Thinking Activity: Digital Humanities

Hello Readers ,

This blog is a part of my classroom thinking activity and this task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir.Digital Humanities is the part of the over syllabus and we have to look into that Havard university course. And we have to do one another activity is that one thematic activity from the CLiC Activity book.

First of all , i want to  clear the concept of Digital Humanities . So let's discuss ...

What is Digital Humanities ?

Digital humanities are at the leading edge of applying computer-based technology in the humanities. Initially called ‘humanities computing’, the field has grown tremendously over the past 40 or so years. It originally focused on developing digital tools and the creation of archives and databases for texts, artworks, and other materials. From these initial uses, and as computation developed, computers offered increasingly sophisticated ways of handling and searching digitised culture. For example, with recent advances in digital imaging, it is now possible to produce very high-quality reproductions of books and artworks that can transform our ability to study them.

The key to understanding the digital humanities is to reject the idea that digital technology is invading the academy. Computers were used for humanist ends from very early on in their history, and not only, as one might expect, as mere storage for large libraries of text. Computer networks, particularly the internet, have also enabled digital files to be used from almost anywhere on the globe. This access to information has had a tremendous effect on the ability to undertake research in the arts and humanities.

What is the need of Digital Humanities ? 

                            Digital humanities have a connection with the English departments. These are the reasons given by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum to explain what DH is doing in English Departments. 

We see the simultaneous explosion of interest in e-reading and e-book devices like the Kindle, iPad, and Nook and the advent of large-scale text digitization projects, the most significant of course being Google Books.

The openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis. 

A modest but much-promoted belle-lettristic project around hypertext and other forms of electronic literature that continues to this day and is increasingly vibrant and diverse.

The widespread means to implement electronic archives.

After numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable datatype for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.

There is the long association between computers and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage.

: Example :

           We have now a days mostly use of powerpoint presentation for teaching and business field also . PowerPoint presentation is useful tools for every person to explain thing easily. We are using digital tools everyday. Without digital tools we can't imagine our life during this time. So these all are digital humanities. We can get any information through the use of digital tools and within a few seconds we got all details & information. 

Activity 8.1 Picking out the character :

1. Go to the CLiC Concordance tab (http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concordance).

2. Select David Copperfield in the “Search the Corpora” box and select the

subset “All text”.

3. Enter Dick in the “Search for terms” box. Hit Return.

This will give you every occurrence in the novel. At this point, you might like to scan

down the lines of examples to see what strikes you about the presentation of Mr.

Dick in general. Are there any patterns or oddities that you can see?

 One pattern we noticed was that the verbs associated with Mr. Dick tend not

to have much agency. In other words, he is often the recipient of action or

comment by being placed in direct or indirect object position, or by appearing in a

prepositional phrase. Where he is associated with agentive verbs, their agency is

actually rather weak: leaning, yet lingered, and so on. His most active and agentive

verbs are perceptual or cognitive: he thought, anxiously watched. In general, this

builds up a picture of a character that cogitates, perceives, and is the recipient of

comment and action, but who does little materially himself.

 Of course, quite a lot of the examples occur within direct speech, where

other characters are talking about or addressing Mr. Dick directly. We can remove

these so that we focus on the narratorial characterisation:

Activity 9.3 Looking for Jane Austen chins

9. Go to the CLiC Concordance tab (http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concordance).

10. In the “Search the Corpora” box, click in the box and then scroll quite a way

down until you find a set of Jane Austen’s novels. Some are listed as part of

the “19th Century Reference Corpus” and some are right at the bottom of the

list. You can select all of these one after another.

11. In “Only in subsets”, make sure “All text” is selected.

12. In ‘Search for terms”, enter chin. Hit Return.

You now have three sets of frequencies for chin in different corpora. Obviously each

corpus has a different number of words, so you might like to work out the

percentage of chins for each of the three.

 You can then close in your analysis by looking carefully at specific textual

examples in each concordance line. If you click on the graphic below “In bk.” to

the right of each line, then CLiC will show you the line in the context of its chapter.

For a selected few examples, you might consider:

• Whose chins are being described?

• What types of adjectives are associated with them?

Going back to the activities in this section, you should find that the word chin occurs

relatively more frequently in the corpus of Dickens’s Novels (DNov) than in Austen’s.

You can show this with your simple percentage calculation. Whereas chin occurs

317 times in DNov, which contains 15 books, it only occurs 1 time in Austen, which

contains 7 books. This observation is already quite convincing, but we can also look

at the total number of words in the books. The table below shows that DNov has

around 3.8 million words. To get the ‘relative frequency’ of chin, we divide its

frequency of 317 by the total number of words (3,835,807). As this will give us a very

small number, we multiply it by 100,000 to give us an index number that we can work

with more easily. We can now say that chin occurs around 8.26 times per 100,000.words in DNov. For Austen, we follow the same procedure:

 The relative frequency of chin in DNov, 8.26 per 100,000 words, is much higher

than that in Austen, 0.25 per 100,000 words, so that we can conclude that the word

chin occurs relatively more often in Dickens’s than in Austen’s novels.

I have completed Hard University Course .

                     ... Thank You ...