For the journal of Internet Histories I had the pleasure of reading Ian Milligan’s recent book History in the age of abundance? How the web is transforming historical research (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). In this book, Milligan discusses the necessity of studying the web for historical research, as well as the problem this introduces with respect to abundance. In my review, I focus on how for Milligan this abundance is both a promise as a pitfall for historians. You can read the review in the journal here, or read my self-archived copy below.
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Paper publication: Boundary Practices of Digital Humanities Collaborations
I am really happy that today the first paper based on my PhD research was published in the DH Benelux Journal. This new journal will serve to turn select conference abstracts from the annual conference into full papers. The first volume follows last year’s conference theme Integrating Digital Humanities. My paper critically explores the integration of the humanities and the computational domains, and concludes that the digital humanities may be more heavily oriented towards the humanities than a balancing of the digital and the humanities, limiting the ability of DH to emerge as a ‘third space’ in-between the humanities and computational domains. You can find the volume here, including my paper in HTML and in PDF.
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DHBenelux 2019 submissions
Next week will feature the sixth installment of the DHBenelux conference, moving to Belgium, to be held in the city of Liège. In this post, I will analyse the submissions, authors, and abstracts, and look to the future of the community. For the previous years see my other posts in the “dhbenelux” category.
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Thesis abstract: Trading Zones of Digital History
On Friday 26 April 2019 I will defend my PhD thesis at the University of Luxembourg.
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DH Failures vs Findings
Recent discussions in digital humanities have drawn attention to “failure”. Projects can fail to deliver a tool or fail to innovate practices. But what practices are emphasised by speaking of “failure”, and for whom is a certain result a failure? In this post, I argue that recent discussions of failure seem to take DH as software development rather than research, shaping the discussion of what DH should achieve and whether other results are thereby failures.
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Collaborations as Trading Zones
DH is clearly a meeting of different communities. To better understand DH therefore requires the investigation of this ‘meeting’. A concept that has gained in popularity to describe the meeting between different communities is trading zones, which I will elaborate in this post. Using this concept, differences and commonalities between meetings of DH collaborations can be investigated and mapped.
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DH: between disciplines, communities, and cultures
In order to understand engagement in DH, one aspect to describe is the configurations of participating people. One approach would be to consider the interactions between different disciplines such as history and computer science. In this post, I will reflect on the concept of disciplines, and discuss alternative concepts of communities of practice and cultures.
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The mountain and the valley: 2019 will be exciting
2018 has been a great year for my wife and me. The most exciting moment was when we welcomed our second son Rowas into the world. Now that he’s almost one year already, the nights are getting easier, giving more energy to concentrate. And I will need my concentration, for 2019 promises to be an exciting year in which I have a mountain to climb, and a valley to explore.
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Cross-disciplinarity in DH
Digital humanities is commonly described as interdisciplinary. But what does it mean to be interdisciplinary, and is digital humanities truly interdisciplinary? In this blogpost, I’ll briefly discuss how “interdisciplinarity” can be understood, and how this applies to DH.
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Towards a hermeneutics of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the humanities
One of the defining characteristics of digital humanities is the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.[1]Klein, J. T. (2014). Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field (online). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12869322.0001.001[2]Spiro, L. (2012). “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in Digital Humanities (online). University of Minnesota Press. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13 The different facets of digital humanities research, such as computer technology, data management, and humanistic inquiry, call for experts with different backgrounds to collaborate. But how to study or reflect on DH collaborations? In this post I introduce a blog series in which I will develop a vocabulary for collaborative DH.
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References
| 1. | ↑ | Klein, J. T. (2014). Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field (online). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12869322.0001.001 |
| 2. | ↑ | Spiro, L. (2012). “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in Digital Humanities (online). University of Minnesota Press. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13 |