KCL • CCH • Minor programme • AV1000 • Electronic communications and publishing

AV1000
Fundamentals of the digital humanities
Exercises in finding things online

The following are typically broad topics you might encounter in typical academic research. Using the techniques already described, find for each of the following at least 10 journal articles, books and any other available resources suitable to support high-quality academic research—not simply web-pages. Look in particular for sources useful to someone who is not already working in the particular area of research but who needs to familiarize him- or herself with it sufficiently to be able to make intelligent comments.

For each of the resources you locate, give full bibliographic information, including the URL of any online resources. Wherever possible capture relevant articles. In some cases you may wish to look significant words up in a dictionary; the Oxford English Dictionary is recommended.

  1. History as performance or theatre, not the history of performance or theatre.
  2. How Europeans' view of the world during the Age of Exploration was affected by what explorers discovered (for example, very different kinds of people, sources of great wealth, strange plant-life).
  3. How ideas of sickness, disease and mortality are reflected in art and literature.
  4. The various meanings and contexts evoked by the idea of “saturation”; the fields of study where this idea is deployed, and the role it plays in them.
  5. The idea of “distributed cognition”, i.e. that thinking takes place not simply in the head but in a physical environment, in part by interaction with the objects in that environment.
  6. Oral history: what it is, how it is done, how it differs from history written from documents and in what disciplines its practice is found.
  7. The nature and function of blogging and related kinds of informal online publishing.
  8. The study of music with the help of computing; in particular, how music stored in a database (as sound and/or as scores) may be retrieved.
  9. Figures of speech (or “tropes”) in the study of literature.
  10. The relation of form (outward structure, representation, format) and content (inner structure, meaning, significance): in what disciplines this is of interest and how each considers it.
  11. Applications of the terms “synchronic” and “diachronic”: what they mean, in what fields and to what kind of data they are applied.

revised October 2007