Team 3 Project 1

Overview of Identification and Context

Our team’s goal for this project is to evaluate the relationship between History and the Digital Humanities through our chosen project and tools. This is a required project assigned to us by Professor Cream in our DHM280 class, during the spring of 2022. History as a discipline requires the digital humanities to create a structured model of events of the past using digital tools and the power of cooperation in a digital setting. The goals of history align with digital humanities, as both entail the analysis, protection, sharing, and publicizing of data, as well as international communication to source and collect cultural data.

Overview of Discipline

History is the discipline we chose for our project. History is the study of past events. Historians ask various questions such as “what happened?”, “why did it happen?”, and “how do we know it happened?” This discipline relates to culture because it helps us uncover and understand events from the past and how they have shaped these cultures over time.

With this discipline, events from the past can be studied in chronological order describing points in time at any location. Researchers examine different artifacts such as documents (old diaries, journals, etc..) and objects (art, tools, clothing, etc…) that are critically examined to determine what, where, and why certain events took place

The discipline of history requires collaborative research and the use of tools to skillfully analyze a point in space and time. Digital humanities is assisting to the historical field as one of the primary ways to study history through the use of digital tools and projects Digital Humanities helps us to understand history better through projects made by historians in an effort to encourage readers to want to learn about past events and understand them. The project our team chose, ‘Dharma and Punya’, was created by multiple people using digital artifacts and databases.

Tool

Neatline is a tool commonly used for projects focused on historical events.

This tool makes it easier to create a timeline as it guides you through the process of making your own, whether it’s from ancient history or in the future. People are able to create and share timelines that help people understand and contextualize history, as well as interact with the timeline. Neatline makes collaborating with others easy and effective. The importance of this tool in Digital Humanities is that it provides a visual for others to see what events happened at what specific time.

Project

Dharma and Punya – Buddhist Ritual Art of Nepal

This Project highlights Nepal’s artistic heritage as a rich and enduring continuation of India Buddhist traditions. The data was organized using many tools designed for digital humanities and with the value of collaboration.

Our goal is to synthesize the use of tools and methods used in this project through digital artifacts and databases Ritual was, and is, a very important part of Buddhism. This project features ritual implements as well as artifacts such as paintings, texts, sculptures created over the last millennium. It is essentially an art history project that demonstrates the centrality of ritual in Buddhism, showing how illustrated narratives and common practices address every devotee’s need to make good karma (puṇya), a central tenet of the Buddha’s teaching (dharma). The project highlights Nepal’s artistic heritage as a rich and enduring continuation of Indic Buddist traditions. The data was organized using many tools designed for digital humanity use and collaboration. Within this project is a historic exhibition of contributions of Kathmandu Valley artisans through the development of Tibetan Art.

Values

Collaboration is a value of much importance in the field of history. “Historians have recorded events of the past, either in writing or by passing on an oral tradition, and have attempted to answer historical questions through the study of written documents and oral accounts. From the beginning, historians have also used such sources as monuments, inscriptions, and pictures” (wikipedia). Collaboration is heavily involved because it is common for historians to work together on research, use each other’s research to build off of, and study certain artifacts that were founded by other people. We would not know the past if people worked alone to understand it.

Digital humanities also relies on collaborative efforts to make projects possible. Our chosen project was not built by one person. There are multiple curators, sponsors, and lenders involved that made this project possible. Digital humanities is not reliable or useful without collaboration and different perspectives.

Two of the “curators” for this project are Jinah Kim and Tom Lewis. Kim is a professor of history and art at Harvard, and Lewis is a professor of arts and humanities and professor of religion at Holy Cross.

Goals

The project was made to inform and help others understand the Buddhist ritual art of Nepal. Digital Humanities plays a role as the project provides a variety of different topics to learn about, such as the different ritual objects that are made and the common rituals that are practiced. The group members in this project even included events that you could attend to learn more about the different art and rituals that were made and practiced.

Scholarship (Peer Reviewed Article)

Wijfjes, H. (2017). Digital Humanities and Media History: A Challenge for Historical Newspaper Research 1. TMG Journal for Media History, 20(1).

ABSTRACT

Digital humanities is an important challenge for more traditional humanities disciplines to take on, but advanced digital methods for analysis are not often used to answer concrete research questions in these disciplines. This article makes use of extensive digital collections of historical newspapers to discuss the promising, yet challenging relationship between digital humanities and historical research. The search for long-term patterns in digital historical research appropriately positions itself within previous approaches to historical research, but the digitization of sources presents many practical and theoretical questions and obstacles. For this reason, any digital source used in historical research should be critically reviewed beforehand. Digital newspaper research raises new issues and presents new possibilities to better answer traditional questions.

Evaluation and Conclusion

History has been created every single day since the beginning of time. Although there have been ways that researchers discovered different artifacts without any technology back then, the use of tools today are able to help researchers accomplish tasks that couldn’t be accomplished decades ago, as well as learning more about their findings. The tool used in this project will be able to help researchers pinpoint where events took place leading up to the artifacts they have found.