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Digital Humanities

This guide provides an introduction to the extensive field of Digital Humanities (DH).

Learn About Your Topic

When starting your research, you'll need to get the big picture on your topic. One good way to go about this is to consult a reference source like the Folgerpedia DH Glossary or Wiki. Use this first stage as an opportunity to get deeply familiar with your topic: learn the specialized lingo, read about related topics, and identify key themes or issues. 

Search with Keywords

When you search for books, articles, and more, it is a good idea to carefully select keywords to reduce your results to only sources that are relevant to your topic. Because you've already familiarized yourself with the key themes of your topic, you'll probably have a handful of keywords to use. Use these tips to super-charge your search results:

  • use AND in between search terms to group them together (ex: "interactive AND timeline" searches for results that contain both key words)
  • use OR for more results (ex: "Content Management System OR CMS" shows results for both)
  • use NOT if you want to exempt a word from your results (ex: "animation NOT 3D" returns results for animation that is not three-dimensional)
  • use quotation marks "_" to isolate phrases (ex: "Point pattern analysis" returns results that have the exact phrase in the record content while ignoring results with just the words 'point,' 'pattern,' or 'analysis' independently)
  • use the wildcard * to get all versions of a word (ex: "map*" returns results for 'maps' as well as 'mappable.')

Research Methods

Search Specific Databases

The below databases are a good place to start when narrowing down your own DH research. These databases house many different publications and articles that cover the myriad kinds of DH and subjects related to DH. 


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