Born Digital Primary Sources in DH

In my day job I work on digital preservation, that is, ensuring long term access to digital information. Aside from that, I spend a lot of time participating in and listening in on conversations in the digital humanities. I feel digital preservation and the digital humanities aren’t in nearly enough conversation.

There is a lot of work focused on analyzing digitized texts, but there remains surprisingly little focused on the study of a range of born digital materials. Interestingly, the folks doing most of the work with born digital materials often tend to be working in fields like sociology, anthropology and have more of an affinity with the social sciences. So, I’d love to have a session where we talked a bit about the kinds of research and scholarship humanists could do based on born digital materials.

I’ve got a few examples of different kinds of born digital collections to spark you’re imaginations;

I figure in the session we can discuss some of these examples, add some more to our list, and think about what kinds of research and perspectives that humanities scholars could bring into analysis and exploration of these and related sources.

 

Categories: Archives, Digital Literacy, Session Proposals |

About Trevor Owens

I'm a Digital Archivist in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. Before coming to the Library of Congress I was the community lead for the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and before that I worked for the Games, Learning, and Society Conference. I'm interested in how learning and knowledge work in online communities, video games and culture, and software tools for humanities scholarship. My training is in the history of science and science communication and digital history.