Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

DHQ : Digital Humanities Quarterly : Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
▻http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html

To overturn the assumptions that structure conventions acquired from other domains requires that we re-examine the intellectual foundations of digital humanities, putting techniques of graphical display on a foundation that is humanistic at its base. This requires first and foremost that we reconceive all data as capta. Differences in the etymological roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.

Les #données ne sont pas données (given), mais obtenues (d’où le joli mot #capta).

Adobe Photoshop and Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts: A New Approach to Digital Paleography
▻http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000187/000187.html

A Companion to Digital Humanities
►http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion

A Companion to Digital Humanities , ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford : Blackwell, 2004

This collection marks a turning point in the field of digital humanities: for the first time, a wide range of theorists and practitioners, those who have been active in the field for decades, and those recently involved, disciplinary experts, computer scientists, and library and information studies specialists, have been brought together to consider digital humanities as a discipline in its own right, as well as to reflect on how it relates to areas of traditional humanities scholarship [...]

Ultimately, in computer-assisted analysis of large amounts of material that has been encoded and processed according to a rigorous, well thought-out system of knowledge representation, one is afforded opportunities for perceiving and analyzing patterns, conjunctions, connections, and absences that a human being, unaided by the computer, would not be likely to find.

The process that one goes through in order to develop, apply, and compute these knowledge representations is unlike anything that humanities scholars, outside of philosophy, have ever been required to do. This method, or perhaps we should call it a heuristic, discovers a new horizon for humanities scholarship, a paradigm as powerful as any that has arisen in any humanities discipline in the past – and, indeed, maybe more powerful, because the rigor it requires will bring to our attention undocumented features of our own ideation. Coupled with enormous storage capacity and computational power, this heuristic presents us with patterns and connections in the human record that we would never otherwise have found or examined.

#digital_humanities