Digital humanities, libraries, and collaborative research: New technologies for digital textual studies

Abstract

How can librarians at college and undergraduate libraries contribute to digital humanities research? This study describes The Greek Key, a working prototype Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the analysis of texts and manuscripts. This paper explains how the VRE functions through a case study of passages in Plato and the Book of Genesis. The Greek Key VRE is a collaborative, scalable, multidisciplinary project that has the potential to engage librarians in participatory strategies such as crowdsourcing. The VRE will make it possible to pursue perennial questions in innovative ways and to use new technologies to respond to questions that do not lend themselves to more traditional methods.

Keywords:

• digital humanities
• academic libraries
• virtual research environment
• text analysis
• crowdsourcing
• Plato
• Genesis

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges her Canadian partners in this research endeavor: Stuart J. Murray and Brian Greenspan of the Department of English Languages and Literatures, Carleton University.

For the production of the Greek Key interfaces, the author also acknowledges the contribution of our consultant, designer, and programmer, Robert R. Wadholm.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grants #410-2010-2636 and #430-2012-0932.