Doing a dissertation: how the Digital Humanities can help you

Doing a dissertation:
How the Digital Humanities can help you
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
University of Roehampton, 23 October 2014

More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities isn’t an
isolated academic
phenomenon. The
institutional and
disciplinary changes are
part of a larger cultural
shift, inside and outside the
academy, a rapid cycle of
emergence and convergence
in technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of
the Digital Humanities (2014)
www.bl.uk 2

Pieter Francois: Winner of British Library Labs 2013 Bob Nicholson: Winner of British Library Labs 2014
www.bl.uk 3

“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk 7

discipline
camp and
camps sentence
www.bl.uk 8

‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)
www.bl.uk 9

© Franco Moretti
Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)’,
Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009)
www.bl.uk 15

© Franco Moretti
Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)’,
Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009)
www.bl.uk 16

“Zotero’s citation functionality was always
imagined merely as bait: by providing this labor-saving
functionality, Zotero would encourage each user to move
her research into what amounted to a fully searchable and
shareable relational database that could be subjected
to text mining and other analysis. Here researchers could
begin to do truly remarkable and new things with their
evidence.”
Sean Takats, ‘Zotero Versus’, The Quintessence of Ham (6 May 2011)
www.bl.uk 17

Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative
Commons Licensed
www.bl.uk 21

Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://slidesha.re/1DwGUEs
www.bl.uk 27

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