Best practice for digitising small-scale Digital Humanities projects
Peggy Bockwinkel, Dîlan Cakir · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2018
Digital Humanities (DH) are growing rapidly; the necessary infrastructure is being built up gradually and slowly. For smaller DH projects, e. g. for testing methods, as a preliminary work for submitting applications or for use in teaching, a corpus often has to be digitised. These small-scale projects make an important contribution to safeguarding and making available cultural heritage, as they make it possible to machine read those resources that are of little or no interest to large projects because they are too special or too limited in scope. They close the gap between large scanning projects of archives, libraries or in connection with research projects and projects that move beyond the canonised paths. Yet, these small projects can fail in this first step of digitisation, because it is often a hurdle for (Digital) Humanists at universities to get the desired texts digitised: either because the digitisation infrastructure in libraries/archives is not available (yet) or it is paid service. Also, researchers are often no digitising experts and a suitable infrastructure at university is missing. In order to promote small DH projects for teaching purposes, a digitising infrastructure was set up at the University of Stuttgart as part of a teaching project. It should enable teachers to digitise smaller corpora autonomously. This article presents a study that was carried out as part of this teaching project. It suggests how to implement best practices and on which aspects of the digitisation workflow need to be given special attention. The target group of this article are (Digital) Humanists who want to digitise a smaller corpus. Even with no expertise in scanning and OCR and no possibility to outsource the digitisation of the project, they still would like to obtain the best possible machine-readable files.