Getting Started in DH

There are many definitions of Digital Humanities and many potential paths to take if you wish to start a digital project of your own. Regular meetings of Philly DH, THATCamp Philly, PhillyDH@Penn, and other workshops and unconferences are a good way to become familiar with basic DH concepts and new work. But where can you turn online to find the tools or contacts that you need to get started?

Rather than reinvent the wheel, with links to leading tools and their applications, we offer a kind of “meta” list of sites that cover basic introductory information about the practice of DH from a number of different angles.

CUNY Academic Commons: A collaboratively produced introduction to DH from the CUNY DH Initiative.

Bamboo DIRT: An online registry of digital research tools for scholarly use to find and compare resources.

Humanities 3.0 Tooling Up for DH: An entryway for scholars interested in digital tools from Stanford University.

DevDH: A site to provide intellectual and strategic scaffolding for digital projects from the University of Maryland.

Oral Historians Digital Toolbox: A slightly older site (2010) dedicated to digital applications of oral histories from Carleton University, Canada.

Digital Humanities Answers: An online community-based Q&A board to address queries about DH projects.

Spatial Humanities Step by Step: A peer-reviewed series of tutorials on spatial tools and resources from the Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia.

ADHO: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. An international organization that promotes and supports digital research and teaching across all humanities disciplines.

Humanist Listserv: A Google Group discussion forum for the digital humanities community.

Day of DH: An annual open community publication project that addresses the question “just what do digital humanists really do?”

The Historians Macroscope: An ongoing project to introduce methods for the exploration of Big Data in history.

Digital History Methods in R: An in progress site for instruction in R.

If you know of sites that complement or could potentially supersede the sites listed here, please let us know. We hope this offering will be reasonably comprehensive for the needs of practitioners with different levels of expertise but not overwhelming in the number of options it provides.