Arnold, Taylor and Lauren Tilton. 2019. New Data? The Role of Statistics in DH. Debates in the Digital Humanities.
This resource expands on the idea of how data visualization acts as a theoretical framework for understanding the graphics of digital humanities projects. It is important because it emphasizes statistical visualizations and their ability to make large datasets interpretable and highlight specific aspects of one’s research. For our project, we found this resource useful because it guided our approach in thinking of data visualizations that could best answer the questions we had about our data sets, for example, a word map to emphasize most common genres of music. It also guided the services, software, and code we decided to use to create our visualizations.
Clement, Tanya and Daniel Carter, 2017. Connecting Theory and Practice in Digital Humanities Information Work. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
This resource describes the field of digital humanities, the kind of work digital humanists undertake, and the impact of this work in the general humanities and beyond. This is important because it helps provide context and information on what exactly digital humanities entails, and its relationship to other fields. For our project, this was valuable because it helped drive our research into our dataset, especially in formulating the kinds of questions digital humanists might be interested in. In addition, we were better able to understand the bigger picture of creating this kind of project, and how multiple disciplines and fields were integrated.
Manovich, Lev. 2017. Aesthetics, "Formalism," and Media Studies, in Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray, eds., Keywords in Media Studies (New York: NYU Press).
This resource describes the connotation and meaning behind the word “aesthetics” in different contexts and its extremely important relation to media studies. This resource is important because it touches upon aesthetics and beauty, which are often overlooked or unstudied in media and communication theory today, but in actuality, understanding the “form” of media studies is highly relevant knowledge. For our project specifically, this work was valuable because it reminded us of designing our mini-site in a visually appealing way that could still be efficient in portraying the data in an easy to understand manner. Furthermore, we were able to see firsthand the role of aesthetics in designing digital humanities projects, and how we gave much thought to the form of our visualizations.
Williams, George H., 2012. Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities. Debates in the Digital Humanities.
This resource calls attention to disability studies and the advent of new tools available to digital humanists that should be incorporated to better fit a universal design for their projects. This is important because oftentimes, digital humanist projects can be very visually reliant, which excludes a proportion of individuals from being able to interact with the project to the fullest, but this resource reminds readers of trying to be inclusive of people with any sort of disabilities. For our project, we tried to keep a universal design approach for our mini-site to the best of our abilities - this was demonstrated by incorporating videos that could be interpreted both by vision and sound, large text for labeling and titles, and alt-text for images. For the future, we can add more assistive technology to better accommodate individuals with disabilities.