Web 2000 is the latest in a series of major conferences on one very significant area of Humanities-related Web development. Papers from this and previous conferences are available online.

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is an independent non-profit corporation that shares, shapes, and standardizes digital information regarding museum collections and enables its educational use. Membership is open to any institution with a collection of art. It offers a variety of model art history assignments to illustrate its educational potentail for subscribing institutions.

A very fine list of online resources can be found in Michael Halls' list of links in Humanities Scholarship

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a very thought-provoking article by Rebecca Moore Howard, on the way teachers should react to students who include chunks "lifted" from the Web in their written work.

Of great value for teachers, Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators, including many lists of links, available within the school resources in Discovery.com or within her own site, with a useful page on teaching how to evaluate Internet information-sources.