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

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’).

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/

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.

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.

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

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

I found an interesting article from Bill Appelbe and David Bannon of the Victorian Partnership of Advanced computing here in Melbourne that also attempts to define and critique ‘eResearch’. It is science focused (of course) but it is a good attempt at explaining the eResearch agenda. It is a  refreshingly critical article, but it does shift the responsibility for research away from ‘eResearch’ to somewhere else (ie. they partly argue that eResearch is a support service and not research thus the research produced by eResearch must be the responsibility of  the researchers themselves).  There is nothing surprising in this claim, but I still hold that eResearch is too distant from where research happens and especially much of humanities research (and there needs to be greater understanding of how to make this happen otherwise eResearch can’t move from service to research).

WHAT IS eRESEARCH?

eScience, or the more generic eResearch, has come into vogue recently, following on the heels of the more well-established term eCommerce. Like eCommerce, which can include anything from supply-chain integration to CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the definition of eResearch is very much dependent upon an individual or organization’s perspective, and to confuse matters further it is called Cyberinfrastructure (Cyberinfrastructure, 2006) in the USA. So any group of researchers will have differing, and often vocal, opinions on what eResearch is. For example, for users of large data sets, such as climate modeling, it is all about having large data sets readily accessible, without them having to worry or waste time about sharing, data formats, backup, or security. To a big compute user, such as modeling cell membranes, its having massive compute capacity available on demand, without having to know anything about underlying details of the computers, operating systems, or file systems. Yet another group, such as the International Virtual Observatory in Astronomy, will tell you eResearch is a matter of breaking down the barriers between researchers, be they geographical, cultural or technical. So there is no quantitative definition possible, or even desirable of what is, and what is not eResearch. Instead, there are useful characteristics of eResearch projects that can distinguish the degree to which a particular project might be promoted  as eResearch, or “traditional” research as shown in Table 1 (see attached article).

A further point of confusion in the use of the term eResearch relates to whether eResearch is actually the “research” conducted this way, or the infrastructure that enables the research conducted this way. We adopt the view that eResearch strictly means research conducted relying on supporting infrastructure that should properly be called either eResearch Infrastructure or Cyberinfrastructure. From the table above, it is clear that the supporting infrastructure can includes hardware, software, networking, and human resources. But eResearch is not just about using new IT tools, such as teleconferencing or web publications, to support research projects. Use of such tools is a common mischaracterization of eResearch. eResearch projects do not just use IT technology, rather they are reliant on IT technology and organizational changes such as online collaboration to achieve the research outcomes. It is also important to note that eResearch adoption is highly discipline dependent. Scientific disciplines such as observational Astronomy or High-Energy Physics have arguably been using eScience for close on decades. Such disciplines intrinsically have some of the characteristics of eResearch above; large, expensive shared instruments and the need to share data internationally using agreed standards (e.g., astronomical coordinates and reference frames). By contrast, some disciplines such as Pure Mathematics or Linguistics intrinsically have few of the characteristics of eResearch. Yet even here, the trend is towards eResearch. For example the case of Mathematics it is the growing use of computers for proofs and proof checking, and a repository of known theorems
(Cruz-Filipe, 2004).

So eResearch support is not a “one size fits all” – it is discipline and project dependent. There is no such thing as “eResearch Support In a Box”. The very nature of research, which is constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, means that eResearch support itself must be constantly pushing the boundaries of networking, data, computational, and collaboration support. eResearch infrastructure is a large system that is made up of a number of organic components software and hardware and organizational components, where each researcher should be able to readily find the components they want and need and not worry about the remainder. But they will have to be able to reach out and grab additional components when the need arises as it invariably will. For example, a scientist may find that they need access to a statistical analysis or visualization tool to interpret their data, or import data from a new instrument source that has just become available. Clearly, the individual components must work seamlessly together and the researcher who is widening his use must find the additional components working exactly as he expects, no surprises! (link to article).

Admittedly this association was established in 1985, so it has had a long time to build a scholarly community of practice (and if it has been a key force in the development of the eLearning community in this region, it has certainly done a pretty good job).  The literature on all aspects of the learning-cycle are well-researched; as are the technical frameworks for large-scale implementation of eLearning environments (as well as the learning outcomes are well researched and mapped).  Plus, the most important thing is that eLearning largely sits within established educational research on constructivism, constructive alignment, inquiry based learning, blended learning and other theories that help teachers and administrators understand where eLearning may help in the classroom and in other learning contexts.  Without a strong evidence base to support it, eLearning would arguable not work well as educators would not know how to use it. It would be akin to a dunce that sits in the back-corner, unable to engage constructively with other students; except maybe to distribute assignments to other students every now and again.

Unlike eLearning, eResearch does not really have a discoverable theoretical base, perhaps because it is a lot newer concern or perhaps because it is a large-scale government policy agenda, rather than a focused intellectual concern (ie. there are no journals, no associations, no research focused conferences, and very few developed theories to understand it).  Although extraordinarily valuable skills, one would need to draw a very long bow to claim that data management is an intellectual concern or that cloud services are a vital method of research inquiry.  The problem that I see is that although eLearning is undoubtedly about learning and the research about learning (and there is a great amount of literature to support this claim), eResearch is not really research (nor is it usually the research about good research).

Although there are lots of debate about the nature of research and indeed this is a highly contested space of competing ways to interpret and measure the world, the lack of literature about eResearch suggest that it doesn’t really enable new research but simply exists to support data management, remote instrument access, and other important services that are required to do modern scientific research.  The term ‘science support services’ would be a much more honest term and perhaps Science does not require the same theoretical base and research context to get on with the job of doing good science (or perhaps they have the same concerns as I do about the all-too-often remoteness of the term ‘eResearch’ from where research happens).  Journals, conferences, class-rooms, debates, lectures, libraries, curriculum, and even blog-posts are all part of the ‘infrastructure’ of research built-up over the past one thousand years in many countries (or 10 years in the case of this blog). If ‘eResearch’ does not comfortably sit within these established ‘infrastructures’ it is something else all together.  eLearning has managed to do this and does it well, but eResearch has a long way to go. Perhaps more humanities and social science educated people working within the eResearch agenda will help build up the theoretical base and arguments for eResearch. At the moment eResearch is theoretically thin and thus cannot be easily communicated within research; and especially humanities research.

I think the people that deny that the digital humanities is a field or a professional practice simply don’t want to learn all these technical skills nor read all those books. It is like saying that I am the first Historian in Australia but I can’t be bothered reading Manning Clarke!  All knowledge can only advance in a context and research can only advance in a research context. Without positioning digital humanities innovations within a focused literature review or within the debates in the field, then there is no way to communicate innovations to others. Thus, fields are important. They bring accountability, context, and rigor to research and allow it to advance through building on other research. Otherwise, we are trapped in the ‘parochialism of the present’; a flat empirical wasteland of seeing is believing or worse still, believing what you are seeing.