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.

As part of JISC’s data management programme JISC is discussing with UK
research funders and libraries on how best to build on recent initiatives, such
as the HEFCE-funded UK Research Data Service feasibility study, so as to
address the considerable challenges outlined in the Open Science report.

Neil Jacobs, programme manager at JISC, says, “There are important changes
in the way science exploits the potential of digital technologies. We are not
saying that the these trends go together – they may conflict – but what we
are looking to find out is to what extent they are happening now and what
researchers, librarians and others think their impact will be in the future.

“Where there is widespread access to the web, digital cameras and
computers, then citizens can become active participants in science, for
example collecting data on natural phenomena on a massive scale. While this
has happened so far in isolated projects, the potential is now for a more
general shift in public participation in science,” added Neil.

The Open Science report looks at how technologies can support the open
movement to share data, workflows, methods and research outputs. It also
illustrates the vital role librarians could have in supporting these new trends
and the recognised need to build relationships between researchers and
librarians to support the research of the future.

Read the Open Science report at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/opensciencerpt.aspx

Take part in the Open Science discussions and share your views at
the ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ blog
http://res3.jiscinvolve.org .

The views, comments and opinions posted on the blog will shape JISC’s
activities over the next 12 months so events cover areas the research and
education community feel strongly about.

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)

This workshop will review and address the making of tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the web. The workshop leaders joins partners in the COST-ESF Interedition project (http://www.interedition.eu), which is focussing – as is the JISC-funded Virtual Manuscript Room project — on Europe-wide creation of infrastructure and tools for collaborative scholarly editing. The Australian Aust-e-Lit project will bring advanced experience of the making and working of collaborative tools with in for a national scholarly digital library. The workshop will allow key participants in Interedition, Aust-e-Lit, and in similar enterprises outside Europe to exchange information with UK scholars active in the area, and to explore common problems and possibilities for further collaboration (link).

A monthly newsletter carrying items of interest to the Australasian eResearch community is published via the mailing list eresearch-announce@eresearch.edu.au and archived here.  If you would like to subscribe, send a plain text message to majordomo@eresearch.edu.au with the words subscribe eresearch-announce in the message body. You can unsubscribe at any time.

If you have an item you would like to include in the newsletter, please send it to newsletter@eresearch.edu.au.  The newsletter is published the first business day of each month, and submissions are due two business days prior to that.  Each item should be no more than 150 words of plain text with a link for further information (link to newsletter)

Digital humanities projects have long lacked a framework for peer review and thus have often had difficulty establishing their credibility as true scholarship. NINES exists in part to address this situation by instituting a robust system of review by some of the most respected scholars in the field of nineteenth-century studies, British and American.

NINES provides peer-review of digital resources and archives created by scholars in nineteenth-century studies. Our Editorial Boards locate reviewers to evaluate both the intellectual content and the technical structure of each project submitted for inclusion in NINES. See below for a set of General Guidelines and Peer Review Criteria.

As part of the peer-review process, NINES requires the submission of metadata describing the objects within the resource. This metadata (in the form of RDF) is largely based on fields such as author, title, data, and course. It also includes a set of genres relevant to nineteenth-century studies (link)

Abstract

MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”

Website

http://www.monkproject.org/

Principal Investigator
John Unsworth
Funding
$999,883, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“…a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an an online framework of collaborative tools and resources that allow researchers to share and re-use data, combine services, and undertake tasks to promote new collaborative research practices….”

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project is one of several studies commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to research on-line research collaboration in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The focus of our study is to scope developments in VREs around the world and set them in relation to the activities in the UK.

The study aims to stimulate debate about the benefits of research collaboration facilitated by Virtual Research Environments so as to assist the JISC to provide services and strategies to support it.

The project is being undertaken by the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London and the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

If you are a user, developer, or provide technical support for VREs, your input would be most welcome .

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/kcl/vrelandscape

Press release

New videos show how researchers use advanced technology

New videos showing how JISC is helping researchers achieve faster, better
and different research through virtual research environments have just been
released.

The videos feature projects from JISC’s virtual research environment (VRE)
programme, which is trying to find ways to connect people and speed up
research processes across disciplines. These include astronomy, physics,
electronics, chemistry and the study of ancient documents.

Case studies from the e-infrastructure programme are also online, showing
how normal it is for researchers to use advanced internet technology when
they work with other institutions and internationally.

Dr Mike Fraser of Oxford University, who led the e-infrastructure project,
said: “We have used story-telling and videos to remove the mystery from
e-infrastructure and demonstrate that its use can now be considered normal
within many subject areas.”

JISC’s VRE programme manager Frederique van Till explained: “Virtual
research environments really speed up the whole chain, and in some ways that
makes the work for researchers much faster because it’s easier to get to the
resources and the people. It also allows them to branch out into areas they
could never have done before by using this new technology.”

Projects featured in the videos include VRE’s in archaeology, the study of
documents and manuscripts, collaborative research events on the web and the
MyExperiment social networking site for scientists.

Professor Mike Fulford from Reading University, who features in two of the
videos, describes the impact of JISC’s work in archaeology project as
“simply a revolution.”

He said: “I used to be a Luddite; the technology was all new to me. But now
it’s like an umbilical cord – I can’t do without it.”

The VRE programme is now entering its third phase with a more modular
approach aimed at making VRE’s work more effectively between different
universities and colleges.

Watch the videos of the VRE projects and see e-infrastructures in action at
<http://www.youtube.com/user/JISCmedia>

Explore audio and video from all of the VRE programme phases at
<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre/outputs>

Listen to Frederique van Till, JISC VRE programme manager, discussing the
latest phase of the programme at
<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/06/podcast82frederiquevantill>

Our first blog posting includes a description of anticipated TILE functionality.

http://mith.info/tile/2009/07/20/welcome/

Upcoming posts will include an invitation to participate in user testing, as well as announcements of software as it becomes available.

Visit often, or subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest news on TILE.

TILE is a collaborative project among the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), and Indiana University Bloomington, funded through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Resources program (research and development focus). Over two years TILE will develop a new web-based, modular, collaborative image markup tool for both manual and semi-automated linking between encoded text and image of text, and image annotation.

The project is unusual in digital humanities tools development in that it is being designed from the start to support a wide variety of use cases. Several projects from the University of Indiana Bloomington, The University of Oregon and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies are initial testbeds. In the second year of the project, TILE will turn to the user community for testing. If you are interested in participating, or in learning more about the project, please contact us at TILEPROJECT@listserv.heanet.ie.  (thanks to Dot P for the link)

The highlight of the meeting was certainly the project presentation segment. New project presentations can be a pretty tedious affair, especially when there are 60 new projects, so even if each project had been given 5 minute to strut-their-stuff, it would have taken 5 hours! So rather than torture the audience for 5 hours, the JISC in its wisdom, allowed each project team a mere 30 seconds!

And the 30 seconds were used shrewdly. There were at least 2 rappers, a poet, a juggler, lots of strange re-enactments from the history of advertising, and a man in a really bad shirt and kilt talking up JISC Legal.

A prize was given to the best presenter and heedlessly it went to the juggler. I don’t think he was a good juggler, he could only juggle 3 balls and he should have attempted more. And I can’t even remember what his project was about. I think it had something to do with rapid innovation, or was is Web 2, or repository enhancement, or GPS, or image annotation, or academic paper summarising, or text mining, or research objects, or the access grid, or e-learners, rapid publication, virtual communities, or the growing cases of dementia in Britain. I can’t remember; I think it was about dementia.

After the project presentations there were presentations about the JISC VRE Programme and the JISC’s Information Environment Programme (further explanation on JISC’s web site). The JISC Information Environment is a large and ambitious national computing architecture programme to build a layer of scholarly content, preserve the content, build systems to access it (like VREs), and formulate policies to use it. It is a 3 year programme and many of the projects presented on the day were funded under this programme. I liked this programme a lot; partly because it is about building a shared national vision and consensus in terms of linking repositories and creating standards for repository management. A programme such as this one is vital is the VRE Programmes visions (ie. to create systems for researchers to re-use data and collaborate) are to be met.

One of the most usefuls events of the meeting were the break-out sessions. The break-out sessions were forums to discuss the more practical aspects of the research projects such as project management, communication of results, and evaluation.

Frederick Van Till, the Programme Manager for the VRE Programme proposed an interesting innovation; a ‘critical friend’ to work with VRE projects. The critical friend would act in a similar was to an ‘institutional champion for the project in terms of writing critical articles to assist the outreach and quality of the project. It was an appealing idea; especially considering that it is easy to become so wrapped-up in a project that we forget the larger social content in which we are operating.

Another session was about communicating the project to broader audiences. The advice here was to keep it simple, communicate the project concept in a coherent way, work in collaboration with other projects, plan communication from the very start, make audiences aware of what benefits then from the project (and at what time), and communicate clearly why the project is a unique idea. There are also a number of Web 2 activities that one can use to promote your work to turn passive users into active users who may create and generate content.

The evaluation meeting was concerned with the frameworks used to evaluate projects. As Andy McGregor from JISC explained, there is no perfect evaluation framework as evaluation is not an exact science. Sometimes it is better to assume an outcome and move on rather than try and fit results into a perfect evaluation framework. He stressed the need to evaluate throughout the project and to share successes and problems with others in the Programme. There was a need to communicate the lessons learned as soon as they are found out and incorporate it within the communication strategy.

One point I did heed it to remember the audience. Senior managers often insist on the ‘tyranny of the harder measures’ rather than the ‘societal change’ style of measurement; often furthest away from the concrete and the measurable (I suppose it is possible to be beaten up by a gang from Tuvalu whist reading the latest figures on climate change).

Neil Chue Hong, the Director of OMII-UK, gave a fabulous workshop on user-engagement and made us do all the work. He developed a user-engagement exercise where he spoke frankly about how difficult it was to get users engaged in a project and explained a set of tactics to aid this. They revolved around attracting interest to a project, keeping interest, and getting users to create value. We discussed ways to turn passive-users into active users and the 90-9-1 principle of Participation Inequity (from http://www.useit.com ). Basically only 1% of a site will be creators of content whilst 9% will be active users. The rest will just be in it for the ride (this is also probably reflected in the broader malaise in the British democracy).

A good initiative from JISC and I look forward to seeing how the projects progress