This week sees the final stage of our Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age (AHDA) programme. As part of the two-day event in central London, we will be examining web authoring, and its implications for digital humanities practitioners.
As well as understanding the languages of the web, the standards, issues around accessibility and design, our workshop also seeks to explore why researchers would want to create websites around their work. One type of website that has received attention is the blog. Sara Kjellberg’s fascinating article (2010) in First Monday is a good example of research that investigates the audience, function and motivation of and for such websites.
For digital humanities practitioners, the spirit of openness is vital. Digital methods, tools and approaches are distributed and interdisciplinary. Occasionally, they can appear to be ‘black-boxed’, in that there are inputs and outputs, but little or no knowledge of the processes that occur in between. Good digital humanities scholarship, I argue, should be ‘glass boxed’; researchers should be able to see what is happening with the inputs to create the outputs.