Digital Humanities in India

November 29, 2009 at 4:29 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

I am  not sure if there is a defined ‘Digital Humanities’ field in India (where I am at the moment), but there is activity occurring in numerous places. The Library Science is one area to find Digital Humanities activities in India as per this International Conference on Digital Libraries in New Delhi early in 2010.

TERI invites your attention to ICDL 2010, the third conference in the Institute’s ICDL (The International Conference on Digital Libraries) series. ICDL 2010 is proposed to be organized during 23-26 February 2010 in New Delhi. The theme of the conference is ‘Digital Libraries : Shaping the Information Paradigm’ and the focus is on the strengths and potential of digital libraries and their role in education, cultural, social and economic development (link).

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The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities

November 20, 2009 at 10:18 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science

This paper is based upon the Keynote lecture given at Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, USA by Professor Christine Borgman (link).

ABSTRACT
The digital humanities are at a critical moment in the transition from a speciality area to a full-fledged community with a common set of methods, sources of evidence, and infrastructure – all of which are necessary for achieving academic recognition. As budgets are slashed and marginal programs are eliminated in the current economic
crisis, only the most articulate and productive will survive. Digital collections are proliferating, but most remain difficult to use, and digital scholarship remains a backwater in most humanities departments with respect to hiring, promotion, and teaching practices. Only the scholars themselves are in a position to move the field forward. Experiences of the sciences in their initiatives for cyberinfrastructure and eScience offer valuable lessons. Information- and data-intensive, distributed, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary research is now the norm in the sciences, while remaining experimental in the humanities. Discussed here are six factors for comparison, selected for their implications for the future of digital scholarship in the humanities: publication practices, data, research methods, collaboration, incentives, and learning. Drawing upon lessons gleaned from these comparisons, humanities scholars are “called to action” with five questions to address as a community: What are data? What are the infrastructure requirements? Where are the social studies of digital humanities? What is the humanities laboratory of the 21st century? What is the value proposition for digital humanities in an era of declining budgets? (original link to paper).

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Ordnance Survey maps to go free online

November 18, 2009 at 12:46 pm · Filed under creative commons, data, digital humanities

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian’s three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US.

Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who is now information tsar advising on the handing over of private government data to the public (thanks to Andy W for the link).

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On being critical…

November 17, 2009 at 4:19 pm · Filed under digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing

A recent post I placed on Humanist; one of the most important academic initiatives in the Digital Humanities run by Professor Willard McCarty of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. In this post, I sort of hijacked the subject somewhat but this needed to be said because as I see it, the otherwise wonderful infrastructure agenda in the Digital Humanities in this instance lacks clarity and purposefulness.

From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: critical thinking

What I think all this has to do with computing is in our understanding
better what computing has to do with the culture in which it has surfaced.
The utilitarian argument (”the computer is useful”) is so trite, so dull, so
incapable of supporting for long the professional activity we would like to
see given a better place in the sun. The principle of reprocity that governs
human relations says we need to be useful for sure, but to attract the sort
of students we want as well as keep ourselves alive intellectually I’d think
we need to offer something with a real bite to it. What has that bite? Not a
totally paranoid vision, though the thrill of the threat of it is a start.

Dear Willard and Humanist,

This is an interesting argument and given the institutional arrangements of the Digital Humanities, they aren’t going to be resolved quickly. I think where we find ourselves in the Digital Humanities is wedged somewhere between a contemporary version of CP Snow’s Two Cultures argument. But rather than wedged between ‘Science’ and ‘Humanities’ we find ourselves stuck somewhere between highly skilled technical  labour and academic labour. They are both two very valuable and different cultures with divergent approaches to work, merit, aspiration, and research significance. This division is especially problematic in the UK context given the history of the class system where working class kids went to technical school and middle class kids were given the opportunity to become academics. This of course changed significantly with mass tertiary education and the rise of the Polytechnics.

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Online Communication and Promotion of Research Expertise

November 17, 2009 at 10:55 am · Filed under projects

I encourage people to apply for this call from JISC. JISC put out some good calls, although at times I worry that they they do not understand the difference between ’skilled work’ and ‘research work’. There is a big difference. Research is not necessarily ‘promoted’; it is cited within the authorial arguments of the academic monologue. It doesn’t matter how heavily research is advertised and promoted; if it is crap research it is still crap research. It may have a poor evidence base, the questions may be trivial, it may be poorly contextualised within a field, it may not be convincing, well argued, nor conclusive. A well-endowed research team may place advertisements on all the EasyJet planes in Europe that announce their research to ‘broad audiences’; however if it is crap research it is still crap research!

The JISC invites tenders to conduct a study of Online Communication and Promotion of Research Expertise.
The aim of the study is to establish how institutions are promoting their research expertise online, and whether this is effective, and to describe practices that contribute to its effectiveness in meeting the needs of the different parties involved, especially research users outside higher education.
Total funding of up to £100,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for this project.
The deadline for proposals is 12 noon UK time on 14 December 2009.
A full version of the ITT can be found here http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2009/11/researchexpertiseitt.aspx

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Open Science and Data

November 10, 2009 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, data, e-science, eresearch

As part of JISC’s ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity
which launches at the end of November, a new Open Science report released
today trails key research trends that could have far-reaching implications for
science, universities and UK society.

The report written by UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Digital Curation
Centre, identifies open-ness, predictive science based on massive data
volumes and citizen involvement as being important features of tomorrow’s
research practice.

It is hoped that this document will stimulate and contribute to community
discussion in the UK, which is ranked second in the world for its output of
quality research, but also fuel the open science debate on the global stage.
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