E-Humanities and E-Arts Endeavours
A position paper by the Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre at King’s
College London
by
Tobias Blanke
And Stuart Dunn
According to Arts and Humanities e-Science Scoping Study led by Sheila Anderson, 1
e-Science stands for the development and deployment of a networked infrastructure
and culture through which resources can be shared in a secure environment. These
resources can be everything from processing power, data, or expertise that researchers
can share. This networked infrastructure allows a culture of collaboration, in which
new forms of collaboration can emerge, and new and advanced methodologies can be
explored. Most important for the Arts and Humanities (A&H), e-Science does not
only describe the use of big machines and storage power, but does point towards a
change in research culture as well. It describes a culture of collaboration as a way to
deal with the challenges stemming from recent developments in society and
technology.
A key to the success of e-Science is the provision of shared access to research
facilities and therefore to provide answers to the increasing globalisation of research.
Researchers from around the world can work together and use each other's resources
as if they were collocated. Digital knowledge objects shall be created and (re-)used in
virtual collaboration spaces. E-research is about joining things up and not purely
about CPU power or computer networking. It is about pro-active relationships as
between server to server and programme to programme and research practitioner to
research practitioner. This global collaboration in a virtual space will be of key
significance to what A&H researchers are going to be doing over the next ten years.
The A&H have not, up until now, been served by these developments. This is despite
the fact that digital resources in these disciplines have mushroomed over the past
decade: the Arts and Humanities Research Council commits roughly half its annual
budget to projects which produce some form of digital content, as did its predecessor,
the Arts and Humanities Research Board. This burgeoning of digital material, which
is often fuzzy, incomplete or inaccessible, brings exactly the kind of challenges which
e-Science can address. The A&H deal with data is in the size ranges of TerraBytes
that is highly qualified by human annotations. The Arts and Humanities Data Service
holds by now almost a 1000 collections that include a wide range of research fields –
from linguistics to performing arts. Furthermore, recent developments in society mean
that almost all human activity is now digitally recorded. In the future, collections such
as the Shoa Archives, having 200 TerraBytes of multimedia recordings from
Holocaust survivors, will be no exception. E-Science methodologies and technologies
therefore provide answers to strong needs for future but also contemporary arts and
humanities activities. No researcher alone will be able to work with such data or
without the help of technologies to help make sense out of the data.
1
http://www.ahds.ac.uk/e-science/e-science-scoping-study.htm
With respect to e-Science processing technologies, as in the sciences increasingly new
data and knowledge management technologies are employed in the A&H to deal with
the new digital corpora. These tools help annotate data with metadata to mark and
describe features of the data and their relationships. Metadata enabled technologies
like the Grid are set up to overcome the limitations in access and interoperability of
the digital corpora. As new ways of generating knowledge from data are explored, the
A&H will find their place in a new data-driven research environment with shared
resources and services. From data mining to knowledge extraction, sense- making
technologies find their way into the workflow of arts and humanities research.
There are particular challenges for the A&H researcher to work with the Grid and
other advanced computing and data technologies that cannot be found at a similar
scale in other research areas. Although by now the community may find itself in the
position of having access to digital texts, images, moving images or audio materials, a
strategy to get the community better involved with these material has yet to be taken
forward. The AHRC-JISC-EPSRC e-Science Initiative, a 2m national programme to
promote and develop e-Science in the A&H, will form such a strategy, and provide
support for the researchers in their use of advanced network technologies like the
Grid.
In the sciences the grand challenges that the advanced network technologies address
were complementary to new advance in computing and measuring technologies. For
the A&H, this might be different, as their digital resources are different. They are
mostly highly qualified data and most of the time do not result form automated
simulations on large data sets, but result from an intense human effort to better
understand highly heterogeneous research subjects like artworks, literacy text or
archaeological artefacts. The 'grand challenges', as they were identified for the A&H
e-Science programme, are therefore to understand how to locate, access and integrate
the content of highly distributed resources that are likely to be unstandardized, and to
have been encoded using different standards, described using different standards, and
be of variable quality. You can read about these grand challenges for the update of eScience tools and methodologies in the A&H in the above mentioned e-Science
Scoping Study reports for several subject disciplines including archaeology, history,
visual and performing arts, library and information studies, and textual studies.
The A&H humanities will most likely not have the funding to drive the technological
development in e-Science. An uptake of the technology could however be the first
step to showcase that not only sciences but the whole society could benefit from
developments of Grids and e-Infrastructures. To make e-Science methodologies and
technologies work for research in the A&H, the challenges are not so much on the
technology side, but lie with the development of a culture of research in the A&H that
allows the acceptance of electronic tools for the life cycle of research. Collaboration
in research is not new to humanists, but most often the ideal is still to maybe
collaborate on discussing the output of research in papers or at conferences, but not
collaborate on producing the research.