2010 4.2

While the purpose and direction of tools and tool development for the Digital Humanities have been debated in various forums, the value of tool development as a scholarly activity has seen little discussion. As a way of filling this gap, the authors conducted an online survey of developers of digital humanities tools in March 2008. The survey focused on their perceptions of their work, how they felt their tool development fit into a structure of academic rewards, and the value of tool development as a scholarly pursuit. Survey results indicate that tool development is indeed considered a scholarly activity by developers, but recognition of this work and rewards for it lag behind rewards for traditional scholarly pursuits (such as journal articles and book publication). This paper presents a summary of the results of the survey, ending with some suggestions for further research.

This extended interview between founding H-Urban editor Wendy Plotkin and H-Urban reviews editor Sharon Irish traces the early history of online scholarly communication via H-Net, H-Urban, and COMM-ORG, informed by Plotkin’s background as a planner and community activist in the 1970s and 1980s. After work with community development corporations on the East Coast, Plotkin entered graduate school in urban history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During this period in the early nineties, Plotkin had a job with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and then collaborated on the development of the forum that became H-Net. In addition to standards and protocols about new communication technologies, face-to-face relationships grew out of online exchanges, often with lively disagreements about the direction of H-Net. Plotkin’s own broadening use of digital tools prompts her concluding reflections on historians’ continuing need to use the Internet to overcome physical and intellectual fragmentation, and how the Internet has democratized the field of history.

Humanities scholars and librarians both confront questions regarding the boundaries of texts and the relationships between various editions, translations and adaptations. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Final Report from the International Federation of Library Associations has provided the library community with a model for addressing these questions in the bibliographic systems they create. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project has been investigating FRBR's potential as a model for the description of computer games and interactive fiction. While FRBR provides an attractive theoretical model, the complexity of computer games as works makes its application to such software creations problematic in practice.

The need for greater software literacy is a pressing problem, but one still not universally acknowledged even among those working in new media and digital humanities. In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin makes a compelling case that software studies as a field is not only an interesting avenue of research for new media specialists but also should increasingly be a basic activity of educated citizens in a 21st century democracy.

The New Edition of the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh on the Web is a review of the web edition of the complete authorial correspondence of the 19th century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh published by the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. While the print version, published by Thames & Hudson in the same year, received ample attention in the specialized and generalist press, the web edition enjoyed less publicity; this review considers the added value of the web version.