DH Ethos
My forays into the field of Digital Humanities (DH) move questions of design from the periphery to the center of scholarly attention. The term “design” denotes the plan or blueprint of a project, its purpose and aims, as well as its aesthetics and function. Both a noun and a verb, “design” refers to structures and to the process of inventing them. It also encompasses matters of style and form.
Design is fundamental to DH, so much so that five of the foremost leaders in DH today—Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp—make it a keyword of their vision for the future of the field. They describe design as both a “creative practice” and an “intellectual method” of “thinking through practice,” emphasizing its importance in making and sharing knowledge:
Understanding the rhetoric of design, its persuasive force and central role in the shaping of arguments, is a critical tool for digital work in all disciplines.”
– Burdick, et al1Digital_Humanities, MIT Press, 2012, 2. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262528863/digital_humanities/
In online environments, good design is essential for communicating what we know, but as Burdick et al point out, the design process can also teach us to think beyond what we know. In the digital era, “humanists, designers, and technologists working together can move beyond considering what can be done with the tools at hand to ask: ‘What can we imagine doing that may not yet be possible?”2Burdick, et al, Digital_Humanities, MIT Press, 2012, 12. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262528863/digital_humanities/https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262528863/digital_humanities/
To give design its due is a feminist act. Feminist design involves recognizing readers as vital partners in the scholarly endeavor and embracing style and aesthetics as crucial to the work of digital humanities, rather than merely ornamental. Design is much more than making websites look pretty: it entails rethinking the processes of generating and disseminating knowledge with our audiences’ needs in mind. It calls for reinventing our scholarly methods in order to reflect the diversity of creative production, break down hierarchies, encourage open exchanges of expertise, and make our scholarship accessible to the public.
Feminist design is the rejection of an artificial binary between utility and ornament.”
– Whitney Trettien3Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory Volvelles, https://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/#thesis, Accessed 11 Oct. 2016.
DH Projects
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde
A born digital, peer reviewed, open source website dedicated to a radical artist, writer, inventor, and feminist.
Index of Modernist Magazines
A bibliographic database of modernist magazines, created by undergraduates at Davidson College.
Envisioning the Harlem Renaissance
Scenes from the life and work of Gwendolyn Bennett, curated in a born digital, open source website.
DH Tools
ScrollyTellerDH
An accessible, open-source app for digital storytelling and close reading (the interpretative analysis of a text), which displays texts alongside interpretations in a visually engaging, scrolling narrative. It is distinguished from existing tools in that:
- it is designed for humanities research;
- it supports analysis of texts, images, audio, and video;
- authors can assemble individual annotations into a narrative arc;
- anyone with access to a computer and internet can use it;
- it generates web-accessible stories from a Google Docs template;
- it requires no downloading and minimal server space.
ScrollyTellerDH was created by John-Michael Murphy, Graphics Developer at NYTimes.com, in collaboration with Suzanne Churchill, Professor of English, and Matt Davis, Systems Librarian at Davidson College.