Digital Humanities in Practice
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
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
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 usercentered 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, 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 Practice
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