On a most basic level, digital text annotation is simply adding notes or glosses to a document, for instance, putting sticky-note comments on a PDF file for personal use. But annotations can also be done on web pages and HTML files and shared among a community of readers, thus recreating the textual communities formed by glossators and other marginal annotators in the manuscript and print worlds.
Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees, colleagues, or suppliers.
Similar to Text Visualization processes, data visualization applications create visual representations of structured data based on lexical, linguistic, geographical, tonal, temporal and a wide variety of other parameters.
Digital mapping is creating graphic representations of information using spatial relationships within the graphic to represent some relationships within the data.
Digital Publishing includes any activities or processes through which scholarly and/or creative works are rendered public in a digital medium.
Digital storytelling is the latest iteration of a narrative tradition. It involves creating and sharing stories using digital tools, incorporating multimedia elements such as image, sound, and words in a narrative that is then disseminated via a web platform. Bryan Alexander offers the most concise definition: "Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies. Digital stories are narratives built from the stuff of cyberculture."
Mark-up languages are among the common forms of structured data. The term "mark-up" refers to the use of tags that bracket words or phrases in a document. They are always applied within a hierarchical structure and always embedded within the text stream itself . . . Mark-up remains a standard practice in editing, processing, and publishing texts in electronic forms. The use of HTML tags . . . is a very basic form of mark-up. But where HTML is used to create instructions for browsers to display texts (specifying format, font, size etc.), mark-up languages are designed to call attention to the content of texts. This can involve anything from noting the distinctions among parts of a text such as title, author, stanza, or interpreting mood, atmosphere, place, or any other element of a text. As discussed in lesson 2A, every act of introducing mark-up into a text is an act of interpretation. Mark-up is a way of making explicit intervention in a text so that it can be analyzed, searched, and put into relation with other texts in a repository or corpus. Mark-up is an essential element of digital humanities work since it is the primary way of structuring texts as they are transcribed, digitized, or born digital . . . TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative, is the prevailing standard mark-up scheme for text and should be used if you are working." with literary texts.
When text material is incorporated into scholarly research, it often first needs to be converted into information that can be analyzed for patterns. Developing software to derive this information from text has been a major undertaking of several digital humanities efforts. These programs extract data from text according to certain parameters and deliver the data in useful file formats. Often these are also referred to as Data-Mining Tools.
Virtual reality (VR) is a computer environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or in imagined worlds.
3D modeling is a process of developing a mathematical representation of any three-dimensional surface or object using specialized software.
3D printing is an additive process, that is, layers of material are added successively to achieve the exact computer-designed pattern in real space.