CPSC 689-606: Digital Humanities
Assignment: "State of the art" topic paper/presentation
Papers due Tuesday, October 24, 2006
In-class presentations on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 and Thursday, October 26, 2006
In this assignment, you will identify a topic of relevance to digital
humanities and will figure out what the current state of the art is in terms of
work addressing the topic.
To make sure that everyone is
working on different topics and that topics are of appropriate relevance and
size, we will have an open discussion in class about topics and will make
final assignment of topics at that time.
There are two "deliverables" for this assignment: a written paper
in scholarly
form
(about the
length of a standard Computer Science conference paper)
and a short (15 minute) in-class presentation. Items to be covered include:
- What is the topic? What is its importance? Is it handled in the
non-digital world and if so how?
- What are the issues? Who's working on them? What have they done? When
was the work carried out? What is available for others' use?
- What still needs to be addresed? How hard is it? Is anyone working on it?
- What are sources of information?
The paper should include correct and complete literature citations.
Some sample topics that came to my mind
are given here, but you are encouraged to think up your own:
- Characterizing differences in editions' typography
- Comparing published texts
- Dealing with damaged or delicate documents
- Determing authorship
- Digitally capturing and viewing very large or very small physical artifacts
- Digitization standards
- Issues of applying traditional library practices to digital objects
- Maintaining or replacing traditional notions of editorship and authority
- Ownership and control of materials
- Preservation
- Searching in handwritten manuscripts
- OCR of older printed works