Welcome to class.... Today we'll introduce ourselves and and talk about where this class should take us. Be prepared to talk a bit about the research questions you're asking these days, and how they might relate to this class. (Research questions like, "What should I be researching?" are perfectly admissible.)

Also, we'll talk about situating ourselves and this class in the context of C.P. Snow's famous "two cultures" lecture. To that end, please read the essay version of his lecture (the link provides both HTML and PDF versions), and reflect on how well the "two cultures" reflects--or doesn't--your scholarly background and aspirations. How are Snow's beliefs and concerns relevant to the contemporary practices of the digital humanities? How are they related to Taylor's slightly more recent perspective?

1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures. The Rede Lecture, 1959.
2. Mark C. Taylor, "End the University as We Know It," The New York Times, April 26, 2009.

Fill out this very short survey about your interests and experience.

Make sure you've received my email about the CUNY Academic Commons and that you've joined the course group. We'll discuss how to use the Commons for this course.

Images and their analysis are also the subject of DH inquiry, though this is perhaps a newer flavor of inquiry than text-based inquiry is. The first two papers (and the supporting survey data) describe an interesting proto-collaboration between computer scientists and art historians. Saleh et al describe a computational approach to making claims of influence between artists, based on computational analysis of images of paintings and machine learning applied to features derived from that analysis. Responding to that paper and its popular reception, Spratt and Elgammal reflect on the significance and possibility of deeper collaboration between art historians and computer scientists

Chung et al and Toler-Franklin et al are fairly technical treatments of how computer vision techniques have been applied to two humanistic problems. Chung et al analyze and classify woodblock prints from a large corpus of ballads held at the Bodleian Library; Toler-Franklin et al apply computer vision and machine learning techniques to help re-assemble shattered classical frescoes.

1. Saleh et al, "Toward automated discovery of artistic influence," Multimedia Tools and Applications, Augsut 2014.
2. Emily L. Spratt and Ahmed Elgammal, "The Digital Humanities Unveiled: Perceptions Held by Art Historians and Computer Scientists about Computer Vision Technology ," self-published. Also, review the survey results on the project's home page.
3. Chung et al, "Re-presentations of Art Collections," presented at VisArt 2014 Workshop, "When Computer Vision Meets Art," held in conjunction with ECCV 2014: 13th European Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, September 6, 2014
4. Toler-Franklin et al, "Multi-feature matching of fresco fragments," ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 29(6), December 2010.

We'll check in about the groups' research topics, and we'll spend a little time collectively formulating the structure for the "mini-presentations" we'll do in the last few class meetings.

As the histories we read a couple weeks ago suggest, text is a central focus of many digital humanists. One major problem is the digital encoding of texts (which can be exceptionally complicated things) in a way that best supports their study and dissemination. This week, we'll focus on the biggest player in humanities text encoding: the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Much technical and political effort has gone into producing a text encoding standard for the humanities that seems likely to stand the test of time; "TEI: History" gives a brief history of the development of the TEI, while Renear gives a longer (and somewhat out of date, ending c. 2004) history of the problem of text encoding.

Text encoding mainly from concerns about the dissemination and preservation of text, but it also can be used to support analyses that would be extraordinarily difficult to perform on "plain" text. "Text Analysis and the TEI" is an exercise in analyzing heavily-encoded text (in this case, Romeo and Juliet); do the exercise and spend some time playing with the possibilities. Duhaime writes of a larger exploration of the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. What kinds of questions/problems could you imagine exploring with this sort of encoded text?

1. "TEI: History" from the TEI Consortium
2. Alan Renear, "Text Encoding," In A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
   
3. Example: Emily Dickison Archive
4. Example: Colonial Despatches
5. "Text Analysis and the TEI," from the "Hacking the Humanities" course taught by Austin Mason. (Note this updated link for Folger Digital Texts Tag Guide.)
6. Douglas Duhaime, "Classifying Shakespearean Drama with Sparse Feature Sets."

If youu knowledge of XML feels rusty, you may also want to look at the TEI's Gentle Introduction to XML.

One of the digital humanities' general imperatives is improving our access both to archival materials (eg by digitizing texts and publishing them online) and to scholar materials (eg by publishing in "open access" fora, or by using and producing "open source" code). Spiro argues this impulse is, in part, a defining one for DH.

But are these forms of openness enough? Making sure people of all abilities have access to digital resources is a computational problem that goes well beyond the digital humanities but certainly affects them. How does "data visualization," for example, work for people whose vision is outside 'normal' parameters? Could data visualizations be translated into data visceralizations? Williams suggests that DH projects should hew to principles of "universal design," and reports on one project aiming to "make the digital humanities more open." Heron offers an example of how to think through accessibility in the context of a reasonably complex text-based application game.

1. Lisa Spiro, " Why Digital Humanities?" (slides).
2. George Williams, "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities," In Debates in the Digital Humanities.
3. George H. Williams, "Making the Digital Humanities More Open (Final Performance Report)."
4. Michael James Heron, " A case study into the accessibility of text-parser based interaction," In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems. (Library access only.)