At universities and colleges worldwide the creation of research institutes, centers or labs as well resources relating to the Digital Humanities (DH) has been under way for at least the past two decades. National and international research groups, networks, journals, and conferences communicate the results of such research while offering the current state of affairs, trends, and new developments. For our companion guide on DH see Digital Humanities – Research, Teaching, and Learning in which we note:
"The DH comprises multiple domains energized by productive cross-fertilizations as it explores the innovative use of technology and computation in arts and humanities research both as a method of inquiry and as a means of dissemination. This in turn leads to highly collaborative initiatives that foster connections as well as new and diverse relationship across disciplines within a large part of the academic institution, as well as worldwide. It channels interest in rethinking the humanities in new and creative ways ."
The current availability of a boundless number of digitized resources, as well the ongoing development of new technologies, a substantial number of humanities scholars and researchers from different research areas are now cooperating with computer scientists in increasingly large projects.
At the very least, a DH Project Plan includes the following components:
Formulating the Project’s Guiding questions
Identifying collaborative opportunities
Developing a data management and sustainability plan
Developing your budget plan and exploring grant funding opportunities
Implementation
This Research Guide focuses on the creation, development, and dissemination of DH projects in many areas of research in the humanities.
Currently, DH projects are frequently collaborative projects that involve many scholars, evolve over time, and contain components that do not always fit neatly into traditional forms of scholarly publishing. Most successful DH projects begin with a Principal Investigator who has an idea or a research problem, and who has determined that such a research will benefit from a digital approach.
Prior to the dissemination of a DH project's results, the following steps in a DH project development include:
Ideation --> Digitization of sources --> Data collection --> Data preparation, Data modeling --> Analysis --> Implementation --> Evaluation and Lessons Learned --> Project Dissemination and Preservation.
Digital methods used in the development of DH projects enable scholars to ask questions that are difficult to answer using non-digital methods, due to the size or complexity of the source material. Digital methods are not always quantitative. Scholarly digital editions, for example, use digital methods to support the manual production of texts that are designed to be read.
DH projects often involve creating software tools. A typical Digital Humanities project uses both digital methods and non-digital methods in its research design, methodology, and dissemination plan by making the products of its research (e.g., high quality data and datasets; tools; web apps, to name a few) publicly available (under an open access license) to scholars to use.
The outputs of a Digital Humanities project are often:
Sources:
Creating and Publishing Projects (University of Texas (Austin) Libraries).
What is a Digital Humanities Project? (Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, UK).
For additional listings, see our Page: Examples of notable large-scale digital humanities projects