What Digital Humanists Also Do

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Following up on [an earlier post]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2016/05/what-digital-humanists-do.html), here are two more user stories from digital humanists to help us figure out what they need and how we can help.

Gamma

Gamma is a senior scholar working on two projects. The first looks at communities of workers and architects in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, and relies on records of specific buildings, diaries of artisans, sketches, and building plans (some of which are very large: the width of a sidewalk, and the length of a city block). The end goal is to learn about the people who created the buildings, who they did the work with, the processes they used, what they were paid, and so on, and more broadly to understand the social network of people involved in creating the great buildings of the time.

What Digital Humanists Do

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have started gathering user stories from humanists to give us a better sense of what they do and how (or whether) our kind of skills training might help. Two of these are summarized below; there's a lot to think about, but the most important observation is that DH really is different in important ways from what Software and Data Carpentry have been doing so far.

Alpha

Alpha is studying the meeting of cultures in a text which mixes vernacular (Judaeo-Provençal) and Hebrew. The text’s author was a physician, and says in the introduction that the vernacular was for women and children, while the Hebrew was for men. The text exists in only one hand-written manuscript from 1401, which is based on the book of Esther used in the Purim holiday.

Digital Humanities on The Carpentries

What Digital Humanists Also Do

Gamma

What Digital Humanists Do

Alpha