A look at open digital humanities today | Opensource.com

"Welcome to the first installment of a monthly feature where I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I will take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities research and some humanities research projects that are using open source tools today. I'll also cover news about how transparency and open exchange, and the other principles of the open source way, being applied to the humanities. Let's start with an explaination of the digital humanities. The digital humanities is where traditional humanities scholarship—or, the academic study of arts, language, history, and the like—meets the digital age. By using technology in new and innovative ways, digital humanities scholars can create research projects that explore topics in ways that were not possible (or were extremely laborious undertakings) before computers. Text/data mining, visualization, information retrieval, and digital publishing are some of the key features of digital humanities research. With computers, it is possible to visualize the connection between famous figures in British history or find patterns in an author's complete body of work, like the University of Toronto's Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst did with the works of Agatha Christie (PDF), where vocabulary changes in her later works suggest she had Alzheimer's disease. In February this year, several interesting developments came to pass—new versions of software, new tutorials, the development of a new course, and a museum journal became open access. I've highlighted them each below. Perhaps one will inspire you in your understanding or research of the digital humanities ..."