0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge  (Page 6/10)

Instead of facilely dismissing either the critical work of the humanities or the potentialities afforded by new technologies, we must be engaged with the broad horizon of possibilities for building upon excellence in the humanities while also transforming our research culture, our curriculum, our departmental and disciplinary structures, our tenure and promotion standards, and, most of all, the media and format of our scholarly publications. While new technologies may threaten to overwhelm traditional approaches to knowledge and may, in fact, displace certain disciplines, scholarly fields, and pedagogical practices, they can also revitalize humanistic traditions by allowing us to ask questions that weren't previously possible. We see this, for example, in fields such as classics and archaeology, which have widely embraced digital tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and 3D modeling to advance their research in significant and unexpected ways. We also see it in text-based fields like history and literature, which have begun to draw on new authoring, data-mining, and text-analysis tools for dissecting complex corpora on a scale and with a level of precision never before possible.

While the first wave of Digital Humanities scholarship in the late 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure, the current second wave of Digital Humanities—what can be called “Digital Humanities 2.0”—is deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is “born digital” and lives in various digital contexts. While the first wave of Digital Humanities concentrated, perhaps somewhat narrowly, on text analysis (such as classification systems, mark-up, text encoding, and scholarly editing) within established disciplines, Digital Humanities 2.0 introduces entirely new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies, and even new publication models that are often not derived from or limited to print culture.

Let me provide a couple of examples based on my own work on a web-based research, educational, and publishing project called HyperCities ( (External Link) ). Developed through collaboration between UCLA and USC, HyperCities is a digital media platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city spaces such as Berlin, Rome, New York, Los Angeles, and Tehran. It brings together scholars from fields such as geography, history, literary and cultural studies, architecture and urban planning, and classics to investigate the fundamental idea that all histories “take place” somewhere and sometime and that these histories become more meaningful and valuable when they interact with other histories in a cumulative, ever-expanding, and interactive platform. Developed using Google's Map and Earth APIs, HyperCities features research and teaching projects that bring together the analytic tools of GIS, the geo-markup language KML, and traditional methods of humanistic inquiry. An Application Programming Interface (API) allows programmers to build on, customize, and incorporate existing software code into their own applications. In 2005, Google released its map API, which let programmers invent their own mapping “mash-ups” using the basic content and technologies developed by Google. The central theme is geo-temporal analysis and argumentation, an endeavor that cuts across a multitude of disciplines and relies on new forms of visual, cartographic, and time/space-based narrative strategies. Just as the turning of the page carries the reader forward in a traditionally conceived academic monograph, so, too, the visual elements, spatial layouts, and kinetic guideposts guide the “reader” through the argument situated within a multi-dimensional, virtual cartographic space. HyperCities currently features rich content on ten world cities, including more than two hundred geo-referenced historical maps, hundreds of user-generated maps, and thousands of curated collections and media objects created by users in the academy and general public.