These pages will contain my (still in-progress!) guides on incorporating digital tools into the study of premodern South and Southeast Asia, and a link to my (prototype) tool unicodify.
“Digital humanities” often seems intimidating to get into. We often associate it with big-data, bells-and-whistles quantitative analytics. At times it can even seem like it’s trying to replace close reading with soulless algorithms. While that kind of “big data” approach can have really wonderful applications, I prefer to see digital humanities as a spectrum, along which we’re all already located. My tutorials are just meant to help our feel our way a little further along that spectrum, so that we have a clearer sense of what’s available to us. We already supplement our humanities skillsets with digital tools for research (library databases! scanned manuscripts!), analysis (annotation software!) and communication (Word! Powerpoint!)—so why not explore what other tools are out there?
In the tutorials below I’m focusing primarily on the tools that I know best, and which I incorporate into my scholarship nearly daily: relational databases, digital mapping and visualisation, and—to a lesser extent—text analysis. I’m using my own dissertation data as a case study, to help walk you through the processes that I find easiest and most helpful, but in a way that empowers you to try out these tools yourself, using your own data, to see what helps you do your best research. Along the way, I’m going to point out many other tools, tutorials, and neat examples that I’ve found helpful, in the hopes that you’ll be similarly inspired by all the excellent work that’s out there.
Why am I writing all of this out? Partly it’s to try and demystify digital humanities. It’s easy to believe that these tools are the esoteric domain of Elite Programmers, particularly when so many tutorials assume a familiarity with (or at least a willingness to extensively Google) endless and opaque jargon. But this needn’t be the case—as these tutorials will (hopefully) show, while some of the more powerful features of digital tools do require some tech-savvy, most are incredibly accessible.
I also want to provide a resource tailored to my specialist field, premodern South and Southeast Asian Studies. Many existing DH tutorials assume that all fields are as amenable to digital analysis as is, say, modern English Literary Studies, or even some subfields of East Asian Studies. These fields already have robust textual corpuses, and refined language processing tools specially developed for them; for those of us labouring with poorly stamped inscriptions, with manuscripts degrading in tropical heat, or with highly unstandardised scripts and languages, it can be frustrating to read a tutorial which just assumes that this is all already in place, and leaves you to fill in the blanks if not. I share your frustrations; what follows is how I’ve tried to overcome them.
More generally, I want to try and model good digitally-assisted scholarship. It’s very tempting, once we start to play with topic modelling and network visualisations and everything in between, to get very caught up in the process; to let the computer do our thinking for us, and to just marvel at the beautiful output. That might work for hyper-modern social sciences, and other “Big Data” fields. But for those of us with much “smaller data,” we need to be much more circumspect about how and why we’re deploying digital tools—to augment and facilitate, not replace, the critical and close reading which makes up the core of what we do. I hope that some of this care is apparent in what follows.
If you prefer watching and listening, I gave a talk on my approach to digital scholarship at Cornell in 2022. Otherwise, you can access my tutorials through the links below (links will be added as I finish writing them!):
databases
what is a database and why should we care?
designing a relational database in SQLite
querying relationships
visualising relational data in GEPHI
maps
why make our own maps when Google is so easy to screenshot?
starting from a blank canvas in QGIS
adding your own places and labels to your maps
integrating SQLite into your maps
finishing touches in Inkscape
