Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.

Our project started with the intention of building a digital archive; the Archive 2.0 nature of the project surfaced when we realised that in order to build a useful archive, we would need to engage multiple stakeholder communities. In our project this meant working with the cultural stakeholders, the Samaritans, as well as academic stakeholders, including Samaritan and Biblical scholars. Initially we thought that applying Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, image tagging, etc, to a digital archive would be our most important contribution to the project. As the project unfolded and we identified stakeholder needs more precisely however, we realised that our role was as much about balancing stakeholders' representational needs as much as it was about the application of Web 2.0 technologies.

While Web 2.0 technology helps mitigate stakeholder needs, we see the work of Archive 2.0 as more about questions of procedure, methodology, and field work.

the present situation could be described as a continuous increase in the amount of material being published only in electronic form, together with wide-scale conversion of paper-based material to digital formats. And this tendency will only intensify in the coming decades, covering more and more geographical areas, countries and language groups. More and more librarians, image-processing specialists, and metadata creators will be involved in this process. Information Science specialists will develop and propose new algorithms for e-resource description, information discovery and retrieval.

This project, from the outset, could be characterised as unique for Armenia in its scale, the novelty of the decisions involved and the hardware deployed. The lessons learnt during the project’s implementation and the solutions that were adopted as a result served as a sound basis for initiating other digitisation projects in FSL. During the lifetime of the project, many technical difficulties were resolved, a lot of practical finesses were teased out of our mistakes, and we hope that this article will serve as a guide for practitioners who are initiating similar projects in their own organisations.

Three principal stages evolved during the project:

photographing the originals using a high-quality digital camera;
saving the images on the high-quality DVD discs (producing 2 copies for each material - Preservation Copy and Access Copy), and;
mounting the images with relevant metadata on the Web for public access.

The most vulnerable part of the camera is its shutter. After several thousand shots (usually 70,000 – 100,000), the camera shutter must be changed, and when preparing a budget for digitisation projects it is important to consult with the hardware supplier on possible repair and maintenance costs, and include these expenses as a separate line.

Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created, the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point. Different systems can be involved at different stages: one of them may be a repository. To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they must therefore be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle. In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one system.

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.

• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.

• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.

• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.

• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?

• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?

• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

Digital media are transforming literacy, scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities. Information technology is an integral part of the intellectual environment for all humanities faculty members, but for those working closely in new media it creates special challenges and opportunities. Digital media have expanded the objects and forms of inquiry of modern language departments to include images, sounds, data, kinetic attributes like animation, and new kinds of engagement with textual representation and analysis. These innovations have considerably broadened notions of language, language teaching, text, textual studies, and literary and media objects, the traditional purview of modern language departments.

While the use of computers in the modern languages is not a new phenomenon, the transformative adoption of digital information networks, coupled with the proliferation of advanced multimedia tools, has resulted in new literacies, new literary categories, new approaches to language instruction, and new fields of inquiry. Humanists are adopting new technologies and creating new critical and literary forms and interventions in scholarly communication. They also collaborate with technology experts in fields such as image processing, document encoding, and computer and information science. User-generated content produces a wealth of new critical publications, applied scholarship, pedagogical models, curricular innovations, and redefinitions of author, text, and reader. Academic work in digital media must be evaluated in the light of these rapidly changing technological, institutional, and professional contexts, and departments should recognize that many traditional notions of scholarship, teaching, and service are being redefined.

Faculty members who work in digital media or digital humanities should be prepared to make explicit the results, theoretical underpinnings, and intellectual rigor of their work. They should be prepared to be held accountable to the same extent that faculty members in other fields are for showing the relevance of their work in terms of the traditional areas of teaching, research, and service.