1st Edition

Digital Humanities and Laboratories Perspectives on Knowledge, Infrastructure and Culture

Edited By Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Christopher Thomson Copyright 2024
    310 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Digital Humanities and Laboratories explores laboratories dedicated to the study of digital humanities (DH) in a global context and contributes to the expanding body of knowledge about situated DH knowledge production.

    Including a foreword by David Berry and contributions from a diverse, international range of scholars and practitioners, this volume examines the ways laboratories of all kinds contribute to digital research and pedagogy. Acknowledging that they are emerging amid varied cultural and scientific traditions, the volume considers how they lead to the specification of digital humanities and how a locally situated knowledge production is embedded in the global infrastructure system. As a whole, the book consolidates the discussion on the role of the laboratory in DH and brings digital humanists into the interdisciplinary debate concerning the notion of a laboratory as a critical site in the generation of experimental knowledge. Positioning the discussion in relation to ongoing debates in DH, the volume argues that laboratory studies are in an excellent position to capitalize on the theories and knowledge developed in the DH field and open up new research inquiries.

    Digital Humanities and Laboratories clearly demonstrates that the laboratory is a key site for theoretical and critical analyses of digital humanities and will thus be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners engaged in the study of DH, culture, media, heritage and infrastructure.

    Foreword

    David M. Berry

    The Promise of Laboratories: An Introduction to Digital Humanities Laboratories in the 21st Century

    Urszula Pawlicka-Deger and Christopher Thomson

    Part 1: Epistemological and Philosophical Perspectives

    1. A Nurturing Lab Model for Computational Literary Studies: An Inside Perspective from the BGU Literary Lab

    Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

    2. Are We There Yet? How a Lab Transformed from Traditional History of Science to a Computational Research Lab

    Julia Damerow and Manfred Laubichler 

    3. Droit de cité: The Digital Lab as Digital Milieu

    James Smithies, Patrick ffrench, and Arianna Ciula

    4. How to Avoid Being a DH Lab: The Stories of the Sussex Humanities Lab

    Anna-Maria Sichani, James Baker, Alice Eldridge, Tim Hitchcock, Ben Roberts, Suzanne Tatham, Amelia Wakeford, Jo Walton, Sharon Webb, and SHL team

     

    Part 2: Socio-Technical and Infrastructural Approaches

    5. More Than a Lab: Infra-structuring the Humanities in the Digital Studio

    Rachel Fensham, Natalia Grincheva, and Tyne Daile Sumner

    6. The Life of a Digital Humanities Lab

    Aaron Brenner, Sarah Connell, Jennifer Grayburn, Matthew Hannah, Brad Rittenhouse, and Brandon Walsh

    7. Initiating and Sustaining a Digital Humanities Laboratory in Nigeria

    Tunde Ope-Davies (Opeibi), Ayodele James Akinola, and Anthony Elisha Anowu

    8. Theory by Other Means? Prototypes in Digital Humanities Laboratories

    Rabea Kleymann

     

    Part 3: Collaborations

    9. Knowledge Transfer in Digital Humanities Labs: Laboratory of Innovation in Digital Humanities (LINHD-UNED)

    Maurizio Toscano, Salvador Ros Muñoz, and Elena González-Blanco Garcia

    10. Exploring dHeKalos: A Digital Heritage Lab for Building Up New Skills and Sharing Responsibilities with Cultural Institutions

    Paolo Clini, Emanuele Frontoni, Eva S. Malinverni, Ramona Quattrini, Chiara Mariotti, Romina Nespeca, and Roberto Pierdicca

    11. The Minimum Research Outcome: A Mechanism for Generating and Managing Projects in Labs

    Giorgia Tolfo, Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge, Ruth Ahnert, and Kaspar Beelen

    Part 4: Socio-Cultural Approaches

    12. Interdisciplinary Technology Communities: Using Feminist Epistemologies and Pedagogy in a DH Lab to Promote Social Good through Undergraduate Student Programming

    Jacquelyne Thoni Howard

    13. At Home in the Digital Humanities?

    Sara Woodbury, Elizabeth Losh, and Laura Beltrán-Rubio

    14. Digital Humanities Laboratories and its Discontents: Experiments and Perspectives from India

    Dibyadyuti Roy and Maya Dodd

    15. Digital Humanities Labs: Spaces for Innovation to Reconnect the Humanities with Society

    Esteban Romero-Frías and Lidia Bocanegra Barbecho

     

     

     

    Biography

    Urszula Pawlicka-Deger is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at King’s Digital Lab, King’s College London. She is conducting an ethnography of digital humanities laboratories combined with a critical analysis of infrastructure. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, a Fulbright scholar at Washington State University Vancouver, and a fellow at the University of Birmingham.

    Christopher Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa/New Zealand where he researches and teaches on digital methods in humanities research, and is currently the director of the UC Arts Digital Lab. He is part of the team that produced the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive, and has published on post-disaster archiving. He teaches and supervises students in literary studies, communications and data science.