Discussion Questions for January 20: Creating and Using Digital Archives

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Don’t forget that we will be meeting on Tuesday, January 20 in the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library.  As you prepare to explore the archives, consider one or more of the following questions, or pose your own:

1) How do you define archive? What about digital archive? How might an archivist like Theimer define these terms?

2) How might you compare and contrast the Whitman, Watkin and Our Marathon Archives? Who assembled them, and why? Who are their audiences? What criteria were used to put together the collections? How are the collections organized? How are the objects described?

3) What do you think of Sternfeld’s notions of “quantum history” and “digital historiography”?

4) How might we assess digital archival records which are, as Sternfeld says, “defined in terabytes”? What would it mean to consider scope and provenance in the course of doing research using digital archives?

Questions for Jan 15, 2015: Evaluating Digital Humanities Projects

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In our session on January 15, we will be exploring digital humanities projects, including how they are made, what institutional structures are required to develop and sustain them, and how they relate to core research questions.  You might consider one or more of the following questions in your brief response, or pose your own:

  • Who do you think is the audience for A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities? How might this guide be recast for different audiences?
  • What does it mean to think of humanistic work as a “project”?
  • What criteria should we use in evaluating digital humanities project?
  • What project did you explore? What are its goals, and how well does it achieve them?

I look forward to the discussion.