Humanities and ICT

Andrea Scharnhorst, DANS and eHumanities group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Artsand Science, KNAW

Introduction at the Workshop National Infrastructure, Social Science and Humanities, January 20, 2015, ePlan at NLeSC

DH in the Netherlands

2004-2014, 9Mio+2.8Mio

2015-2018, 12,6Mio

Projects, centers, coursesActive community

EINS 1st PLENARY

DH in WorldCat (ArticleFirst)Digital libraries

Science, ComputerScience, ontologies

Many different humanities fieldsProminently language &Literary studies

What is Digital Humanities?

Akdag, et al., EINS Conf

Large scale humanities projects – Archimedes Palimpset

William Noel, keynote, DHBenelux2015

“If you get sexy data – you make it promiscuous”!

Spectroscopy

Image recognition and processing

Transcription

Digitization

Long term (since 1998), many different funds

13TB data which now cost 3000$ per year to host

1-Jan-99 31-Dec-00 31-Dec-02 30-Dec-04 30-Dec-06 29-Dec-08 29-Dec-10 28-Dec-12 28-Dec-14 27-Dec-16

ExPoSe

From Digitization to Digital Humanities

Infrastructure and Research

• Are interwoven – so it is often not easy to say what belongs to the infrastructure, what to research? Who get’s the credit?

• Infrastructure is a precondition – necessary but not sufficient – it is supporting – not in the foreground Hidden, not articulated, not taken seriously enough in research planning

• Infrastructure requires other skills than research (this is not only the case for humanities, but the less there is computational thinking involved in the curricula the greater the chances of miscommunication, misunderstanding

• Infrastructure – ICT technologies – are changing dramatically and this change bases on fundamental and applied research. We don’t want, and cannot be the plumbers. Or technical versus scientific staff. Or who get’s credit?

Research pipeline

Sources

INPUT

Results

OUTPUTPROCESS

Get interactive!

• In your own daily practice, what comes to your mind if you think about ICT infrastructures, eScience, Data Science, and Humanities?

• Where does play ICT a role and which kind of ICT? That can be any from mundane (local desktop, google, mail, …) to large ICT structures?

• What do I miss most? Be it ICT related or not?

Sources

INPUT

Results

OUTPUTPROCESS

“distributed electronic access to a vast virtually centralized repository containing a variety of humanities artifacts and information” + creation and curating of it; simplifying access; secure access; structure and linking data (p. 33) “Historic humanities artifacts

are physical objects” Digitisation “data volumes are exploding due to the variety of sensors and intelligent devices.” digital born new data sources (p. 34)

Wyatt, S., Millen, D., eds.: Meaning and Perspectives in the Digital Humanities. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/files/894428/white_paper_web_1_.pdf

Quotes from KNAW CHAT White paper

cognitive computing

network analysis

visualization and visual analytics

text and social analytics

search and data representation

The goal is to organize data with redundant storage to speed access and limit cross network / bus reads while providing resiliency should one of the data nodes fail…. (p. 37)

A balance must be struck between open access and protecting content. (p37)

Interoperability of resources and services …. further than Europeana (p. 39)

social infrastructure

education and training

- Make visible what/who is there already- Create (even) more links – how to do this best?- Use the network for …......

Mapping the (D)H

Size of data

Size of infrastructure

Types of toolsSscope of sustainibility of tools

Types of dataType of needed Research Data Management(Data Stewardship)

References and acknowledgements- Melissa Terras started a data collection 2011, Infographic Digital Humanities

see her blog http://melissaterras.blogspot.nl/2011/11/stats-and-digital-humanities.html

- Leydesdorff, L., Akdag Salah, A.A.: Maps on the basis of the arts & humanities citation index: The journals Leonardo and Art journal versus digital humanities as a topic. Journal of the American Society for information Science and Technology 61(4) (2010)

- Wyatt, S., Leydesdorff, L.: e-humanities or digital humanities: Is that the question? In: Digital Humanities Workshop. (2013)

- Wyatt, S., Millen, D., eds.: Meaning and Perspectives in the Digital Humanities. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/files/894428/white_paper_web_1_.pdf

- Koopman, R., Wang, S., Scharnhorst, A., Englebienne, G.: Ariadne's thread: Interactive navigation in a world of networked information. In: CHI'15 Extended Abstracts. (2015) http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.04358

- Akdag Salah, A., Scharnhorst, A., & Wyatt, S. (2015). Analysing an academic field through the lenses of Internet Science : Digital Humanities as a Virtual Community. In Conference: 2nd International Conference on Internet Science Brussels, May 27-29, 2015, At Brussels, Volume: http://internetscienceconference.eu.