Articles
[en] Digital Humanities in the 21st Century: Digital Material as a
Driving Force Niels Brügger, The Centre for Internet Studies, and NetLab Aarhus University
Abstract
[en]
In this article it is argued that one of the major transformative factors of the
humanities at the beginning of the 21st century is the shift from analogue to
digital source material, and that this shift will affect the humanities in a
variety of ways. But various kinds of digital material are not digital in the
same way, which a distinction between digitized, born-digital, and
reborn-digital may help us acknowledge, thereby helping us to understand how
each of these types of digital material affects different phases of scholarly
work in its own way. This is illustrated by a detailed comparison of the nature
of digitized collections and web archives.
[en] Towards a Rationale of Audio-TextTanya E. Clement, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
[en]
Digital humanities scholars have made a tradition of problematizing our
understanding of textuality through discussions concerning the design of
information systems for texts that, in many cases, still look like books. This
discussion is concerned with how creating opportunities for studying audio texts
further complicates our understanding of “the rationale of a textualized
document,” defined by Jerome McGann as “the dynamic structure of a document as it
is realized in determinate (artisanal) and determinable (reflective)
ways”. This discussion frames a rationale of audio text within the
context of developing information infrastructures for accessing audio texts. I
introduce a tool called ARLO that we have been developing in the High
Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) project
(http://www.hipstas.org) for
accessing and analyzing sound collections alongside new standards being proposed
for the development of audio visual (AV) metadata and content models. The
discussion concludes by considering what these interventions tell us about how a
rationale of audio textuality helps us rethink rationales of text in digital
environments.
[en] Circling around texts and language: towards
“pragmatic modelling” in Digital HumanitiesArianna Ciula, University of Roehampton; Cristina Marras, Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Abstract
[en]
In this paper we introduce the syntagm “pragmatic modelling”
as a productive way of contextualising research in Digital Humanities (DH). We
define “pragmatic modelling” as a middle-out approach
(neither top down nor bottom up) that combines formal and experimental modelling
techniques with an effective use of language. Furthermore, in order to elucidate
a “pragmatic understanding” of model building, we reflect on
texts (considered here as objects) and modelling (or strategy of analysis) in DH
research (and teaching). This paper does not identify a new practice or
approach; rather it offers an explanatory framework for existing practices. As
the paper explains, this framework goes beyond existing ones and allows us to
think about modelling in a more integral way. Drawing on this framework, we
reveal how DH modelling practices challenge epistemological and linguistic
restrictions, by, for example, problematising the adoption of terminology
belonging to the domain of computer sciences. Reflections on metaphorical
reasoning are used to exemplify how polarities and some rigidities DH research
could find itself embedded in are overcome in practice. We conclude by
advocating the importance of a diachronic and historical analysis of the role of
metaphors in DH to further explore the relation between theory and practice as
well as to develop models of modelling integral to DH research.
[en] Explaining Events to Computers: Critical Quantification,
Multiplicity and Narratives in Cultural HeritageStuart Dunn, King’s College London; Mareike Schumacher, Hamburg University
Abstract
[en]
Digital Humanities provide the means and methods to research topics in a
transdisciplinary and multilayered way. In this paper we combine perspectives
from historical research and literary criticism to problematize the
categorization, computation and representation of events in cultural heritage.
Combining methodologies of narratology, historic research and Digital Humanities
we aim to extract, classify and quantify events in a way that preserves their
inherent multiplicity and multivocality. In two case studies we exemplify that
narrative may be seen as a means to mediate events rather than a classical
media-centred tradition to preserve an authorized version of cultural
heritage.
[en] How do we get to the Humanitarium from here?Stan Ruecker, IIT Institute of Design
Abstract
[en]
For the past century, the sciences have made terrific strides in capturing the
public imagination. From dedicated television channels to online learning
materials to science-related entertainment and educational facilities for
families in practically every major city on the planet, the scale of public
relations has been impressive and continuous. However, the same cannot be said
for the Humanities. Although we certainly have cultural institutions for adults,
ranging from art galleries to opera houses, their primary emphasis has been on
providing opportunities for passively consuming cultural production, rather than
with the core interest of the Humanities, which is in enriching objects of study
by analyzing them through a variety of theoretical lenses. In this paper, I
argue, as others have been doing for some time, that the Humanities need to
learn in this respect from the sciences, in order to increase their public
stature. Further, the driving force behind this education is Digital Humanities.
Since public relations has been on the back burner for so long, this initiative
is both important and daunting; it is one of the ways in which the Digital
Humanities are strengthening the Humanities while at the same time encouraging
them in a task that seems difficult enough that everyone wishes it was not
necessary.
[en] Covers and Corpus wanted! Some Digital Humanities
Fragments Claire Clivaz, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Abstract
[en]
Covers and bindings are collapsing in the digital textual world. To begin with,
the following paper argues that this is not a genuinely new situation, since all
cultural Western history attests to written texts as never having been
autonomous from oral discourses and versioning steps. Thenceforth – after
analyzing the relationship between paper and body, relying notably on Derrida –
this article will claim that we have the right and indeed, an obligation, to
“capture” new covers and bindings. During the 17th century, in the
lawless parts of the ocean, buccaneers realized that the right to depart was the
condition for the capacity to be bound. Therefore, let us dare to depart from
ancient bindings and create new boundaries.
[en] Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for
Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks Christopher N. Warren, Carnegie Mellon University; Daniel Shore, Georgetown University; Jessica Otis, Carnegie Mellon University; Lawrence Wang, Carnegie Mellon University; Mike Finegold, Carnegie Mellon University; Cosma Shalizi, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
[en]
In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social
networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so.
Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an
unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in
how persons were connected to one another in our field of study, early modern
Britain (c. 1500-1700), has no global, unified resource to which to turn.
Manually building such a network is infeasible, since it would need to represent
thousands of nodes and tens of millions of potential edges just to include the
relations among the most prominent persons of the period. Our Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project takes up recent
statistical techniques and digital tools to reconstruct and visualize the early
modern social network.
We describe in this paper the natural language processing tools and statistical
graph learning techniques that we used to extract names and infer relations from
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. We
then explain the steps taken to test inferred relations against the knowledge of
experts in order to improve the accuracy of the learning techniques. Our
argument here is twofold: first, that the results of this process, a global
visualization of Britain’s early modern social network, will be useful to
scholars and students of the period; second, that the pipeline we have developed
can, with local modifications, be reused by other scholars to generate networks
for other historical or contemporary societies from biographical documents.
[en] Mining Public Discourse for Emerging Dutch NationalismMaarten van den Bos, Utrecht University; Hermione Giffard, Utrecht University
Abstract
[en]
Historians have argued that nationalism spread from elite groups to larger
populations through public media, yet this has never been empirically proven. In
this paper, we use digital tools to search for expressions of nationalism in
Dutch newspaper discourse in the late nineteenth century by text mining in large
newspaper repositories. The absence of emotional nationalist rhetoric in Dutch
national newspapers suggests that nationalism in the late nineteenth century was
much more subtle than the literature based on elite discourse tells us.
[en] The Printing Press as MetaphorElyse Graham, SUNY Stony Brook
Abstract
[en]
These days, we are constantly looking for an image of ourselves in the historical
past. “The first ever information revolution,” begins a typical book jacket
blurb, “began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars
to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge” . A communications scholar offers a view of our place
in history that has echoes in countless other publications and presentations:
“At present we are witnessing an information revolution whose significance
parallels and perhaps even surpasses that of the information revolution caused
by the printing press in the fifteenth century” . Publishers, both academic and trade, have created a new genre
of book titles that confidently find the digital sizzle in the analog past:
The Renaissance Computer (on printed books),
The Victorian Internet (on the telegraph),
Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (on
letters, pamphlets, and graffiti). Scholars give talks with titles like “Books as Social Media” (Leah Price), “Blogging Now and Then (250 Years Ago)” (Robert
Darnton), and “What’s in a Visitor’s Book? Social Media and
Volcanic Tourism in the Nineteenth Century” (John Brewer).
Surrounded as we are by these analogies — by these claims in favor of specific
ways of construing the relationship between the past and the present, and by the
significance claims that go with them — it seems fair to ask what purposes they
serve. There is no doubt that we feel ourselves to be in the midst of a period
of dramatic change in our media and information environments. My interest in
this essay lies not in these environments themselves, but rather in our popular
uses of historical metaphor to explain them. Why, in particular, do we turn to
the rise of the printing press, out of all the options available, as our
standard analogy for the rise of the internet? What value does this metaphor
hold for us, what does it enable and what does it constrain, and what value does
metaphoric thinking in general hold for analysis in media studies? It is as
common for us today to use the printing press as a unit of measure in
estimations of information history as it is for us to discuss our current
circumstances in terms of an information revolution. But how
historically accurate are these kinds of description? What do they mean for the
ways in which we as futurists make use of history — and what do they mean for
the ways in which we as historians take the long view?
[en] The App-Maker Model: An Embodied Expansion of Mobile
CyberinfrastructureBrett Oppegaard, University of Hawaii; Michael Rabby, Washington State University Vancouver
Abstract
[en]
With the Maker Movement promoting a refreshing DIY ethic in regard to creation
and epistemology, the time might be ripe for scholars to adopt such techniques
into their own research, particularly in the subfield of mobile communication
studies. One can now relatively easily participate in the building and
implementation of a variety of digital products, such as mobile apps, that can
then be used to study user experiences through interactions with rhetorical
forms, including a variety of types of informatics. Our experiences in several
projects that use both large- and small-scale mobile apps offer a critique and
lessons learned directly from engaging in this type of field experimentation,
including reflections on observations, survey responses, and other types of data
collection made possible through this model. Four larger issues are addressed
here, about conducting research through making apps, providing potential
research paths, opportunities and challenges to consider. Perhaps most
importantly, this research approach offers the ability to tailor an instrument
specific to research needs and then test that instrument in a natural setting,
affording a true sense of how people interact with their environments in real
situations and real settings.
[en] Literary Data Mining: A review of Matthew
Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital
Methods and Literary History (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2013).Jim Egan, Brown University
Abstract
[en]
This review finds that Jockers' Macroanalysis provides a clear and provocative
argument in favor of literary critics' use of data mining in
their efforts to understand literary history. The review
finds Jockers' case for a blended approach, one that
combines data mining with close-reading techniques,
compelling, and it finds, in addition, that his claim that
such an approach holds the potential to revolutionize
literary study to be a fair assessment of the possibities
offered by data mining tools and techniques.
