Report on the Digital Humanities 2010 conference (DH2010)
General Information
Digital Humanities 2010, the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital
Humanities Organisations (ADHO), was hosted by the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities (CCH) and the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King's College London from 7th
to 10th July. The conference, whose theme was “Cultural expression, old and new”, featured
opening and closing plenary talks given by Charles J. Henry and Melissa Terras respectively,
the Busa Award and Lecture given by Joseph Raben, three days of academic programme with
four strands each, and four poster sessions, as well as a complementary social programme. The
highlights of the latter included a conference dinner at the Great Hall at Lincoln's Inn, and
excursions to Hampton Court, to the Tate Britain and Tate Modern museums, and to the Globe
Theatre and Exhibition. The conference website is at <http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/> from
which the conference abstracts can be downloaded. Discussions could also be followed on
Twitter at <http://twitter.com/search?q=%23DH2010>. The three-day programme of parallel
sessions began on Thursday morning, the following is a summary of the panels and paper
sessions attended.
Session one
The first session attended was a panel session, entitled “Building the Humanities Lab:
Scholarly Practices in Virtual Research Environments” and moderated by Charles van den
Heuvel and Smiljana Antonijevic of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences, in
which six panelists presented their work on virtual research environments:
1. David Bodenhamer, Director of the Polis Center at Indiana University Purdue
University Indianapolis (IUPUI), introduced his centre <http://www.polis.iupui.edu/>,
a multi-disciplinary research unit founded in 1989. The centre adopted GIS as its
technology of choice in 1992 and has six focus areas: geoinformatics, community
informatics, health geographics, spatial informatics, humanities GIS, and community
collaborations. The centre is a matrix organisation with 25FTE and employs a central
strong project management system and industry-standard practices. The centre is
entirely projects-based, it runs between 50-100 projects, and self-funded with a diverse
funding base that includes consultancy work. One of its key focus area is the Virtual
Center for Spatial Humanities, a Humanities GIS with book and journal publications in
preparation.
2. Fotis Jannidis of the University of Würzburg presented on the BMBF-funded Textgrid
project <http://www.textgrid.de/en.html>. The project is now entering its second
phase, there are already a number of resources and tools at researchers' disposals for
retrieval and re-use. The integrated tools in the user environment include data capture,
editing, analysis, workflows, annotation, and publication. The front-end is the
Textgridlab software, the services on the service layer include among others tokenize,
lemmatize, sort, transform, and collate, the backend is provided by the Grid. Textgrid
is based on lucene and eXist. Textgrid is now a library-based project, academics serve
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3.
4.
5.
6.
as advisers. Some of the challenges include: providing robust, production-ready tools
and sustainability for both services and data; need for structure and an architecture, but
openness is a necessity, and development should be collaborative; availability of an
integrated user interface, but user-defined processing pipelines are needed.
Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia Scholars' Lab presented on the
NINES VRE <http://www.nines.org/>. NINES is a collaborative research environment
for nineteenth-century scholarship, which models an alternative to traditional peerreviewed publishing. Peer-review is the core function of NINES, currently there are
670,000 digital objects available in an entirely scholar-driven environment. While the
social functions in the community have been less successful, work concentrates on
resource discovery rather than on an VRE as an online environment that needs to be
studied to be used. Essentially, NINES establishes federated peer-review and resource
discovery of quality online materials.
Geoffrey Rockwell of the University of Alberta, Canada, gave a presentation on the
TAPoR Portal <http://portal.tapor.ca/>, which is being put on a Grid-infrastructure.
The Portal is a Web-services broker for the TAPoR tools, the second-generation tools
known as Voyeur, formerly TAPoRware tools. There is also an accompanying Web of
tutorials, documentation, and a wiki. Some challenges remain: building a portal is
tricky, the complexity of learning about and using it is prohibitive; tools pose a
challenge as well, as humanists think of texts not tools, therefore tools need to be
plugged into texts; lastly, community building is challenging, methods and research
practices are important aspects. There are however benefits too: Web-based tools are
easier to develop and maintain, and adaptable to different environments; it is possible
to offer APIs to the community. Funding is always an issue: TAPoR seeks
sustainability through collaboration with the HPC infrastructure; libraries are
considered to be permanent homes for projects like this.
Mike Priddy of King's College London gave a presentation on the EU-funded
DARIAH project <http://www.dariah.eu/>, which develops a digital research
infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. DARIAH's roots are in VREs, it was
originally planned to widen the reach of e-science. The ultimate aim of the project is a
Virtual Research Community (VRC) that is based on the collective intelligence of the
community and establishes an architecture of participation. It aims to be a Social VRE,
one that is institutionally grounded in everyday research and empowers research that is
open and re-usable. The challenges include interoperability (integration of data),
collaboration that can lead to collective intelligence, integration of tools and services
into everyday research, software engineering vs. humanities practices. Conceptually,
VREs are second-generation digital libraries, in which the concept of “research
objects” is foregrounded.
Joris van Zundert of the Department of Software R&D at the Huygens Institute, Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, presented on AlfaLab, a digital research
infrastructure <http://virtualknowledgestudio.nl/current-projects/alfalab/>. The project
is a collaboration between computer science and humanities divisions. It takes the
“distant reading” paradigm, coined by Franco Moretti, as its underlying concept.
AlfaLab conceptualizes VREs as highly specific applications for very specific research
questions for specific communities. AlfaLab comprises TextLab, GISLab, LifeLab,
underlying them is a common technical infrastructure that facilitates very basic
functions, e.g. annotations across corpora and collections. AlfaLab 2.0 is currently
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planned as a support service for digital researchers enabling them to innovate,
providing support, and offering sustainability.
Session two
In the second session, entitled “TEI”, Piotr
Bański of the University of Warsaw and Adam
Przepiórkowski
of the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, presented
on “TEI P5 as a Text Encoding Standard for Multilevel Corpus Annotation”. The presenters
introduced the National Corpus of Polish (NCP) project <http://nkjp.pl/>, a three-year project
that involves four institutions. It builds on several previous corpora projects and employs
multiple levels of linguistic annotation. One million words have been annotated manually at a
detailed level. The workflow starts with the source text, which is segmented into its
morphosyntax, into syntactic words (syntactic groups and named entity versions), and word
senses (kept in a sense inventory). Several standards have been investigated to provide the
encoding for the corpus: TEI P5, XML Corpus Encoding Standard (XCES), and the ISO
TC37/SC4 family of standards, including LAF (Linguistic Annotation Framework). The pros
and cons of the standards were reviewed and weighed and a decision for TEI P5 was made
primarily due to its good documentation and solid user base. The NCP project has customized
the P5 schema for its specific purposes by comparing the solutions offered by TEI to the other
standards and then recommend the customization as best practice for the project. The segment
element is used for sentences, phrases, words, etc. instead of feature structures, ptr is used to
point to immediate constituents as it allows for encoding discontinuities, which are very
frequent in the Polish language. TEI has proven to be a reasonable choice as it is sufficiently
flexible to implement data models proposed by a variety of standards.
John Walsh of Indiana University gave a paper entitled “'It’s Volatile': Standards-Based
Research & Research-Based Standards Development”. Digital Humanities scholarship
connects humanities scholarship with technological research and development, such as
standards development. Unicode is one of the most important standards for the digital
humanities. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project <http://www.chymistry.org/> uses Unicode
extensively to digitise and edit, study and analyse the alchemical works of Isaac Newton and to
develop various scholarly tools around the collection. The project has made a proposal to the
Unicode Consortium to register all the alchemical symbols in Newton's alchemical writings.
The proposal process is a thorough, peer-reviewed process, the project's proposal is currently in
its final stages and due to be included in the Unicode 6.0 release of the standard. One of the
main challenges of the project was that by its nature alchemical language is imprecise, full of
allusion and uncertainty, which is in conflict to the stringent requirements of character
standardisation. The graphic and pictorial nature of alchemical language makes glyphs very
important carriers of meaning, which contradicts the idea in Unicode of abstract characters that
can be represented by a number of different glyphs. Some of the solutions employed involved
additional layers of meaning used in combination with standard Unicode characters, additional
markup, use of images, and representing variants of characters and glyphs. The Unicode
proposal process has been a rewarding experience and as it was successful it has benefited the
scholarly community and potentially a much wider audience.
Deborah Anderson of UC Berkeley presented on “Character Encoding and Digital Humanities
in 2010 – An Insider's View”, a paper related to the previous paper in the same session.
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Unicode <http://unicode.org/> is now the most used encoding standard on the Web, TEI's
endorsement of the standard has been phenomenally helpful in establishing it as the encoding
standard of choice for the electronic transmission of text. Unicode 5.2 currently defines over
100,000 characters for over 75 scripts, Unicode 6.0 is about to be finalized and published.
While Unicode offers a vast array of character choices to the digital humanist, its breadth and
depth can also be confusing. This is particularly true of the approval process for new characters
by the Unicode Technical Committee and the relevant ISO committee. The presenter explained
this process, which involves two standards committees, namely the Unicode Technical
Committee (UTC) and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 WG2, and usually takes more than two years.
The UTC is primarily concerned with technical questions and computer science applications,
discussions are often based on potential issues for computer systems and electronic text. The
ISO committee is comprised of national representatives of all member countries and support
from a national body is highly advisable and sometimes essential for proposals to be accepted
into the international standard, discussions are sometimes more political in nature. Being aware
of the interests and backgrounds of each standard group and their members can help explain
what appears to be a spotty set of characters in Unicode.
Session three
The third session, headed “Archives”, began with a paper by Peter Doorn and Dirk Roorda of
the Data Archiving and Networked Services, Netherlands, entitled “The ecology of longevity:
the relevance of evolutionary theory for digital preservation”. The presenter borrowed notions
from evolutionary theory in thinking about digital longevity or “digital survival”. Thus, the
concept of “sustainability”, which in biology refers to ecological systems that remain diverse
and productive, is analogous to preservation in the digital environment. Digital objects are
intended for the long term, but only short-term survival can realistically be accomplished. The
preservation of individual objects may be less effective than making them richer and
interoperable. Preservation strategies are either emulation, which preserves the environment of
the data, or migration, which adapts the data to the environment. Current digital preservation
thought states to first preserve and then re-use, however, this has the perverse consequence that
preserving too well actually prevents re-use. Moreover, in evolutionary theory systems get rid
of unused functions, therefore it is more suitable to first re-use and thus preserve. Evolution is
based on mutation and copies, not originals, making copies preserves data. Reproduction in
ecological systems can therefore be directly linked to the interoperability of data, mating your
data will preserve it. An ecology of sustainable information must be governed by certain rules:
a financial incentive to preserve is helpful, optimizations of both value and cost are necessary,
data use is instrumental in preservation, and the actors involved must constantly be aware of
the chances and risks of survival of the digital data they curate and use.
The second paper, entitled “The Specimen Case and the Garden: Preserving Complex Digital
Objects, Sustaining Digital Projects”, was given by Melanie Schlosser and H. Lewis Ulman of
Ohio State University. The presenters outlined the aspects of preservation of digital humanities
projects from a librarian's and a scholar's point of view. Preservation too often means taking a
snapshot of living projects and storing them away where they die from lack of use. From a
scholarly perspective, digital projects led by scholars are often ambitious and complex, more
often than not a labour of love of individuals, often situated on the fringes of the official
institutional preservation infrastructure. From a librarian's perspective, in order to support
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faculty research effectively, standardisation is paramount, there are few resources available for
unique projects, however the library is committed to offer advice and to preserve projects. The
NEH-funded project "Reliable Witnesses: Integrating Multimedia, Distributed Electronic
Textual Editions into Library Collections and Preservation Efforts"
<https://digitalhumanities.osu.edu/>, a collaboration between faculty and librarians, can serve
as an example. For preservation purposes ('the specimen case'), the library has adopted a lowlevel approach to preservation of projects, namely preserving all pieces of a project as METSfiles, employing a dedicated, registered METS profile. The digital projects are ideally sustained
in their production environments ('the garden'), this requires to work closely with and connect
all the staff involved in digital projects in order to support staff in creating robust, sustainable
projects. This makes it possible to curate a set of completed projects that comply with certain
criteria and to sustain them beyond the time of involvement of the original creators.
The final paper of the session, entitled “Digital Libraries of Scholarly Editions”, was authored
by George Buchanan of the School of Informatics, City University London, and Kirsti Bohata,
Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW), Swansea
University. Digital editions are complex, often bespoke, dynamic objects, which are difficult to
preserve. The presenters are working on establishing common denominators of the scholarly
electronic editions created in Wales that will allow them to create a central “library” of digital
editions. Digital libraries have been a major movement in Computer Science since at least
1995. Digital editions are best organized into collections, but often digital libraries are not
designed to hold complex objects, instead they reduce, make static, and atomize content. While
digital library systems can provide preservation and collection-level description, little focus is
on the internal organisation of scholarly editions. A user study of producers and consumers of
digital editions has been undertaken to establish the common features of scholarly editions.
The presenters aim to develop extensions to the Greenstone Digital Library system to bridge
the gap between digital library software development and the specific requirements of digital
editions. In particular, the extension of the Greenstone SW is intended to support both text and
commentary, dynamic content, collections of content, and provide interoperability.
Session four
In a session headed “Literature”, John Walsh of Indiana University gave a paper entitled
“'Quivering Web of Living Thought': Mapping the Conceptual Networks of Swinburne's Songs
of the Springtides”. The presenter introduced a new section of the Swinburne Archive
<http://swinburnearchive.indiana.edu/> with experimental work. The starting point for the
experiments is the postmodernist view of texts as nodes in networks that work on both
intratextual and intertextual levels. Swinburne himself used the metaphor of networks and
nodes in a Web of intertextuality. His poetry is highly allusive and referential, and employs its
own collection of symbols, images, and concepts. His “Songs of the Springtide” collection is
an excellent example of such a deliberately designed volume of networks: the poems have been
organized into three parts with a transitional sonnet and a final ode. The thematic networks
employed include: literary figures; poetry, music, and song; the passage of time; celestial
bodies: sun, moon, and stars; the sea. This highly structured volume of poetry is almost
schematic in its explorations of these topics. The texts have been marked up using the TEI P5
encoding standard, and keywords are used to encode these concepts. A P5 taxonomy is used
and keywords are encoded as <seg type=”keyword”>...</seg>. The presenter demonstrated an
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interface that allowed for the selection of clusters of keywords, which were highlighted in
individual poems, but could also be seen in a bird's eye view of the entire volume of poetry
thus offering a unique view of the nodes at work in the overall structure of the volume.
The second paper of the session was given by Mark Byron of the University of Sydney and
was entitled “Digital Mediation of Modernist Literary Texts and their Documents”. The
presenter introduced a project that will digitise and transcribe all of the manuscripts of and
documents relating to Samuel Beckett's novel Watt (1953). The project is part of the larger
international Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which aims to have all of Beckett’s
literary manuscripts transcribed and represented in digital form. The Watt editorial project has
identified the problem of MS transmission as key to the complexities of the novel. The MS,
written during the Second World War, suggests a series of major revisions of the text, it is
littered with emendations, revisions, and additions. The addenda section at the end of the novel
is far more than a metatextual game, it points towards concepts and nodes in the work itself.
The opportunity to represent a large corpus of materials in a single online environment, which
allows for their manipulation and exploration in new ways, as well as exploring the
implications of textual evidence for the authority of “the text” are two of the unique
opportunities offered by digital scholarly editions. The innovation of the project will be the
coherent representation on a platform of all the documents required for a scholarly edition,
showing the MSS in their contexts as well as their relation to the published text. The
documentary transcription of the MSS will follow the TEI/XML Guidelines and will seek to
capture both text and the many illustrations. A future critical edition of the novel will be able to
build upon the findings of the documentary edition produced in this project.
Joshua Sternfeld of the NEH gave a paper entitled “Thinking Archivally: Search and Metadata
as Building Blocks for a New Digital Historiography”. The paper explored the relationship
between data of historical evidence and the interpretative implications of finding and using
such data. As data is collected and selected, the archivist serves as a mediator of records, not
merely as a curator. Selection criteria themselves are synonymous with interpretation and since
no coherent selection policy can be applied across collections, it must be made transparent for
any users of the same materials and open for interrogation by historians. In the online world,
the interface and search functionalities offered contribute to the ways in which knowledge is
produced and is responsible for the preference of certain records over others (e.g. tag clouds).
The archive organises information and makes this organisation available, which in itself is an
interpretative process that favours certain ways of exploration and certain methodologies.
Digital historiography therefore needs to pay more attention to these often implicit decisions.
Another concern is the reliability of historical data. Provenance is a key archival principle and
it should be extended to digital historiography. Searching in particular can lead to the
decontextualisation of records and the obscuring of relations and dependencies of historical
data. Historians should therefore always think “archivally” when selecting and evaluating
historical data.
Session five
The fifth session, headed “Annotation/Markup”, saw the presentation by Wendell Piez,
Mulberry Technologies Inc., of a paper entitled “Towards Hermeneutic Markup: An
architectural outline”. The presenter explained that hermeneutic markup is essentially process-
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oriented, not product-oriented, it is devoted to interpretation, not re-usability, it is focussed on
a specific enquiry and may contain multiple perspectives on the same text. XML encoding is
always hierarchical, thus multiple structures need to be merged, e.g. literary and linguistic
markup. Any anomalies in texts pose problems for the markup, sometimes they are in direct
conflict with the markup employed. Therefore, a descriptive, not a prescriptive, schema
mechanism is required to overcome these issues. Markup today serves the end of “production”,
it assumes that schemas are complete and “given”. In a new, more flexible architecture, we
need to include schema design and query design as components of the process. We need
openness, a gentle learning curve, build on the current infrastructure, a data model that
supports overlap, many hierarchies, a flexible and extensible schema, ad-hoc schemas, multiple
schemas for documents, extensible annotation frameworks, and structured and taggable
annotations.
Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland gave a paper entitled “The Open Annotation
Collaboration: A Data Model to Support Sharing and Interoperability of Scholarly
Annotations”. The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) <http://openannotation.org/> is an
18-month project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It addresses a number of
problems with scholarly annotations: there is a plethora of annotation/tagging tools, but a lack
of consistency, interoperability, and standards; the annotations are neither persistent nor
addressable, neither sharable nor aggregatable. The OAC data model is intended to enable
sharing and interoperability. The guiding principles have been: annotations must be
publishable and discoverable; be Web- and resource-centric; have unique URIs; be based on
W3C principles (Semantic Web and Linked Data). The basic assumptions (based on use cases)
are: the act of annotation is an event (creator/created); there is a body of the annotation and a
target of the annotation; an OAC annotation is an ORE (Object Re-use and Exchange)
aggregation, which can be described and serialized in a number of ways (RDF, RSS etc.);
segments of objects are annotable; the annotation can also refer to a proxy (which can have
additional qualifiers for more detailed descriptions) which points to the target. OAC
annotations are automatically propagated across various instances of digital objects, e.g.
resized or 3D versions of videos. OAC also allows for annotations of aggregations and
annotations of annotations. Currently, the AustLit Annotation Service Architecture is being
developed based on the OAC specifications. Furthermore, OAC makes the annotation of
dynamic resources possible (blogs, twitter postings, etc.), these can be divided into timeless
annotations (that never change), uniform time annotations (which have the time stamp of the
target), and variable time annotations (which have both the time stamp of the target and of the
annotation). Next steps include finishing version 2 of the OAC data model, the publication of
the OAC ontology, and a detailed evaluation of the OAC model, as well as a number of
workshops.
Session six
In a session headed “Geography”, Natasha Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill gave a paper entitled “Unfolding History with the Help of the GIS Technology: a ScholarLibrarian Quest for Creating Digital Collections”. The presenter reported on the Carolina
Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) and Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
collaborative digital library laboratory that creates, develops, and maintains online collections
on the history of the American South with materials drawn primarily from the archival
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holdings of the UNC library. User involvement/requests/responses are an important factor for
digital collection development in the libraries and maps have been a frequent request.
Historical maps in particular are very popular, however, they are difficult to digitize and
represent in an online environment. The North Carolina Maps project has nevertheless
managed to put over 3,000 maps of the state of N.C. online. The project has developed its own
digital workflow and infrastructure for this purpose in parallel with another map collection, the
“Going to the Show” history project <http://www.docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/>, which maps
cinemas across the state in the first three decades of the 20th century. The project has found the
Sanborn Fire Insurance maps extremely valuable for its purposes. The project also makes use
of the Google Maps API. As a method, the project applies geo-referencing on stitched together
Sanborn maps that cover the entire state, over 1,300 movie theater venues have thus been
identified. Another project is the “Driving Through Time” project, which layers historical maps
and makes it possible to “travel through time” by using different levels of opacity for the maps.
“Main Street Carolina” finally is a collaborative project and toolkit (Web application) for
content creation that can be re-used by other projects (JavaScript API) and has already been
used by several demonstration projects.
The second paper of the session, entitled “GIS, Texts and Images: New approaches to
landscape appreciation in the Lake District”, was given by Ian Gregory of Lancaster
University. The presenter reported on the work of an interdisciplinary research group at
Lancaster University that works in the field of Historical GIS, the application of GIS to
historical and humanities data in general. The group has employed GIS in the field of literary
studies and has been influenced by Franco Moretti's concept of 'distant reading', which
summarizes large bodies of text rather than focussing on a few texts in detail. In a project
funded by the British Academy, the group has studied Coleridge's and Gray's tours of the
Lakes <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/mappingthelakes/>. The aim is to establish whether we can
create a GIS of text that is useful in literary research. For this purpose, the two accounts have
been manually converted, analysed, and encoded. Place names have been matched to a
gazetteer and turned into GIS form. The project has thus produced a number of different maps,
e.g. simple dot maps, density smoothed maps, and maps of emotional response to the
landscape. Thus both the physical characteristics of the tours (altitudes, population densities of
places visited etc.) and the literary means by which they have been recorded have been taken
into consideration. A combination of using a historic map of 1815 of the Lakes and modern
aerial imagery provided by Google Earth has been found a valuable approach for an alternative
“close reading” approach. The project has also experimented with geo-referencing photos of
the Lake District on Flickr to visualize the areas described. It was thus possible to achieve a
distancing from the text and a subsequent close reading in the light of the new data gathered for
individual passages in the text. The project has concluded that text and GIS can work together
very fruitfully by including various sources in the analysis process and offers many potential
applications in humanities research.
Elton Barker of the Open University gave the third paper of the session, entitled “Mapping the
World of an Ancient Greek Historian: The HESTIA Project”
<http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/>. HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging
Archive) is an interdisciplinary project, sponsored by the AHRC and involving the
collaboration of academics from Classics, Geography and Archaeological Computing from
Oxford, Birmingham, and Southampton. Herodotus' Histories about the conflict between
Greece and Persia are at the centre of the investigation. The digital text (TEI/XML) of the
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Histories has been provided by the Perseus Project, they have been enhanced as part of the
project and been resubmitted to Perseus. The aims of the project are: to explore geographic
concepts in the texts; investigate the textualization of these geographic concepts; and the use of
ICT in order to visualize these concepts. The XML-encoded text is encoded for use in the
project's GIS system (QGIS) by creating references that specify the location, the section in the
text, and the toponym. The location is recorded by its name, category (settlement, territory,
physical features), coordinates, and its super-region. For the purpose of visualization, the
project has investigated a number of approaches: generated GIS maps (simple point maps);
Google Earth has been found to be both easy to use and valuable for the visualization of the
data as it can display the text alongside the maps and images; TimeMap, developed by Nick
Rabinowitz, is a mashup that investigates narrated time in Herodotus' text by allowing for data
plotted on Google Maps to appear and disappear as a timeline is moved. The project has also
done a detailed analysis of networks by applying a qualitative analysis in just one chapter of
the text. All geographic entities have been defined in the section and all phenomena that
occupy a place in the topographic reality have been marked up. Using a system of weighting
relations between geographic concepts in the text, new insights about the networks drawn in
the text have been won.
Session seven
The final panel session, headed “Networks of Stories, Structures and Digital Humanities”, saw
three presentations on social network analysis, the mapping of relationships as networks, and
its application to the humanities, the techniques and tools used, the potential of the approach
and some of the problems encountered. Network analysis is a new social sciences
methodology. A network is defined as a set of nodes connected by lines. Anything can
constitute a node and networks usually contain different types of nodes. The lines represent
relations, they can be directed or undirected. Network analysis focusses on the lines to detect
meaningful patterns from a set of systematically selected nodes and lines. The characteristics
(categorical qualities and quantities) of nodes and lines are called attributes. Furthermore, there
are structural properties of the system connecting the nodes. Networks are observed over a
period of time, which allows for the analysis of network evolution over time, the diffusion of
changes through a network, and the analysis of an (intellectual) genealogy. Patterns of
particular interest include those concerning the overall network structure (identifiable
subgroups, centrality and brokerage, ranking) and those that show how a single actor responds
to his local network structure (e.g. reciprocity, balance, preferential attachment, transitivity,
homophily, etc.). Visone <http://visone.info/> is one of the tools available to visualize social
networks.
1. Zoe Borovsky of UCLA presented on “Dickens' Double Narrative: Network Analysis
of Bleak House”. The presenter demonstrated an analysis of the novel using network
content analysis tools, focussing in particular on gender issues in the text. The narrative
voice in the novel has been analysed from the perspective of male/female spheres, the
hypothesis being that there is an interesting play at work between the first-person
female narrator and the third person narrator in the text, as they share a number of
unusual collocates. The Wordij software <http://wordij.net/> has been used to analyse
the text as a network, calculating the distance between concepts in both narrative
sections. Thus concepts like “man” and “woman” can be visualized for each narrator
and the analysis shows that the third-person narrator’s change in style (employing
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collocate patterns used in the first-person narrator's text) reflects and mirrors the
character development in the novel. A shift from “one sex” to “two sex”, a theory that
was very influential in 19th century sociology, can thus be observed to be played out in
the text.
2. Wouter de Nooy of the University of Amsterdam gave a presentation entitled “Network
analysis of story structure”. The presenter demonstrated a network analysis of Russian
folk tales drawing on Vladímir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). The folk
tale is characterized by a limited set of characters, a simple character-function relation,
and the functions served by the characters occur in the same order. Taking the example
of the “Swan-geese” story, the relation of characters and actions was analysed as a
network. As with all fairy-tale roles, temporal patterns influence the actions and drive
forward the morality of the story exemplified by the actors and their actions. Together
with the attributes (e.g. positive vs. negative) of the relations of the characters, it is
possible to construct a network of the story. Each character fulfills a series of positive
or negative actions, his role in the story can be deducted from these actions alone. The
assumption is that moral values are attached to patterns of interaction rather than the
roles characters fulfill in the story, the result is that children are morally educated
through the recognition of the right or wrong doing of the characters in their
interactions. Interesting patterns usually occur when authors play with the conventions
of the genre in which they write and structural patterns are turned upside down. Shifts
between genres and developments of genres over time are possible applications of
network analysis. In conclusion, network analysis requires formalization of the story
structure; time is an important factor to be formalized; interesting comparisons can be
made between stories and across genres.
3. Alkim Salah of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences gave a paper
entitled “Mapping the Flow of 'Digital Humanities'”. The presenter used
scientometrics/bibliometrics as the methodology in her research, using information on
journal papers collected from abstracting services, to map out activities in digital
humanities research. The presenter found that digital humanities research is less widely
distributed and visible than might be expected, it is usually confined to journals
dedicated to the topic and journals on library and information sciences. There has been
very little impact in traditional humanities publications in the various disciplines,
despite the interdisciplinary approach of humanities computing. It is however to be
expected that publications in online journals will alter these findings. It is also
necessary to take a closer look at all the interactions between scholars and digital
humanists that happen in virtual research environments to be able to fully appreciate the
work that is going on in the digital humanities. These social networks pose interesting
challenges and may yield fruitful insights into how the digital humanities have evolved
(institutionally and globally) and how they have contributed to humanities research as a
whole.
It was also announced that next year’s Digital Humanities conference will be hosted by
Stanford University, and that the 2012 conference will be hosted by the University of
Hamburg.
20/08/2010
Alexander Huber
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
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