Digital humanists often get started with technology by exploring a more efficient or creative approach to a familiar research challenge. Whether that involves finding an easier way to collect or organize resources and information, or discovering new ways to analyze and publicize research, finding technical solutions to a single part of the research process can open up wider possibilities for future development of the whole. Here at Duke we are fortunate to have a diverse community of DH practitioners and partners interested in sharing their knowledge, exchanging ideas, consulting, and training. We also benefit from a rich variety of working spaces and technical resources around campus.
Doing DH
Get Started With DH at Duke
The DH community at Duke has grown out of discussions and collaborations on particular topics and methodological approach to DH. Another way to hone your DH skills is to learn more about and participate in one of these conversations or groups.
Concept: Using web technologies to make digital objects publicly accessible on the internet. These digital objects may include, but are not limited to, text, images, audio, and video. Oftentimes, digital collections will organize digital objects in a way to make they more accessible and discoverable for researchers, whether by creating exhibits, facets, or search features.
Some of the places where archives and digital publishing are happening at Duke include: Digital Scholarship Services and the Wired! Lab.
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: Exploring relationships and connections between objects commonly studied in the Humanities. This process involves breaking information into component parts and visualizing those parts to show their interdependence. Examples of Humanities networks might be: philosophers and how they borrow philosophical concepts or artists and the museums their works are displayed in.
Some of the places where networks scholarship is happening at Duke include: Data and Visualization Services, Duke Network Analysis Center, and Social Science Research Institute.
Concept: Using simulated spaces, virtual worlds, and hybrid media annotation systems to reconstruct sites, explore counterfactual concepts, and offer contextualized/situated knowledge. Procedural and interactive environments for experience design, storytelling, activism, and entertainment.
Some of the places where extended reality (virtual, mixed, augmented) and games are happening at Duke include: the Extended Reality (XR) Studio; the Digital Digging Laboratory; Information Science + Studies; The Wired! Lab; the Emergence Lab; the Duke University Game Lab: and the Visualization and Interactive Systems group.
Concept: Using technology hardware and software to convert, explore, and visualize common Humanities text-based information. This area includes text analysis, topic modeling, statistics, and various quantitative methods of exploring text-based information.
Some of the places where text scholarship is happening at Duke include: Data and Visualization Services, Digital Scholarship Services, Social Science Research Institute, and Information Science + Studies.
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.
Concept: Applying project management principles and best practices to digital projects in the Humanities. This includes learning about: project planning, collaboration, data storage, and tools for being more efficient in your project management.
Some of the places where project management learning is happening at Duke include: Digital Scholarship Services, OIT Training, Data and Visualization Services, 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.
This theme focuses on the range of approaches to creating narrative and interactive experiences using digital tools and hybrid media systems. The emphasis is on approaches that take advantage of computational media affordances for construction and playback. This topic also includes exhibition design with significant digital and interactive components. Common toolsets include the Knightlab digital storytelling tools such as TimelineJS, StoryMap, Juxtapose, Soundcite or ESRI Storymap for maps.
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.
Concept: Projects related to the making and unmaking of sound. Sound Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field that explores the idea of sound from cultural, aesthetic, and scientific perspectives. it also considers technologies of reproduction and circulation.
The Department of Music is a primary site for the study and creation of music, both traditional and conceptual, and including work with technology-mediated approaches to music composition and performance. The Program in Dance engages with technology and performance through a variety of programs and projects, incorporating sound and other media in their work.
Concept: Scanning and Modeling real and imagined dimensional objects and environments for critical, historical, and creative purposes. This includes both 3D imaging from photos, lasers, and other tools and drawing in 3D software environments. Some 3D Models are also printed out as material objects.
The Wired Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture, and the various labs associated with Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, use these approaches to their research and teaching. Courses on 3D modeling and visualization are taught in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies and Information Science + Studies. The Innovation Co-Lab provides 3D printing services in several locations on campus.
There are many digital tools available for use in the digital humanities, some made specifically for dh and others that can be re-purposed quite effectively for Humanities research. Another good approach to doing a technical project in the Humanities to assess what stage of the research process you are in and explore tools that can help you complete that stage more quickly and/or effectively.
Agisoft Photoscan
- publication
ArcGIS Desktop
- analysis
ArcGIS Online
- analysis
- publication
Carto
- analysis
- publication
DH Press
- analysis
- publication
Drupal
- collection
- publication
Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE)
- analysis
- publication
Duke Toolkits
- management
GeoNode
- publication
Gephi
- analysis
Google My Maps
- collection
- publication
Juxta Editions
- analysis
- publication
Lentil
- collection
MapBox
- analysis
- publication
Neatline
- analysis
- publication
Oculus Rift
- publication
Omeka
- collection
- publication
OpenRefine
- collection
- analysis
- management
QGIS
- analysis
R Shiny
- analysis
- publication
Scalar
- publication
SketchUp
- collection
- analysis
- publication
Social Feed Manager
- collection
Tableau
- analysis
- publication
TimelineJS
- publication
Turning the Pages
- publication
Unity 3D
- publication
Versioning Machine
- analysis
- publication
Voyant
- analysis
Wordpress
- collection
- publication
A good way to learn how DH can help your work is to check out the spaces where DH is happening at Duke. There are several spaces on campus that provide staff, hardware, and software to help you get started on your project.
Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services
Dig@Lab
Emergence Lab
Innovation Studio
ISS Fab Lab
Murthy Digital Studio
PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge
S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab
SSRI Connection
The Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE)
Wired! Lab
The best way to get started with a DH project is to talk with one of Duke's support staff. They can help you with various needs from conceptualizing your project to finding the appropriate digital tools and getting the training and technology support that is right for you.
There are several workshop series on Duke's campus to learn about digital humanities practices. Attending a workshop in one of these series is a good way to get started with a new digital tool or learn about new methods that can help your research and teaching.
Interested in getting started in data driven research or exploring a new approach to working with research data? Data and Visualization Services’ workshop series features a range of courses designed to showcase the latest data tools and methods. Begin working with data in our Basic Data Cleaning/Analysis or the new Structuring Humanities Data workshop. Explore data visualization in the Making Data Visual class. Our wide range of workshops offers a variety of approaches for the meeting the challenges of 21st century data driven research. Please join us!
In partnership with departments across Duke and practitioners across the Research Triangle, Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) offers a variety of workshops and symposia focused on digital scholarship methods, tools, and best practices.
OIT Training provides technology training opportunities to support the academic needs of Duke students, staff and faculty. This training include in-person and online workshops and seminars, as well as one-on-one personalized opportunities.
Duke Research Computing plays a role in building basic technology competencies for research through regular short courses, workshops, and symposia that touch on:
specific skills (such as mastering Linux, learning programming languages, and using a cluster computing scheduler like SLURM) transformational developments in information technology (such as “containerization” technologies like Docker and GPU computing) issues in and helpful technologies for establishing reproducibility in research involving large data or infrastructures, and complex computation matters that explore the interdisciplinary qualities of research computing.Roots workshops are meant to help students of any skill and confidence level comfortably start to gain an understanding of how to make use of a variety of tools and technologies. The goal here is not to make you an expert - we know that takes time - but to help you get to the point where you're excited and confident about starting your own project.
SSRI offers workshops on a diverse array of topics throughout the year. They typically run for two to four hours and focus on a particular task, methodology or software relating to statistical analysis, ethnographic research design, and survey research and design. Open to anyone at Duke, these workshops are free of charge and are not for curricular credit.