Connecting and Enabling the Humanities: e-Research in the Border Zone (original) (raw)

2012, Collaborative and Distributed E-Research: Innovations in Technologies, Strategies, and Applications

E-Research is well-established in science and technology fields but is at an earlier stage of development in the humanities. Investments in technology infrastructure worldwide, however, are starting to pay dividends, and a cultural change is occurring, enabling closer collaborations between researchers in a sector that has traditionally emphasized individual research activities. This chapter discusses ways in which the humanities are utilizing digital methods, including: creating and enhancing online collections; building knowledge communities around projects, disciplines, and data; and communicating research results in widely accessible formats. E-Research has brought with it new attitudes, behaviors, and expectations. Topics include the growing opportunities for collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches, building the information commons, and the need for long-term strategic investment in research infrastructure.

Humanities research information resources and digital communication redux

This essay, originally published at a time of formative debates on the nature of scholarship in the digital environment, draws extensively from the views expressed in a compendium of insightful late 20th century reports regarding the emergence of digital research infrastructures, the nature of cultural heritage and humanities research and its object of inquiry, and the urgency of establishing priorities in this field. In this new version, I include the text retaining almost fully its original form, with the addition of a postscript questioning which of the issues and strategies identified at that time remain relevant after almost two decades of sweeping change and major investments for the conceptualization and development of major digitization initiatives and efforts to construct digital research infrastructures in the arts and humanities, and providing a self-reflexive assessment of the original ideas in light of some unanticipated and highly salient contemporary developments. My aim is to call attention to to early debates on digital scholarly infrastructures, some available today only in hard to find sources, and to point to elements of historical continuity and discontinuity relevant to contemporary challenges in digital humanities and digital heritage infrastructural work.

Digital Humanities: Harnessing Digital Technology for Sustenance and Growth of the Humanities

The Incandescent Classroom (Essays in Honour of Prof. Satyaki Pal), 2023

The Digital Humanities is a comparatively new area of study that combines the traditional strengths of humanities with the strength of modern information and language technology. This opens up an interactive interface for the new generation of scholars to enable them to extend their studies and research of humanities under a digital platform and gives them the power to apply traditional skills of the humanities (e.g., critical thinking) to understand digital culture while learning how digital technology can enable them to explore the key questions in the humanities. It is an alternative way of doing scholarship in humanities that involves collaborative, transdisciplinary, and technologically engaged analysis, research, development, teaching, resource generation and making them available for the new generation of users. It confirms our theoretical postulation that when the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution, there is an alternative medium which is more penetrative and powerful than the existing one. An effort is made in this paper to look at the basic concept of digital humanities with a query on its purpose, methodologies and application on various fronts of human societies.

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