Yesterday, I attended the GCDI’s workshop on “Tools of Digital Humanities”, taught by Tuka Al-Sahlani. This hourlong workshop offered a survey of five pillars in DH scholarship, with demonstrations of some open-access, minimal computational tools that can be used to support DH practitioners. In order to address a range of tools as they relate to the needs of DH projects, Tuka focused on five components of DH: digital pedagogy, data visualization, mapping, digital archives, and digital publishing. Before we dove into the tools associated with each of these categories, Tuka offered us examples of DH projects that fit into each one. This helped our group consider what types of projects, research, and work are included in the umbrella of DH. This consideration speaks to the persistent challenge of defining DH, and I liked that this workshop used practice as a means of finding a definition. 

As Sarah mentioned in her workshop blog post, one of the tools our group looked at was Voyant, a text analysis tool that featured in this week’s readings. Learning about text can be uploaded into Voyant, I thought about how other tools – like Scrapy – can be essential to furnish the textual data needed to run an analysis. Using tools in conjunction with one another underscores the value of interdisciplinary skillsets for DH scholars: with a basic understanding of Python, someone will be better equipped to extract and study the exact text they need for a project. Following our unit on open access, I felt curious about the potential benefits and downsides to open access DH tools. For example, does uploading a text into Voyant mean that this text is now part of the public domain? Who can view the results of users’ analyses? Do independent projects contribute to a larger knowledge database? I would love to learn more about the privacy measures guaranteed (or not) by open access tools like Voyant. 

The open and public nature of many DH tools was impressive to me. At one point, Tuka mentioned that UMap, a digital mapping tool, was preferred by users for being more ethical than its peer sites (like Google Maps). This comment made me think about how community input can be instrumental in regulating ethical standards in scholarship. So many DH tools rely on collaboration in order to be taught, supplemented, and improved; and it seems that community stakeholders also play a role in ensuring the integrity (and thus, usability) of DH tools. This form of practice and participation reflects debates in the more general field of DH, where the scholars we’ve read in class are constantly questioning who is able to engage with DH and to what ends. Ultimately, Tuka concluded, digitization should aim to bring disparate materials into a cohesive narrative. The tools we explored in the workshop can help us capture data, analyze data, display data, and then make the information derived from these steps meaningful to a wider audience.