Digital Humanities in Practices Challenges Directions in Digital

Digital Humanities in Practices, Challenges, & Directions in Digital Humanities Scholarship TITLE Smiljana Antonijević & Sally Wyatt , Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Monica Bulger & Eric T. Meyer, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

“ I went to sleep one day a cultural critic and woke the next metamorphosed into a data processor. -Alan Liu, 2004

Are new technologies transforming information practices among humanities researchers?

Research • Two projects: Alfalab and Humanities Information Practices • Timeframe: April-October, 2010

Case studies (54 participants)

Humanities Information Practices • 6 case studies, 54 participants • Interviews, surveys, focus groups • Questions about daily practice, changes in use, barriers, ability to ask and answer new questions

Alfalab Six KNAW institutes Linguists, historians, IT engineers, STS experts … Top-down initiative 2008 -2011

Original Objectives Strengthen collaborative potential Increase availability of tools & data Facilitate re-use of tools & data Phase 1 – deliver demonstrators Phase 2 – (with extra funding) expand partners, tools, data – become portal for digital humanities in the Netherlands

Site visits (32 participants)

Highlights Text Lab Space lab Interface Lab Life Lab

Connecting epistemic cultures Developing cross-disciplinary understanding Promoting user-centered approach User-testing sessions Implementing feedback cycles

Discussing epistemological and methodological differences Developing common vocabulary Promoting collaborative writing Supporting shared values Team meetings

Transformations in practice

“ The amount of time I now spend doing the very mechanical, laborious, timeconsuming work is much smaller. You can now do things in 5 seconds which it took you 3 months to do a few years ago.

“ 20 years ago, I would have gone into the British Library and done it with the actual paper in front of me. Now I sit at home and I do a keyword search.

“ It’s a huge change. You can do things much more quickly, read much more widely, find connections…it’s very, very important.

“ Old Bailey Online hasn’t replaced anything for me or displaced anything for me, but it is part of this general transformation of how I do what I do.

“ It makes the nature of your research different because it allows you to get quantitative information much more quickly, which then allows you to maybe think about how you might use that information differently, because you’ve got so much more time.

“ My greatest frustration in life is that we can now answer all the questions we had in 1980 faster, much faster. And we can get around to publishing them much, much more quickly. But what we haven’t yet done is develop the new questions and the new paradigms that should be possible, and that we as imaginative scholars should be able to imagine.

Establishing evaluation criteria

“ We need for big professional groups to be able to have a set of criteria that say—just as when they look in a regular print publication— what is the intellectual value here, what is contributing to the field, where is the new knowledge, what are the research methods, are they sound.

“ One of the things our reviewers look for is the notion that the project is looking outside of itself. … We do not want to keep funding the same types of projects over and over. If something works, we want it to be shared and repurposed or reused.

25 recommendations, including: 1. Plan ahead to measure impact 4. Make your resource easy to find 9. Adopt Cool URIs 10. Provide automatic citations that are easy to copy or download 12. Create training materials using examples from real research 15. APIs are the future

What we learned from Alfalab • Focus on researchers not infrastructure (user driven not technology driven) • Incorporate existing methods & practices (‘new technologies/old social forms’ – Raymond Williams) • Access is not the only issue • Demonstrate cross-domain re-use (show not tell) • VREs instead of portal

Reconfiguring Resources

“ In those days [10 years ago] computer scientists at your own university wouldn’t even want to talk to you. Even now when we work with them what computer science recognizes as research and what digital humanities recognize as research are different things. So you have to find a common set of research goals.

Recommendations & future directions

“ Break down boundaries between text, artifact, and image.

“ If you just take something like the Old Bailey in isolation, it only gives you a partial story of London life, but if you combine it with other records, which is what they’re trying to do on London Lives, then you could build a wonderful picture of a society in a way that we find quite difficult to do.

In 2025, the field of humanities finds itself in a strong and integrated position among the sciences. Scholars in 2025 looking back 15 years, see a less integrated set of academic disciplines with substantial differences…. The significant breakthrough, that happened both nationally and internationally, was a result of the effective integration of information science and information technology in the humanities. . . During the past 15 years humanities not only benefited from information science and technology but made significant contributions to these fields… (KNAW, Computation Humanities Programme, 2010)

http: //ssrn. com/abstract=1859267 Bulger, M. , Meyer, E. T. , de la Flor, G. , Terras, M. , Wyatt, S. , Jirotka, M. , Eccles, K. , & Madsen, C.

Digital Humanities in Practices, Challenges, & Directions in Digital Humanities Scholarship TITLE Smiljana Antonijević smiljana@gmail. com Monica Bulger monica. bulger@oii. ox. ac. uk Eric T. Meyer eric. meyer@oii. ox. ac. uk Sally Wyatt sally. wyatt@ehumanities. knaw. nl