Frontiers in Spatial Humanities from Scholars’ Lab on Vimeo.

Bethany Nowvisky talks in ‘the final event of our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.

The Scholars’ Lab/NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship was held at the University of Virginia Library May 25-27, 2010 and concluded with a set of two-minute, three-slide lightning talks by Institute attendees on their own spatial humanities projects and works-in-progress.

Still, what a wonderful time I have had over the past month; capped off last week by a symposium in Newcastle, Australia to honour the work of John Burrows; one of the pioneers of ‘stylometrics’ or the statistical study of authorship in text. This was possible one of the best DH events I have been to in recents years; certainly because it sits within one of my core understadings of the field (and arguably is the foundation of the field). Computing in the humanities is a form of method and analysis and through this analysis we may learn something new about authorship; disputed text, intellectual health, death, murder, love, plagiarism, and class war. I will pursue these last claims in a following blog post as I am more concerned at this juncture about why Firefox 5 killed my Google tool bar and now my spell-checker doesn’t work and everyone will be able to tell I went to a State School.

And I thought that there was a good balance of participants; about 1/3 were from interstate; about half the attendees were from universities and the other half were from the cultural sector such as museums, libraries, and the Victorian Public Record Office (the digital humanities is the sound of many hands clapping!)

I was particularly impressed by the session proposals that ranged from the theoretical, speculative and critical to the focussed technical discussions.  The session on HTML 5 and Javascript were particularly strong in terms of the technologies, methods and critical technical discussions. The sessions on collections and online reputation management were well-attended and I often didn’t like having to end lively discussions so as to keep people on time and remind them of the next session.  The boot-camp sessions were  also well-received and I can’t wait to start using Omeka after Tim Sherratt’s excellent demonstration of its capabilities and plug-in features (it looks a lot like WordPress….yeaaah!).

Creating the sessions at the beginning of the day could have perhaps been imagined more creatively (my fault here).  But in the end we only needed about 15 sessions and we had 17 so everyone was easily accommodated (there are other ways to do scheduling and perhaps it is worth exploring alternatives in future THATCamp events. Plus I am not sure that everyone knew what the sessions were about given that we could only write simple one line descriptions on the white board). And, as we are in the centre of the city, many people were coming and going and had individual requests for scheduling sessions which they were leading that was fairly challenging to accomodate. But, we managed to schedule some good themes around collections, tools, and theoretical discussions which appeared to work-out ok.

And one attendee mentioned that they liked ‘the vibe’ of the event which I took as a great complement as this is important if we are to build bridges between people with different degrees of investment in technology and/or the humanities. This is a ‘hard-interdisciplinary’ relationship and there still aren’t too many productive places where the ‘two cultures’ come together in an innovative and collegial way.

Opening Session of THATCamp Melbourne

THATCamp is an ‘un-conference’ that brings together technologist and humanities scholars in an informal setting to make and discuss technologies in the humanities.
As part of THATCamp, there will also be a Great PROV Data Challenge to be held at the Public Records Office Victoria on Thursday 24 March).

Submissions will open from 20 January, 2011 and outcomes will be know by 25 February 2011.

Read the various sections on this site for more information about THATCamp Melbourne.

Hope to see you in March!

TEI in Humanities Research (at University of Melbourne's, staff Digitisation forum)

I occasionally do talks at Melbourne University and elsewhere on the use of TEI in humanities research. Although a long way from being an expert, I usually just outline the key TEI projects and what is possible with TEI. Here I am explaining the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London’s wonderful Fine Rolls of Henry III project.

Professor Graeme Davidson

‘Narrating the nation’

Professor Carl Bridge, Director of the Menzies Centre

Dr Ian Henderson, Lecturer at the Menzies Centre and his partner Kwesi.

Inaugural Lecture

by Richard Beacham, Charlotte Roueché & Harold Short

We have chosen to give a joint inaugural presentation of our work, because we all work in densely collaborative areas, in a manner which is not necessarily familiar to Humanities scholars.

We will be presenting how our individual researches have developed, how we have worked together, and what we hope for the future.

We are particularly keen that this event should inaugurate and inspire new activities among our friends and colleagues (link).

Professor Hey discussed ‘eScience’ and how it may be a new way to do science. He discussed the shift from experimental science to data intensive science. He explained that building datasets, using datasets, and analysing datasets had become a ‘new paradigm’ within scientific research. However, this shift is not exclusive to scientific research and ‘eScience’ offers new opportunities to the humanities as well. But there is a need to put data into a form and create the tools that are useful for the humanities (putting data into a useful form is partly the work of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s and the Digital Humanities Observatory). He showed some of the work of Microsoft including a video presentation, transcription and annotation system called Project Tuva. This project features the work of Dr Richard Feynman, a famous scientist at Cornell, and allows users to search and annotate videos of his lectures. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ .

Although not really Digital Humanities, he did show some of the other work of Microsoft’s 800 plus research scientists scattered around the world. Some of this work admittedly made me a bit nervous, especially Microsoft’s data centres that are each about the size of Dublin. The data centres represent a shift in Internet thinking from the autonomous computing and storage capacities of desktops (and various institutional computing facilities), to large centralised warehouses controlled by corporations such as Microsoft. Professor Hey touted the benefits of data centres for ‘cloud computing’ (ie. use of tools and services at a remote location), but in my mind, these centres give a lot of control to Microsoft and we must take it on good faith that Microsoft will always have our best interests in mind.

Martin Curley, Director of IT innovation at Intel Information Technology (based in Ireland), responded to Hey’s talk, but unfortunately at times, deferred to the flabby arguments of technological determinism with the usual utopian visions of ‘more computers make things better’ (why do utopian visions never imagine free Guinness?). He did make some interesting points about the ‘grand challenges’ facing the world and how these are, in part, being addressed through European Commissions Framework 7 Programme (focussed upon building the research infrastructure capacities in Europe). Humanists must always work alongside scientists in addressing ‘grand challenges’ as we already know that the ice caps are melting and that the world is running out of oil, but we also desperately need to understand the potentially catastrophic societal dimensions of this (and surly part of the cause is rampant consumerism driven by corporate globalism, but I would never infer such a thing in such company).

Other presentations during the day included more content-specific presentations such as the magnificent 1641 Depositions Project, presented by Dr Marie Wallace, that contains 20, 000 pages of witness testimonials about the massacre of Protestants in Ireland in 1641. Dr Seth Denbo discussed the DARAIH project (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and its aim to link researchers to important data sets held in major data centres throughout Europe. The project has 14 partners in 10 countries and plans to build a ‘discovery architecture’ so that researchers can find important data resources and incorporate them into their working practices and solve ‘real world’ research problems.

Dr Susan Schreibman, the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), discussed the work of her centre and emphasised the importance of building the human infrastructure as well as the technical infrastructure to support the research community. She explained that the Digital Humanities is not only about technical capacities, it is also about people and practices. I would like to think this is always the case, but often the short-term practical solution, devoid of the critical, contextual, and reflective apparatus of the humanists, triumphs. If we don’t understand the humanistic context of the technologies that we use (ie. how they help us understand human society), then we don’t always know how to apply the right technical solution to the right humanist problem. Computing, if poorly considered, can also damage scholarship and our relationship with the human record.

The seminar ended with a reception at the Provost’s house, Professor Andy Orchard, on the grounds of Trinity College.

Projects/papers/resources presented at the seminar include:

• Project Tuva (Video annotation system), Microsoft External Research,
  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
• The Digital Future is now; A Call for Action for the Humanities, Christine Borgman (article),
  http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1232&context=borgman
• DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)
  http://www.dariah.eu/
• European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme,
  http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/
• 1641 Depositions Project
  http://dho.ie/drapier/node/105
• Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO)
  http://dho.ie/
• Christ on the Cross Project
  http://christonthecross.org/index.html
• The Irish in Europe Project (Virtual Research Environment)
  http://www.irishineurope.com/
• A number of excellent poster presentations were also given at the event (many of the details of the projects can be found on the DHO’s DRAPIer projects database http://dho.ie/drapier/ )

Dr Susan Schreibman with the Provost of Trinity College, Andy Orchard.

Anatomy lecture theatre, Trinity College, Dublin

Joris van Zundert from the Huygens Institute in The Hague spoke first about moving humanities tools towards ‘networked services’. Many tools are developed for individual projects and are not often re-usable within other projects. By providing  tools online (or ‘micro services’ that can be plugged into a generic software frameworks), other projects may use them to say, parse TEI XML texts, tokenise texts, or apply other methods required to transcribe and annotate text. His vision,  shared by many projects, is for scholars to obtain their text from digital repositories, pipe it through a number of micro-services, and then end up with annotated and transcribed data. The particular content that Zandert is working with is critical editions of Middle Dutch; not easily automated through Optical Character Recognition Systems (thus a collaborative translation system is required).

Dot Porter, the Metadata Manager at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin spoke about her TILE project for linking image and text. Similar to the other projects presented, TILE will be ‘beautifully modular’ in that existing tools and services will be able to be plugged into it creating ‘a system where existing tools work well together’. She described it as ‘a community of projects not a single project’. Similar to Zundert’s project, this system will be able to make use of data once it is stored in a digital repository and provide the tools to work with it. The plan is to provide a suite of tools and collections of (critical editing) tools to display and annotate images.

Roger Osborne spoke about the Aus-e-lit project that provides collaborative integration and annotation services for Australian literature scholars. The original project originated in 1980 from a card index of Australian authors and list authors from 1788 to the present. It contains 650, 000 citations that are entered by a team of specialists from around Australia. The services the Aus-e-lit project provides includes data integration, empirical reporting, collaborative annotation and publishing services. The system includes a Firefox add-on to enable users to add Dublin core and other relationships to the digital works and citations stored. Osborne also mentioned that a large digitisation fund was becoming available in Australia involving the National Library, the National Archives, and the Film Archive. If large digitisation projects along with their data are available in Australia, then just like Britain who leads in this field, Australian scholars will be in a position to add-value to this data through collaborative annotation and editing systems such as Aust-e-Lit.

Yin Liu and Geoff Rockwell presented some of their work in Canada. Yin Liu was one of the few presenters to raises issues of ‘scholarly culture’; especially in terms of authoring scholarly editions (perhaps the core intellectual endeavour of the Digital Humanities field). She posed the question ‘is the single author edition the best way to do things or is it a function of the traditional model of what an edition might be?’ Although she did not attempt to answer the question; it is extraordinary important to pose questions such as this as poorly implemented ‘solutions’ in scholarly culture can undermine scholarship.

Geoff Rockwell talked about the projects TAPOR and JITR. Similar to the TILE project, TAPOR is a portal for tools; a broker for web services. He discussed how to turn tools into web-services (and also emphasised that it is OK at times to ‘re-invent the wheel’; in part because of the diversity of approaches in the humanities). TAPOR is a way of importing text and listing tools to work with the text. It has a section called TAPORware that lists tools, explains what they do, then allows users to apply the tools (interestigly, the innovative online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly uses one of TAPOR’s tools). Rockwell also briefly discussed JITR which is an integration testing system for the interoperation of tools. The tools to gather, edit, and analyse text may need to be ‘interoperate’ to accommodate scholarly work flows. JITR is a system to test if they work well together (the tools, not the scholars!)

Other projects discussed at the workshop included Neel Smith’s The Cite Architecture for identifying and retrieving objects (US) , TextGrid; a large German project for collecting, organising and analysing texts (or an extensible community architecture). Peter Robinson and Federico Meschini (UK) discussed ontologies (or the ‘semantic digital humanities’) and called for projects to reveal their ontologies and make them available to other projects. Tamara Lopez from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities discussed the new project TextVRE which is an extension to the German TextGrid projects so that TextGrid can work with English texts and UK national services. The final project presented was by Karsten Kynde from the Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen who discussed the Kierkegaard online edition and his fairly traditional critical edition approach.

Overall, many of the participants stressed the need to design tools to target architecture, not isolated research tasks. Infrastructure has no value in itself and must have good tools, services and significant data resources to work with it. There needs to be a deep understanding of scholarly research processes and modular, extensible, and flexible systems are needed to accommodate the myriad of scholarly approaches and heterogeneous data resources in the humanities. There was also much discussion of ontologies as ontologies provide the basis for finding digital texts on line in their rich and meaningful context so that they can be linked/compared/integrated with others.  Plus, turn your tools into web services!

The projects discussed at the workshop include:

• T.I.L.E Text Image Linking Environment (US and Ireland)
  http://mith.info/tile/
• The Cite Architecture for Identifying and Retrieving Objects (US)
  http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/cite
• e-Laborate: Virtual Workspace for Social Sciences and Humanities (Netherlands)
  http://www.e-laborate.nl/nl/
• Pinakes (Italy)
  http://www.pinakes.org/
• Aust-e-Lit: Collaborative Integration and annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities (Australia)
  http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/
• Heurist Scholar (Australia)
  http://heuristscholar.org/heurist/
• Editing Modernism in Canada (Canada)
  http://editingmodernism.ca/
• MARGOT: Moyen Age et Renaissance (Canada)
  http://margot.uwaterloo.ca/
• The Grub Street Project: Topographies of 18th Century London
  http://grubstreetproject.net/ (Canada)
• TAPOR: Text Analysis Portal for Research (Canada)
  http://grubstreetproject.net/
• JITR (Joint Integration Test Runner (Canada)
  http://www.jitr.org/
• TextGrid: Networked Research Environment for the Humanities (Germany)
  http://www.textgrid.de/en.html
• FRBR, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (Ontology framework; UK)
  http://www.frbr.org/
• CIDOC CRM (ontology) (Greece etc.)
  http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/
• TextVRE (UK, Germany)
  http://textvre.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/
• The Kierkegaard Edition Online (Denmark)
  http://www.sk.ku.dk/eng.asp

(Dot Porter from the DHO discussing the TILE Project)

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Hindman was on the panel titled ‘Social Media so what? Assessing the impact of blogs and social media?’ The main thrust of his argument was that the Internet isn’t inherently democratic and that it is not so much about the medium, but how the medium is institutionalised that makes it democratic. He discussed democracy in the broader sense and asserted that there are a lot of democratic values and they aren’t all about the web. Publishing is an important part of political expression, but as the barriers to publication are so low on the web, anyone can publish creating a cacophony of noise. In other words, a lot of people are publishing but who is listening? Hindman claimed that the very volume of data on line necessitates the need to filter and this may create a new set of ‘gate keepers’ rather than usurp the older gate keeping mechanisms of industrial media. He also discussed (as he does in his book) that the Internet hasn’t partially empowered a new political class and that unequal political expression and organisation remains. The most important lesson from Hindman is that technology is not good nor bad nor is it neutral and that all technological advance isn’t towards the removal of privilege. All technological advances create winners and losers and the increased use of social software isn’t necessarily good for democracy; we must make it good for democracy.

Kara Swisher, on the other hand was a technological determinist. She was on the panel ‘Blogging at 20? The future and potential of social media’. It may have been that it was the end of the day and people were grappling to find anything more to say about blogs (I have been blogging for 10 btw), but the discussion descended into the usual gee-wizz, determinist clap-trap. Swisher embraced the technological determinists’ narrative in a vigorous gravitas that I haven’t heard since the superstitious days of the late 20th Century. She performed brilliantly claiming that politicians and the rest of us don’t use social software such as Facebook then they will become redundant (not sure what ‘redundant’ means here). She made an historical and metaphorical leap that made me dizzy and claimed that as people learned to drive cars and left their ponies behind, democracy must do the same (no donkeys!). The usual catalogue of new gadgets was brought to the fore with the only argument it seems; that if we don’t embrace them then we are doomed!

I twitted a message that was projected on the wall behind her head ‘technological determinism bad; technology good!

In ending, the Convention shouldn’t have concentrated on Blogs so much; they are really not that interesting. Also I would have liked to see a speaker or two from China and other countries as the US and Britain were over-represented. Plus, I would have liked to see more evidence presented (as Bill Dutton; the Director of the Oxford Internet did), as Conventions such as this are in danger of being hijacked by trivia dressed up as revolution. As Dutton argued, the Internet reconfigures rather than changes, it has always been social and even wondered if it is possible to have an overview at all now.

But still, in the words of Bill Thompson, Technology critic, BBC News Online, people will do remarkable things if you remove the need for them to ask permission.

(Follow what others had to say…)

Matthew Hindma