Resources
Table of contents
Guide to DH Resources 🧩
Doing digital history can be exciting and super rewarding. It can also feel pretty hard sometimes. That's normal! Everybody needs a little help now and then. You are going to feel stuck or have questions at some point in this semester. One of the most prominent goals I have for this course is to make sure you know where to find a helping hand. These resources can help you.
See also the Tech Help section for details on troubleshooting in this course as well as a number of tech services, tools, and spaces available through Temple.
Tutorials + Guides
- The Quartz Guide to Bad Data is "an exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data along with suggestions on how to resolve them."
- The Programming Historian publishes "novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive community of editors, writers, and readers."
- Tooling Up for the Digital Humanities is a Stanford initiative "designed to be a starting place, an entryway for scholars interested in beginning to explore the possibilities for digital tools, programs, and methods to empower and enhance their scholarship in the humanities."
- Crafting Digital History: A Workbook contains a lot of exercises and tutorials. This workbook was created by Shawn Graham and Rob Blades for a course at Carleton University in Canada.
- DH101: A Highly Opinionated Resource Guide by Miriam Posner is a great collection of tutorials and resources grouped by topic of interest.
- The DH Toychest was created by Alan Liu to gather many resources relating to digital humanities scholarship, including tutorials, lists of tools, DH examples, and datasets.
- TAPoR: "Discover research tools for studying texts."
- Oral History in the Digital Age is a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership project and collaboration among a bunch of universities. Find information on tools and best practices here.
- The Hacking the Humanities series of video tutorials were created for a course at the University of Leiden, and cover advanced topics like Python, Git and GitHub, and using the command line.
- Scott Weingart's Teaching Yourself to Code in DH is a list of lists of book-length introductory resources for programming in the humanities.
- Amanda Visconti's Starter Kit for Considering a DH Dissertation
Best Practices
- Best Practices for Creative Commons Attribution: "You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution."
- Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database helps you determine if your stuff is under copyright or within the public domain.
- Guide to Citations and Copyright compiled by the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.
- Digital Humanities Best Practices: Engaging a Collaborator guide from the NYU Institute of Fine Arts codifies milestones and responsibilities of collaborative work.
- Project Management for the Digital Humanities (PM4DH) breaks the work down into five stages, each with its own best practices and guidelines.
- Social Justice and the Digital Humanities is "a conversation on designing best practices for digital humanities praxis committed to social justice" administered by Roopika Risam.
- IDEO Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit is a free-to-download guide to human-centered user experience design and how it can impact the social sector.
Workshops + Training
- Workshops at Temple University's Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio are free and open to all students. Going to some or all of the workshops offered on a topic that you're interested in is a great way to brainstorm, learn, and meet other people who can help and/or collaborate. Find these on the Events Calendar.
- Spatial Humanities Workshop by Lincoln Mullen provides a thorough, hands-on walkthrough of the ins and outs of mapping and spatial scholarship in the humanities.
- THATCamp, "the Humanities and Technology Camp, is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot."
- Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) "is a 5-day training institute that includes keynotes, ignite talks, and local cultural heritage excursions for researchers, students, early career scholars and cultural heritage professionals who seek to learn more about Digital Humanities theory, practice, and culture."
- Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) "provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach."
Keeping up with the Latest
- DH + Data Luminaries on Twitter: Most of the prolific digital historians and humanists are active on Twitter, and it can be a great resource for finding out about new tools, projects, methodologies, debates in the field, conferences, and CFPs. I've curated this list to help you find some of them!
- Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) is "an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities."
- Digital Humanities Now "is an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Since 2009, DHNow has been refining processes of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review to open and extend conversations about the digital humanities research and practice."
- Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) "is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities."
- Frontiers in Digital Humanities "publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research from Digital History to Big Data, providing a community platform for the Humanities in the digital age."
Tech Help + Troubleshooting 🔌
You'll be introduced to a lot of tools and methodologies in this course which you may not have any experience with. A major portion of the class is devoted to becoming more familiar and comfortable with technical problem-solving tasks, many of which will involve the use of computers and digital technology. It is vital for you to know that you're going to encounter situations where something doesn't work the way it is supposed to. In those cases, it's your job to determine what the problem is, how you might attempt to fix it, and how you'll approach others for their assistance.
It will be frustrating, but it will be worth it, because when you leave this course, you'll take with you the following:
- A recognition of iteration, experimentation, and “failure” as an important, inherent part of the process of learning, making, and doing things that are worthwhile.
- Strategies for creating, evaluating, and analyzing multimodal projects.
- CV-ready, hands-on experience integrating the methods and tools of digital humanities into the advancement of research interests, scholarship, and professional goals.
Where to go for tech help
- If you're having trouble connecting to Canvas, Zoom, library resources, or any other service/platform that is administered through Temple, consult Tech Support for Online Courses
- If you're having issues with your computer and you think it might be "sick," contact Temple's Help Desk Clinic or a computer-support professional.
- If you're having internet connectivity issues, please let me know so that we can try to find a workaround to get you the resources you need.
- If you're looking for supplementary tutorials, check the DH Resources section.
- If you're playing around with a new tool and you can't figure out your next steps, first try posting to the Tech Help Slack channel.
- If we still can't solve the issue, I'll ask for you to make a screencast with Screencast-O-Matic to share with me so we can investigate together further.
Tech services offered at Temple
- The TECH Center makes a ton of software available for students to use without having to purchase a license or install on their own computers. They also provide a Multimedia Studio for photo and video shoots, audio recording, and media editing, and Private Recording Booths for audio recording sessions.
- Temple provides free-of-cost student licensing for several software applications including the Adobe Creative Cloud suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat, etc.) and Microsoft Office.
- TUScholarShare is a new open-access institutional repository for scholarly output, which students and faculty are invited to deposit.
- The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio maintains a VR/Visualization Studio and a Makerspace with 3D Printing capability that are both available to book this semester.
Academic Support at Temple 📚
Temple University Libraries
Temple University Libraries provide resources to assist Temple students with their class projects and research needs. Visit the Libraries’ website to find millions of articles, books, video, and other resources, both in print and online.
The site also provides tutorials to help you start your research, as well as subject and course research guides to help you identify resources that may be particularly useful for this class. Contact the library at any stage of the research process. You can chat with a librarian 24/7 or make an appointment with your subject librarian, who can help you explore a topic, craft a research question, and identify and cite sources.
Contacts
Rebecca Lloyd is the History department's subject-specialist librarian, and she can help with reference requests, finding sources, organizing research, and citation management. (She's very friendly and helpful!)
Duckworth Scholars Studio
Temple Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio offers spaces and resources for student and faculty consultations, workshops, and collaborative research in digital humanities, digital arts, cultural analytics, and critical making. Check the Scholars Studio’s library page for further information about our resources. See our LibGuides to get a sense of the digital methods we support.
We offer technical equipment, software, and support for a of digital methods for interdisciplinary research and pedagogy, including text mining and analysis, working in and creating 3D spaces, using geospatial technology, incorporating games into education, and much more.
Visit our Makerspace, VR Lab, Specialized Computing Lab, and Tech Sandbox on the third floor of the Charles Library to learn more.
Contacts
- Matt Shoemaker, Librarian & Coordinator of Digital Scholarship Service Development
- Alex Wermer-Colan, Digital Scholarship Coordinator
- Jasmine Clark, Digital Scholarship Librarian
Student Success Center
- The Student Success Center offers academic coaching, writing tutoring, and a host of other services for graduate students.
Career Center
- The Career Center provides career coaching, mock interviews, workshops, and professional development opportunities.
Well-Being 🌡️
Your success in this class is important to me. If there are circumstances that may affect your performance in this class – including personal, health-related, family-related, or any other type of difficulty - please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work together to develop strategies for adapting assignments to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course. You don't need to disclose or discuss anything that you don't feel comfortable with.
Additionally, I care about your well-being. Students experience any number of challenging circumstances that make it hard to make learning a first priority. Temple University has resources that may help and which you are entitled and encouraged to use when or if you need them. Please reach out to me, or the kind folks on the CARE Team, if you need support or guidance connecting to these resources or others.
Food Resources
Temple maintains the Cherry Food Pantry at 1601 Park Avenue (TU PD Morgan Substation). Other food access resources in Philadelphia can be found through the Philly Food Finder Food Access Guide. You may also be eligible to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Mental Health Resources
Temple's Tuttleman Counseling Services offers free and confidential services including group and individual counseling, psychiatric services, and specialized support for concerns relating to substance use and addiction (The Campus Alcohol & Substance Awareness--CASA), disordered eating and body image (The Eating and Body Image Concerns Team), and sexual violence (The Sexual Assault Counseling and Education unit--SACE). The Temple Psychological Services Center also provides assessment, therapy, and crisis response services on a sliding fee scale.
Sexual Health Resources
The Wellness Center at Temple provides HIV testing, safer sex supplies, and wellness consultations. Many options are in place for students to report and/or receive assistance following instances of sexual misconduct, including assault, harassment, stalking, and intimate partner violence. Several of these University-provided resources are completely confidential.
You should be aware that as a faculty member, I am a "mandated reporter," which means that I am required by law to disclose knowledge of sex/gender discrimination, sexual violence, or crime to the University's Title IX Coordinator so that they can ensure a victim receives resources and support, while also assessing the need for action to best provide for survivor and community safety. That means that while I will do everything in my power to provide support and guidance, I cannot promise to keep a disclosure of that nature strictly confidential.
Other Health Resources
Temple Student Health Services offers various testing and immunization services in addition to free or low-cost medical exams and care.
In accordance with the city of Philadelphia Board of Health’s new vaccine requirements, Temple University now requires all faculty, staff, students and contractors to receive the COVID-19 vaccine by Oct. 15, 2021. Students, faculty and staff can call 215-204-7500 to schedule an appointment to receive the vaccine at Student Health Services, 1700 N. Broad St., 4th floor. Appointments can also be made using the patient health portal. Keep up-to-date on vaccination information via the TU Coronavirus portal.
Temple University will continue to operate coronavirus testing sites on Main Campus and the Health Sciences Center to help keep students, faculty and staff healthy. Note that testing is done by appointment only and walk-ups will not be accepted. Use the patient health portal to register for appointments.
Housing Resources
The University's CARE Team stewards an Emergency Aid Fund that may be of help in dealing with housing insecurity. If you need immediate assistance, please call the 24-hour Project HOME Coordination Center Hotline at (215) 232-1984. The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency is offering a fourth phase of COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Other Financial Assistance
As part of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, students with exceptional financial need are eligible for additional financial aid grants through the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF II). HEERF II funds must be prioritized to provide emergency grants that may be used for any component of a student’s cost of attendance or for emergency costs that arise due to COVID-19.