Classifying the (digital) arts and humanities

Abstract

Only Can you imagine working in a field of research where even practitioners argue if it exists as a field at all? 'Digital Arts and Humanities' is such a field and my role within it includes the task of further developing a classification system for resources, people and all sorts of activities in this 'field': a taxonomy (soon to be ontology) of digital methods for research. As a kind of meta-field, Digital Arts and Humanities spans across a broad range of disciplines, from History, Performing Arts and Archaeology to Theatre and Linguistics. While computational methods such as 'text mining', 'motion capture' or 'text encoding' are used across all these subject disciplines, it may only be a relatively small group of practitioners who actively define themselves as 'digital humanists/artists'. This huge diversity means that people working with the same methods are often not even aware that they could profit from lessons learned in other disciplines, leading to a duplication of work. Developing, and successfully promoting, a system that would span disciplines and facilitate knowledge transfer around digital methods could help prevent the re-inventing of the wheel, encourage re-use of resources and contribute to a greater awareness of the importance of digital research. To achieve that, it needs to be taken forward in a community approach to ensure that the classification can be used and kept up-to-date by not just one institution. For several years, the AHDS Methods Taxonomy (with associated vocabularies) has been used to structure the ICT Guides database that catalogues digital arts and humanities projects. It is organised around methods used for resource creation, divided into seven groups (such as 'Data Capture' or 'Data Analysis'), and does currently list and describe over a hundred methods used in the digital arts and humanities: Associated vocabularies list, for instance, funding bodies, software used and metadata standards. In its latest incarnation, ICT Guides is now part of the arts-humanities.net project, hosted by the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King's College London. At King's College, the taxonomy has also been used to structure content on the website of the AHRC ICT Methods Network. Recently, the taxonomy has also been implemented in DRAPIer (Database of Research and Projects in Ireland) by the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), and other projects and Universities, such as Oxford, have expressed an interest in using it. Starting with the collaboration between the DHO, Oxford and CeRch, we are developing a model for a shared usage and development of the taxonomy, with the view to build a larger consortium of project partners in the future. There is now a chance to develop the taxonomy into a shared ontology resource, to be updated and developed by the wider community. In this paper I will re-visit the background and rationale of the project, discuss the model and challenges of developing a shared taxonomy — including a planned transformation into a more flexible ontology —, and outline the shared use of the resource, including the development of a web service based on the Methods Taxonomy.