On a previous version of my website (and in various Twitter threads) I wrote a bunch of tutorials, which are very slowly being migrated over here. These tutorials were aimed at humanities scholars who didn’t have a lot of exposure to digital skills, but who might still benefit from learning how to make nice maps or build a basic database.
“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?
