Arts, Humanities and Qualitative
Social Science
• Reflected on the nature of research practices
• Different paradigms: individualistic vs (and?)
large projects
• Sharing – but only on my terms
• Recognise existing work: digital humanities dates
back to 1940’ and 50’: Robert Busa, TEI, Clio,
Tact etc. etc. ALLC, ACH, AHC
• Social and cultural change is key – by and for
researchers
Changing practices
• Recognise, understand and model changing
practices – scholarly primitives
• AHRC research grants – increasingly fund
collaborative (and digital) work
• Impact of European funding with focus on eContent and research infrastructures – practices
follow the money…….?
• Publications – slower but discernable shift towards
new forms of digital publication? Do we need new
publication models – a digital ‘book’?
Data intensive research
• Humanities work is data/source driven – always
has been (except maybe practice based arts)
• Based on sources and archival / library research,
data creation - but data/sources highly dispersed
• Impact of million books / increasing digitisation of
archives (Europeana etc.)
• Silos to break down
• Significant role for linked data – as a concept
• Create social networks around linked data
• Facilitate easy to use, minimal, linked data
environment
• Play the impact card to provide incentives
Data intensive methods
• Some suspicion of computational methods – can’t
see what the computer is doing
• But activity increasing; music information
retrieval; visualisation, text mining, simulations
• Build on these successes – case studies etc.
Fund more work in these areas
• Training and safe (physical and virtual) places
to experiment