About
Demystifying Digital Humanities (DMDH) is an ongoing pilot program at the University of Washington to support graduate students and other members of the UW community working with digital humanities and multimodal scholarship. The centerpiece of the program is a series of workshops that provide a guided introduction to the points of intersection between traditional and digital humanities (DH), including how traditional humanities approaches and questions are used or translated in DH studies, and identifying major DH subfields and their goals.
These workshops are geared toward graduate students who are curious about digital humanities and interested in using digital humanities techniques but are not sure how to get started or are unclear about what digital humanities scholarship requires — but they are open to staff and faculty as well. Our goal — and an area which we count among our research interests – is to develop curriculum materials that provide a non-threatening starting point for DH self-development.
Each quarter’s workshops cover a different aspect of getting started— the autumn workshops will focus on professionalization, including developing an online scholarly identity, and finding other colleagues with similar interests. The winter workshops are oriented towards programming, and working with coding languages; and the spring sessions are all about project development and management.
DMDH was founded in 2012 by Paige Morgan and Sarah Kremen-Hicks, and originally funded by grants from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities and the UW Textual Studies program. In 2013, Simpson Center funding was renewed for a second year, and Brian Gutierrez joined DMDH as an organizer.
2012-13 Original Grant Application
2012-13 Annual Report
2013-14 Renewal Grant Application
Organizers
Brian Gutierrez is a PhD candidate in the English department, whose areas of research include Romanticism(s), Cultural Media Studies, and Digital Humanities. His dissertation, “An Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Rise of the Romantic Literary Celebrity,” traces the cultural and historical processes that give the rise of the modern celebrity apparatus, while providing three case studies that demonstrate its impacts on William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Joanna Baillie’s early literary careers. Brian’s dissertation employs traditional humanists as well as digital research methods and tools, such as GIS technologies, data/text mining, and network visualization programs. Brian is excited and honored to report that he has been nominated as a HASTAC scholar for a third year and will be blogging on HASTAC.org about building DH communities, digital projects and dissertations, and the visibility of DH across institutions from 2-year colleges to R1 universities. Email Brian (or brianrg AT uw DOT edu)
Sarah Kremen-Hicks is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Washington. She works on the application of digital humanities methodologies to the study of Victorian literature and aesthetics. Her current project involves the analysis of Victorian data structures as a way of understanding the economics of popular fiction in the nineteenth century. Email Sarah (or sarahkh AT uw DOT edu)
Faculty Sponsors
Tyler Fox (UW-IT)
Ann Lally (UW Libraries Digital Initiatives)
Brian Reed (English)
Helene Williams (I-School)
Míċeál Vaughan (English)
Stacy Waters (NELC)
Paige Morgan (co-founder, emerita) completed her Ph.D. in English and Textual Studies at the University of Washington in June 2014. Her dissertation, “Haggling with the Muses: Negotiating Value in 18th Century Poetry,” reveals how 18th-century English poets articulated a vernacular economic theory prior to more formal articulations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and other early economists. Her work in the digital humanities includes the creation of Visible Prices, an archive of literary and economic information. Her articles on digital humanities, William Blake, and textual studies, can be found in Romanticism and in the Palgrave anthology Sexy Blake.
Paige is expanding and adapting the Demystifying Digital Humanities curriculum at McMaster University’s Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, where she holds a CLIR postdoctoral fellowship. Visit her website, http://www.paigemorgan.net.