scholarly journals Introduction: Digital History in African Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 269-274
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hart
Keyword(s):  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Digital History ◽  
Methodological Innovation ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis brief introduction to a special section on Digital History in African Studies situates three articles on recent digital humanities initiatives among African historians within the broader histories of the use of digital methodologies in the study of Africa. In particular, it highlights the way that Africanist digital scholarship sits at the intersection of digital historical representation, community engagement, and academic research. While Africanist digital history builds on the work of a much broader digital humanities community, historians of Africa also draw on their discipline’s long history of methodological innovation to raise important questions about the potential contributions and limitations of digital technologies in academic research.

From Street Corners to Social Media: The Changing Location of Youth Citizenship in Guinea

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clovis Bergère
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Youth Politics ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Youth Citizenship ◽  
Media Practices

Abstract:This study explores social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as emergent sites of youth citizenship in Guinea. These need to be understood within a longer history of youth citizenship, one that includes street corners and other informal mediations of youth politics. This counters dominant discourses both within the Guinean public sphere and in academic research that decry Guinean social media practices as lacking, or Guinean youth as frivolous or inconsequential in their online political engagements. Instead, young Guineans’ emergent digital practices need to be approached as productive political engagements. This contributes to debates about African youths by examining the role of digital technologies in shaping young Africans’ political horizons.

Mindset and Guidelines: Insights to Enhance Collaborative, Campus-wide, Cross-sectoral Digital Humanities Initiatives

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Gaffield
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Promising Practices ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of

At the heart of the emergence and development of the Digital Humanities has been the potential to move beyond the out-dated epistemological and metaphysical dichotomies of the later 20th century including quantitative-qualitative, pure-applied, and campus-community. Despite significant steps forward, this potential has been only partially realized as illustrated by DH pioneer Edward L. Ayers’ recent question, ‘Does Digital Scholarship have a future?’ As a way to think through current challenges and opportunities, this paper reflects on the building and initial use of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI). As one of the largest projects in the history of the social sciences and humanities, CCRI enables research on the making of modern Canada by offering complex databases that cover the first half of the twentieth century. Built by scholars from multiple disciplines from coast-to-coast and in collaboration with government agencies and the private sector, CCRI team members came to grips with key DH questions especially those faced by interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, cross-sectoral and internationally-connected initiatives. Thinking through this experience does not generate simple recipes or lessons-learned but does offer promising practices as well as new questions for future scholarly consideration.

scholarly journals Towards Digital Histories of Women’s Suffrage Movements: A Feminist Historian’s Journey to the World of Digital Humanities

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
Heidi Kurvinen
Keyword(s):  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Digital History ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Feminist Historian ◽  
Research Questions

This chapter discusses the various practical, epistemological and methodological issues of importance when a historical scholar with limited digital skills wants to take a step towards learning how to conduct digital analyses. As a feminist historian, the author combines this approach with a discussion of the relation of feminist research and digital humanities. In line with practice in feminist research, she uses a self-reflexive approach and asks how the increase in the understanding of digital methods influences research questions in feminist history. Do digital humanities tools transform the work as feminist historians? How can digital analyses develop the field of gender history in general and the history of feminism in particular? Can a scholar who has limited technological skills engage with an informed and critical discussion with digitised materials? In doing this the chapter provides an inside reflective history of the making of digital history.

scholarly journals Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Henry B. Lovejoy ◽  
Paul E. Lovejoy ◽  
Walter Hawthorne ◽  
Edward A. Alpers ◽  
Mariana Candido ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Controlled Vocabulary ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Digital History ◽  
Open Source Data ◽  
Source Data ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
History Of

Abstract Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

From Datum to Databases: Digital Humanities, Slavery, and Archival Reparations

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 429-448
Author(s):  
Robert Nowatzki
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
African American History ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
System Mapping

ABSTRACT This article examines several projects that apply digital technologies to the study of transatlantic slavery and assesses the potential benefits of these projects while also noting their limitations. It argues that despite the absence of race, and specifically African American history and culture, in much digital humanities scholarship, the study of slavery has been considerably enhanced and transformed by the work of archivists and digital humanities scholars who apply digital technologies to the study and representation of slavery and enslaved people. This subject must continue to be studied so that we understand not only the past but also slavery's impact on the present. Digital technologies such as databases and geographic information system mapping have been useful in helping us understand this chapter of human history more fully and in new ways. Digital applications to archival materials relating to transatlantic slavery not only increase access to these materials for students and researchers, but also offer ways of obtaining new insights into this topic. However, to enhance our understanding of the history of slavery and to be effective agents of progressive social change, such initiatives should be cognizant of how data analysis can be driven by false assumptions of neutrality and can unwittingly contribute to the reification and dehumanization of people of African descent that was characteristic of transatlantic slavery. Digital humanities as a field should both continue such digitizing initiatives and also use digital tools to create critical analyses of oppressive hierarchies to weaken or destroy them.

The Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Alvesson ◽  
Yiannis Gabriel ◽  
Roland Paulsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Prestigious Journal ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

This chapter introduces ‘the problem’ of meaningless research in the social sciences. Over the past twenty years there has been an enormous growth in research publications, but never before in the history of humanity have so many social scientists written so much to so little effect. Academic research in the social sciences is often inward looking, addressed to small tribes of fellow researchers, and its purpose in what is increasingly a game is that of getting published in a prestigious journal. A wide gap has emerged between the esoteric concerns of social science researchers and the pressing issues facing today’s societies. The chapter critiques the inaccessibility of the language used by academic researchers, and the formulaic qualities of most research papers, fostered by the demands of the publishing game. It calls for a radical move from research for the sake of publishing to research that has something meaningful to say.

scholarly journals Returning urban political elites to the research agenda: the case of the Southern Low Countries (c. 1350 – c. 1550)

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-588
Author(s):  
Frederik Buylaert ◽  
Jelten Baguet ◽  
Janna Everaert
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

Indian concepts of human personality in relation to the doctrine of the soul

1988 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Werner
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The Individual

Among the popular misconceptions which still linger in the minds of many people who are interested in the study of different religious systems, who are personally involved in one of the growing Hindu- or Buddhist-based modern religious movements, or who even do academic research in the field of the history of religions, is the rather simplistic view that Hinduism teaches the existence of a transmigrating individual soul, but that Buddhism denies it. At the same time it is well known that Buddhism, like Hinduism, teaches the rebirth of the individual in successive lives, in combination with the doctrine of moral retribution for his deeds in this or the next life or in subsequent lives according to the laws of karma, whose operation can be summed up rather well by the use of the biblical saying: “as you have sown so you will reap”.

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