Pixelating: A Digital Humanities Mixer is a program facilitated by Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham and Allan Cho, at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The program is a forum for discussion to develop UBC Library-based digital humanities projects.

Digital humanities is an emerging area, which combines technologies and digital tools with the objects and methods from the study of humanities. Digital humanities projects are collaborative, involving professionals from different fields. The projects can involve the re-creation of physical objects in a digital environment or the enhancement of digital materials, and can lead to the production of journal articles, monographs, digital objects, digital collections and presentations.

These are some of the projects presented on the Pixelating sessions:

• Classical Chinese poetry automation and Chinese text analysis: this project explores poetry using text analysis for non-English scripts.
• BC Through Arriving Eyes: this project presents materials that describe German immigrants’ experiences in British Columbia and Western Canada. Oral history interviews, pictures and documents are some of the materials available for access.
• OCR for Non-English Language Text: a UBC project that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to transcribe non-English materials.
• Database of Religious History (DRH): a collaborative project that collects aspects of religious history and makes them available online.
• The sights and sounds of digital humanities: Two projects were presented on this topic: the Chinatown Sound Map Project and the Disappearing Moon Café Interactive Tour. The first one displays various audio tracks on a map of Vancouver’s Chinatown in order to show how sounds contribute to our sense of place. The second project offers an immersive digital experience and provides a 360° view of Chinatown in Vancouver.

Check out these and other projects on the Pixelating blog! If you have an idea for a project that could be applied to libraries, or that could help other people get information, come to a Pixelating meeting, which happen every Thursday, from 12 pm to 2 pm, at the Koerner Building. Check the UBC Library’s events website for more information.

Sources:

Digital humanities in the library (American Library Association)

Pixelating: a digital humanities mixer: scoping a collaborative, UBC Library-based digital humanities project (UBC Library)

Scoping a collaborative, UBC Library-based Digital Humanities Project (Pixelating)