In a compelling blog post several months ago, Tom Scheinfeldt suggested “that we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.” To what extent will the availability of massive amounts of digital information, along with tools to organize, visualize, analyze, and disseminate that information, catalyze changes in research methods in the humanities? Since THAT Camp is bringing together folks representing a range of fields—history, philosophy, English, Chinese, library science, anthropology, classics, archaeology, American studies, museum studies, media studies, and even biophysics—I’d love to participate in free-wheeling discussions about emerging research methods. Indeed, I think that questions about research methods will underlie many of the conversations we will be having at THAT Camp, whether we’re talking about visualization, text analysis, gaming, teaching, or history appliances.

Let me toss out some questions to consider:

1. What are the core research methods in different humanities fields?
2. What is the impact of information technology on those fields?
3. What new research methods are emerging? And how are traditional research methods being affected by the availability of new tools and resources?
4. As new forms of evidence—e.g. text mining results, visualizations, and simulations—and new forms of scholarly communication—e.g. videos, blogs, hypertext essays—emerge, to what extent will the conventions of scholarly argumentation change?
5. What kind of training programs should universities develop to prepare students to do research in the digital environment?
6. What kind of support do researchers need from academic departments, libraries, information technology groups, funding agencies, scholarly societies, etc.?

I find questions about research methodology fascinating (and overwhelming), but my interest in this topic grows out of three particular projects:

1) In collaboration with a colleague in the library and a professor in the English department, I’m developing a series of workshops on research methods for graduate students in English. I’m planning to infuse the workshops with digital humanities goodness, but I’m still trying to figure out what the students need to know and how best to cultivate that knowledge.
2) To explore what it means–and takes–to produce digital scholarship in the humanities, I’m remixing my 2002 dissertation on bachelorhood in 19th C American culture as a work of digital scholarship. So far I’ve determined how many of the works on my original bibliography are available online, experimented with text analysis tools, and begun working on a short video based on my article on the publication history of Reveries of a Bachelor, a key bachelor text. I’m blogging my questions and observations both about my project and about digital humanities scholarship in general at digitalscholarship.wordpress.com, and I’m sharing my raw research notes at lisaspiroresearchnotes.wordpress.com

3) I manage Rice’s Digital Media Center, which aims to support digital scholarship by providing access to tools and training. I view one of my key duties to be helping researchers identify and learn how to use tools appropriate for their projects, such as bibliographic software and collaborative apps. To promote awareness of such tools, my colleagues and I are in the process of launching the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki, which is both a directory of research tools and a collection of concise reviews written with researchers in minds. As I work on this wiki, I’m wondering how to connect tools to research methods; the kinds of questions researchers ask should drive the selection of tools and not vice versa.

I’d welcome questions and suggestions related to any of these projects, and look forward to learning more about everyone’s work. I’m hoping that I’ll come away from THAT Camp with new ideas and energy—and perhaps some new collaborators as well?

Tags: research methods

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.