Guide to DH Resources

Doing digital history can be exciting and super rewarding. It can also feel pretty hard sometimes. That’s normal! Everybody needs a little help now and then. You are going to feel stuck or have questions at some point in this semester. One of the most prominent goals I have for this course is to make sure you know where to find a helping hand. These resources can help you.

See also the Tech Help page for details on troubleshooting in this course as well as a number of tech services, tools, and spaces available through Temple.

Finding Data

Finding historic/historical/heritage data can be challenging.

Consult a spreadsheet of data source suggestions and add new sources as comments, as you find them!

Tutorials + Guides

Can’t get something to work? Want to play around with a new tool?

The Quartz Guide to Bad Data is “an exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data along with suggestions on how to resolve them.”
The Programming Historian publishes “novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive community of editors, writers, and readers.”
Tooling Up for the Digital Humanities is a Stanford initiative “designed to be a starting place, an entryway for scholars interested in beginning to explore the possibilities for digital tools, programs, and methods to empower and enhance their scholarship in the humanities.”
Crafting Digital History: A Workbook contains a lot of exercises and tutorials. This workbook was created by Shawn Graham and Rob Blades for a course at Carleton University in Canada.
DH101: A Highly Opinionated Resource Guide by Miriam Posner is a great collection of tutorials and resources grouped by topic of interest.
The DH Toychest was created by Alan Liu to gather many resources relating to digital humanities scholarship, including tutorials, lists of tools, DH examples, and datasets.
TAPoR: “Discover research tools for studying texts.”
Oral History in the Digital Age is a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership project and collaboration among a bunch of universities. Find information on tools and best practices here.
The Hacking the Humanities series of video tutorials were created for a course at the University of Leiden, and cover advanced topics like Python, Git and GitHub, and using the command line.
Scott Weingart’s Teaching Yourself to Code in DH is a list of lists of book-length introductory resources for programming in the humanities.
Amanda Visconti’s Starter Kit for Considering a DH Dissertation

Best Practices:

Best Practices for Creative Commons Attribution: “You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution.”
Stanford’s Copyright Renewal Database helps you determine if your stuff is under copyright or within the public domain.
Guide to Citations and Copyright compiled by the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.
Digital Humanities Best Practices: Engaging a Collaborator guide from the NYU Institute of Fine Arts codifies milestones and responsibilities of collaborative work.
Project Management for the Digital Humanities (PM4DH) breaks the work down into five stages, each with its own best practices and guidelines.
Social Justice and the Digital Humanities is “a conversation on designing best practices for digital humanities praxis committed to social justice” administered by Roopika Risam.
IDEO Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit is a free-to-download guide to human-centered user experience design and how it can impact the social sector.

Workshops + Training:

Want to dig in deeper?

Find dozens of free or low-cost events and workshops on the Events Calendar. All are optional, and all are eligible for the Skills Workshop Attendance assignment.
Workshops at Temple University’s Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio are free and open to all students. Going to some or all of the workshops offered on a topic that you’re interested in is a great way to brainstorm, learn, and meet other people who can help and/or collaborate. Find these on the Events Calendar.
Spatial Humanities Workshop by Lincoln Mullen provides a thorough, hands-on walkthrough of the ins and outs of mapping and spatial scholarship in the humanities.
THATCamp, “the Humanities and Technology Camp, is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.”
Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) “is a 5-day training institute that includes keynotes, ignite talks, and local cultural heritage excursions for researchers, students, early career scholars and cultural heritage professionals who seek to learn more about Digital Humanities theory, practice, and culture.”
Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) “provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach.”

Keeping up with the Latest:

DH moves fast! Here are resources to keep up with developments in the field.

DH + Data Luminaries on Twitter: Most of the prolific digital historians and humanists are active on Twitter, and it can be a great resource for finding out about new tools, projects, methodologies, debates in the field, conferences, and CFPs. I’ve curated this list to help you find some of them!
ADHO’s DH Events Calendar: “A calendar of conferences and events for people doing digital work in museums, libraries, archives, universities, and humanities departments and centers.”
Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) is “an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.”
Digital Humanities Now “is an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Since 2009, DHNow has been refining processes of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review to open and extend conversations about the digital humanities research and practice.”
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) “is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities.”
Frontiers in Digital Humanities “publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research from Digital History to Big Data, providing a community platform for the Humanities in the digital age.”