The following resources were compiled by Sarah Osborne Bender to support the Digital Humanities for Art Historians Mini-Workshop held at the ARLIS/NA Mid-Atlantic Summer Meeting, July 24, 2015, in Norfolk, Virginia.
How to keep up with developments in DH:
- Digital Humanities SIG – join SIGs at membership time and be placed on the listserv
- DH SIG Blog arlisdhsig.wordpress.com
- DH SIG Twitter @arlisdhsig
- Programming at ARLIS/NA/VRA Seattle 2016 http://www.arlisna-vra.org/seattle2016/
- Zotero bibliography from ARLIS/NA Fort Worth 2015 DH Workshop https://www.zotero.org/groups/arlis_2015_dh_workshop/items
How to engage with DH initiatives local to our chapter:
- VCU’s Digital Pragmata digital arts and humanities initiative http://wp.vcu.edu/digitalpragmata/
- Digital Cultural Heritage DC Meet-Up (DCHDC)- last Thursday of the month, 7pm @ Stetson’s http://www.meetup.com/Digital-Cultural-Heritage-DC/
- Local maker-spaces
- Podcasts: MITH’s Digital Dialogues, UVA’s Scholar’s Lab, CHNM’s Digital Campus (all on iTunes)
Tools for teaching:
- ThingLink: www.thinglink.com
A free education account is available that allows you to create student groups, but this functionality isn’t necessary to use as an assignment. - StoryMap: storymap.knightlab.com
- Omeka:
Documenting the Gilded Age – a New York Art Resources Consortium initiative to digitize and provide access to related materials spread through multiple institutions. - Omeka with Neatline plugin:
Flowers in a Glass Vase
Streams of Being
Both of these examples are by students in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at University of Maryland. A group of these students created a valuable step-by-step and best practices guide to Omeka with Neatline, found here: http://michellesmithcollaboratory.umd.edu/omeka-guide-getting-started-and-best-practices
Tools for research:
Examples:
- University of Maryland PhD candidate Matthew Lincoln has pursued many projects combining art historical research and digital tools such as R Software and ArcMap. His blog and Twitter feed (@MathewDLincoln) are very informative.
- Students in UCLA’s Digital Humanities program examined data from the Getty Provenance Index through a variety of visualization tools and wrote about their experiences. Christian Huemer, head of the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute, has been experimenting with this data and presented on his activities at ARLIS/NA Pasadena 2013.
- Rosemont College professor Michelle Moravic delved in to correspondence of artist Carolee Scheemann.
- Librarians at Yale created Robots Reading Vogue using ProQuest for their dataset.
Two accessible data tools:
- For unstructured data:
Voyant www.voyant-tools.org
Demo with van Gogh letters - For structured data:
Viewshare www.viewshare.org
Demo from Rice University
A few words about cleaning or “tidying” your data:
When working with structured data, having clean or “tidy” data can make a big difference. Hadley Wickham’s article Tidy Data is an excellent introduction if you’re working with data in spreadsheets, especially surveys or values. You can also drop your spreadsheet into Open Refine. This extremely powerful tool is good for resolving erroneous variations in data, and many other things. Thomas Padilla, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Michigan State created an excellent guide to getting started in Open Refine.
Where can you get data to experiment with?
You can get unstructured data, full text of articles or correspondence for example, from sites like Project Guttenberg, Hathi Trust, even JSTOR, or places like the Archives of American Art that have full texts of things like oral histories.
More institutions are opening up their collection data all the time. Just last week, MOMA released its collection data on Github, joining the Tate and the Cooper Hewitt.