1) What are the most interesting innovations happening right now in the field of digital humanities, and is it possible to predict or anticipate what will be most important in the future?
The most interesting innovations? That's a great question - one that I could talk about all day! First, let me briefly explain [that]...under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, media studies, and many others....
Before we look at humanities scholarship, let me throw out an analogy [to music]....
Now let's look at these three areas again (Access, Production, and Consumption) but in the context of humanities scholarship....The change in access may not be quite as far along as it is for music, but it will be soon. Like with music, you'll have access to materials from all over the world. You won't have to send a book via airmail from New York to Chicago because you'll have instant access to it on your PC (or your mobile device). If you want to study materials in China, you'll be able to view them (or for that matter, find out about them) using the Web.
On the production side, we're already seeing more and more scholars producing their work for the Web. It might take the form of scholarly websites, blogs, wikis, or whatever. But, like with music, a scholar (even an amateur, part-time scholar) can make her work available to the entire world at very low cost of production....
If I had to predict some interesting things for the future in the area of access, I'd sum it up in one word: scale. Big, massive, scale. That's what digitization brings - access to far, far more cultural heritage materials than you could ever access before. If you're a scholar of, say, 19th century British literature, how does your work change when, for the first time, you have every book from your era at your fingertips? Far more books than you could ever read in your lifetime. How does this scale change things? How might quantitative tech-based methodologies like data mining help you to better understand a giant corpus?...
4) How will digital technology in the academic system in general (for example, in the changing role of textbooks in the classroom, open-access databases, or publishing requirements for tenure) affect the way research is performed and shared?
...Let's face it: sometimes scholarship is constrained by seemingly mundane hurdles like copyright, travel costs, or language barriers....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/02/2009 01:16:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
