Research System Infrastructure and Informatics Solutions for Digital Humanities

Extending the research from two previously funded IHR Seed Grants this project focuses on developing and enhancing easy-to-use digital interfaces and manuals so that digital tools can be implemented and used by future projects in digital computational HPS and digital humanities without a long learning curve or additional expense. A 2005 IHR Seed Grant “The Embryo Project” is an interdisciplinary effort concentrated on identifying and understanding the agents of change at work in the history of embryo research.  This current research endeavor will use the digital humanities knowledge and tools developed for the “Embryo Project” and apply them to the 2011 IHR seed grant project, “The Shakespeare Cognition Research Project.”  The Shakespeare project investigates how contemporary American audiences respond to nontraditionally cast productions of William Shakespeare’s plays through discursive analysis of audience surveys and is need of tools to code these surveys in reliable and objective ways that maps networks of responses linking specific actors, productions, plays, sets, settings, etc.  The Shakespeare Project aims to discover conceptual tools that can be used by scholars and theatre companies to gauge various aspects that alter audiences’ horizons of expectations. Building on these two projects, Research System Infrastructure and Informatics Solutions for Design, wishes to develop a range of solutions that span the life cycle of digital objects—from their creation, curation, analysis, and display. This project will attempt to develop a set of pipeline tools that can support projects in the digital humanities at ASU. Moreover, this project aims to develop and refine easy-to-use guidelines in the areas of Digital Objects, Ingest Layer, Storage Layer, API Layer, Access Layer, and Computational Tool Layer.

This project was sponsered by the Institute for Humanities Research.