Let the sun shine in…

By Craig | Published: May 13, 2012

Yes let's preserve the data. But can it survive the sunshine?

 

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Computer as thing…

By Craig | Published: May 10, 2012

The thing is not yet human...

I think if I could name one of the most frustrating aspects about being a ‘digital humanists’ (apart form the preponderance of polyester shirts), it is confronting the popular notion that a computer is a thing.  Many people, (including some of the nations most talented researchers), believe that a computer is just a thing.  And by extension, the thing just ‘does its thing’. You just turn the thing on and it does history for you or does philosophy for you or writes your books for you. And ‘the thing’ is just like the washing machine in the laundry at home. No need to learn how the thing works; just turn on the thing and your undies will come out clean and bright.

And optomised for the Australian sunshine; the thing is often painted a nice Benthemite beige with one big button for ‘the everyman’ to efficiently master the thing whilst whispering sweet victory over 19th Century European class structures (whilst ignoring those of the 21st).  And ‘the thing’ sits there quietly and does its job; determining its own future by giving less and less buttons to ‘the people’ who are still fighting the ghost of Queen Victoria through the ghost of David Hume.  Keep it simple! One day the common man rebels and screams ‘I want another button!’ I want a button that does more. I want a button that does history for me!’ And he presses a button and up pops David Hume who tells him ‘don’t worry, be happy. No need to learn; just keep pressing your one button over and over and over again and you will be happy’.

Perhaps I see the role of the digital humanists as freeing people from the more unimaginative dictates of utility through education. Not a unique vision,  but unique visions are, well, unique (or perhaps as Hume would tell us ‘useless’).

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Digital Humanities Australasia 2012: Review

By Craig | Published: May 9, 2012

Dr Julia Flanders from Brown University in the US, Keynote Presentation

The newly formed Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) held its inaugural conference ‘Digital Humanities Australasia: Building, Mapping, Connecting’ in Canberra, 26-30 March, 2012. The event was the first major conference of its type in Australia; bringing together some of the leading figures in the digital humanities internationally as well as showcasing some of the innovative new research in the field in Australia and New Zealand.  The Keynotes included Julia Flanders, the Director of the Women’s Writers Project at Brown University in the US, Alan Liu, Professor of English at Santa Barbara University in the US, Professor John Unsworth, the CIO from Brandeis University in the US, and Professor Harold Short, the former Director and founder of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

The conference was held in the splendid 1950s chic of the Shine Dome owned by the Australian Academy of the Science. The conference included a poster session to display the new scholarship of emerging scholars as well as a series of workshops led by some leading figures in text encoding and text analysis, mapping, and book digitisation. The main conference sessions included ‘trends in digital scholarship in Japan ’, ‘modelling and open publishing’ and ‘teaching the digital humanities’. Together the interdisciplinary format of the program provided ample opportunity for participants to discuss and exchange some of their computing methods and critical insights developed within their fields.

The conference was supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian National University, and VeRSI who partnered with University of Melbourne Library to bring-out one of the keynotes and provide much of the program management tools and expertise.  The conference is a much needed and long-overdue addition to Australian and New Zealand humanities research and will be held roughly every 2 years as part of the long-term commitment of the aaDH.

More details can be found on the aaDH site: http://aa-dh.org/

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Another vision?

By Craig | Published: May 4, 2012

I think if there is to be another so-called broader vision of ‘computers in the humanities’ at this stage of development,there needs to be much more work done in terms of ‘research into research’ (ie. especially into humanities research practices). The practical and urgent problems of science require lots of talented people to address them; partly with the tools of the digital age, but in terms of their adaptability to humanities research, there does needs to be a lot more focused  research undertaken to build an evidence base and set of convincing arguments. Again, the present vision of eResearch may not be one that makes sense across the two great branches of knowledge; the science and the humanities. The ‘eResearch vision’ for the humanities needs to be built on a convincing evidence base (ie. research into humanities research), not only the arguments of good scientific practice.  There is nothing wrong with borrowing and adapting ideas from any field or branch of knowledge to a particular problem, but they do need to be useful to the context in which they are adapted. And more ‘research into research’ will assist in this regard. And again I think the eLearning community (ie. research into learning) has done a pretty good job here.

eResearch is not a quick fix, the  agencies involved in it do some excellent work and its mission is an important one and it must be sustained in the longer term as the monumental problems addressed by eResearch are not going to be solved quickly.  And if it is not sustained we won’t be able to build upon its vision and make something of our own for the humanities. I think it is fair to say that a lot of the ‘digital humanities’ is emerging out of eResearch, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.  But there is also nothing wrong with imagining something a little different to this and to do this, we need to understand what we actually do a lot more (ie. a trans-formative reflection). Again, we ignore the literature in the digital humanities at our own peril.

 

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eResearch and Digital Humanities: a broader vision?

By Craig | Published: May 3, 2012

Digital Heat: Vast underground machines run by downtrodden humanists power 'Metropolis.

I have been having many conversations with people of late around the boundaries of  ‘eResearch’ and ‘Digital Humanities’.  And I have received lots of divergent and interesting responses from both researchers and professionals working in various ways with computing in the humanities.  And there does tend to be little agreement about certain aspects of the landscape; many researchers have ‘discovered’ computing in the humanities from their own particular perspective and this perspective is often lacking generosity towards the richer and deeper veins of thought and helmsmanship provided by the long history of computing in humanities research and teaching (ie. the digital humanities).

The eResearch community in Australia has done some fantastic work in terms of building and maintaining repositories and addressing related issues around data management and data re-use.  And this is perhaps not unusual as arguably, the Australian eResearch community emanated from the repository movement in the 1990s. However, the vision of eResearch; that principally relates to data-management and data-reuse is a limited vision and can be a fairly low-level understanding of computing in research (especially for humanities research problems).

The raison d’etre of eResearch around ‘data management’ and ‘data re-use’ may be very important in some research contexts, but still they are largely scientific concerns. And although they may resonate with some aspects of humanities research; they are very much secondary to the higher cognitive functions required to address humanities problems.  In my mind, eResearch is largely a set of Professional Development problems and although professional academic development is a very important aspect to good research and teaching; there is not one size fits all to professional development and again the needs of the scientific community are very different to the needs of humanities research.

Data management may be a component of some humanities research and it may be of more importance to say one or two of the fifteen or so disciplines that traditionally constitute the humanities, but it is also a very limiting idea of computing in the humanities.  There are also some difficult, urgent, and critical intellectual concerns about how computing works within humanities thought and the digital humanities and humanities computing before it; have been tackling these issues for close to half a century now (but still, ‘data’ does play a big role in this, but I hope it isn’t the only role).

And I like the way that this body of knowledge developed within the digital humanities challenges and extends humanities researchers beyond the glass-ceilings that eResearch has often inadvertently set for us.  The humanities thrives on imagination and intellectual curiosity so surely we can imagine something a little more colourful than a set of largely scientific professional development issues focused upon the good management of data? Sure, this is a very important activity, but is not the main game for much of the humanities and good research requires a much larger vision.

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Harold Short ‘Collaborative Scholarship in the Digital Humanities’ Melbourne

By Craig | Published: April 23, 2012

Just a reminder that Professor Harold Short will speaking in Melbourne this Friday, 27 April, 2012.

Synopsis:

What are the particular challenges faced by arts and humanities scholars engaged in collaborative inter-disciplnary research? This is a significant question for the Digital Humanities, whose own disciplinary identity and character are so intrinsically multidisciplinary.

Drawing on the twenty years’ experience in multidisciplinary research projects of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, Harold Short will present some reflections on the challenges faced in large collaborative projects and possible approaches to meeting those challenges. Particular emphasis will be given to the points of stress, the continuing areas of difficulty and the problems faced by collaborative research in the arts and humanities in a wider academic culture that is slow to change.

Bio:

Harold Short is Professor of Humanities Computing at King’s College London, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Western Sydney in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics. At King’s, Professor Short founded and directed the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, now the Department of Digital Humanities, of which he was the Head until his retirement in 2010. He is a former Chair of both the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and is a general editor of the Ashgate series <Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities>. . Professor Short is  in Melbourne with the assistance of VeRSI.

Friday, 27 April 2012
11.00am 12.20pm
North Lecture Theatre (Room 239)
First Floor
Old Arts Building
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

To register, please email arts-research@unimelb.edu.au

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Data versus method (data needs heads!)

By Craig | Published: April 23, 2012

I have been thinking a little more about this the relationship between ‘eResearch’ and the ‘Digital Humanities’ of late; partly because it is the subject of my talk at the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg in July, and I want to do justice to what I see as a very important topic that hasn’t been particularly well handled in the past.

There are certain unique challenges in Australia in that the eResearch agenda is quite established but the digital humanities aren’t.  And this has caused quite a lot of conflict in the past in that many in the humanities have seen themselves as being locked out of the eResearch agenda by Science and many in eResearch have viewed the humanities as high-risk and being ill-prepared to lead large infrastructural developments in their disciplines.

There is perhaps some truth in both these assertions, but I do see a way forward.  eResearch is largely an infrastructural movement (largely led by science) and thus often lacks a theoretical base and set of arguments to convincingly communicate its worth within humanities research. But if there is a theoretical base or conceptual core to the eResearch agenda; then is it ‘data’: data management, data re-use, and data interoperability.  But there is a problem here in that the data collected by agencies within the eResearch agenda is often only collected and not much else. Data is an idea (not a ‘thing’) and ideas can never speak for themselves; ideas (data) must be attached to the arguments in scholarly research (humanities research is interpretive, not positivist).

This is where the digital humanities can lead. If eResearch is building a ‘data commons’ (ie. through agencies such as the Australian National Data Service), then the digital humanities are building a ‘methodological commons’.  A method is a vital component of the research process and if we develop lots of methods, we will be able to use lots of data.  So the digital humanities needs to be strengthened to rise to the challenges otherwise we have lots of data (and lots of ideas) with no heads to put them in.  And if data doesn’t have a head then the data doesn’t actually exist (ie. data is interpretative and doesn’t really exist outside of that interpretation). And yes, I am not such a relativist to believe that there is not a world outside of interpretation, but data is not ‘of this world’ it is merely someone’s interpretation of the world.

A 'methodological commons' developed by Professor Willard McCarty et.al

 

Posted in data, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, Virtual Reseach Environments | 1 Comment

  • ...this blog is obsessively directed at profiling digital humanities developments in a cultural, social, and technical sense and in terms of books and applications...it is an aggregation or 'meta' style blog with the occasional commentary

    Hi, my name is Dr Craig Bellamy and I am a digital humanities analyst for the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative, a consortium based at the University of Melbourne, however, the views expressed in this blog are the responsibility of the author alone.

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