Concept: Applying geospatial information system tools and techniques to common objects of study in the Humanities. Work in this area spans a wide spectrum, from giving audiences a different view of history by overlaying historical and modern maps or showing change in a place over time or how ideas spread by mapping social media or other written texts.

Some of the places where GIS/mapping scholarship is happening at Duke include: Data and Visualization Services, the Visualization Friday Forum, and the Wired! Lab.

Concept: Using simulated spaces, virtual worlds, and hybrid media annotation systems to reconstruct sites, explore counterfactual concepts, and offer contextualized/situated knowledge.

Some of the places where virtual and augmented reality is happening at Duke include: the Duke immersive Virtual Environment;  the Digital Digging Laboratory; Information Science + Studies; The Wired! Lab; the Emergence Lab; and Visualization and Interactive Systems group.

Concept: Using social media or crowdsourcing to collect information from past or present events to make that history or the objects that make up that history more accessible for research or public consumption.

Some of the places where social media and crowdsourcing are being utilized are: Forum for Scholars and Public, the University Archives,  and the Wired! Lab.

Although taken up by many communities, "Digital Humanities" is a complicated and sometimes contested term. Theorists, practitioners, and critics have weighed in on the question of what is included and not included in that definition. Is the digital a modifier of humanities practice as it has been understood within existing disciplines? Is it inherently distinct? Is it is a set of tools and methods in its own right? How are theory, code, teaching, public-facing scholarship, activism understood within and across the field? How are the intersecting power relations that affect other aspects of academia played out in this "field"? And how is digital scholarship to be evaluated within and across these frameworks of interaction? Does DH include non-textual forms of analysis, as it so often does at Duke? If so, how, and in what relation to prior traditions of humanities computing? What are the relationships between DH and media studies? Science and technology studies? Race, gender, sexuality, and postcolonial studies?  Communications studies? Performance studies? Informatics? Software studies? Physical Computing? Installation art? Data and visualization?

Our concept of Digital Humanities is meant to embrace these questions by including a variety of perspectives on them, and providing opportunities to explore and interrogate this emerging set of practices online and through courses, workshops, and sponsored/co-sponsored events and projects.  We encourage DH-interested scholars to investigate related opportunities like Bass Connections, Archives Alive, the Information Initiative, the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge (graduate students), the STEAM Challenge, the Computational Media, Arts & Cultures Rendez-Vous, the Visualization Friday Forum, and the various workshop opportunities featured here - and to bring back some of the perspectives they have gained back to their own work and local scholarly communities. 

Concept: Data visualization encompasses a wide range of practices focused on the transformation of quantitative or otherwise segmented information into visual forms to convey information and sometimes provide interactive engagement with data sources. This topic also includes the creation of data itself, and histories and theories of information processing. 

The Duke Libraries Data and Visualization Sciences, as well as the Social Science Research Institute provide workshops and consulting around data visualization. Some courses in Art, Art History & Visual Studies and Information Science + Studies also provide opportunities to learn more about data visualization and analysis.