Digital Humanities in the Age of AI: Reflections on Opportunities and Challenges

The OCTA’2019 international Multi-Conference on « Organization of Knowledge and Advanced Technologies » is a large-scale scientific event to bring together researchers and R&D professionals on ideas and common actions in the organization of knowledge while defining collaborative strategies using advanced technologies in multiple fields of research and application for society and its cultural, education, economic and industrial developments. Also, to initiate future projects in innovation in order to bring public and private institutions closer to tomorrow’s technological challenges. In OCTA’2019, the scientific projects involved in this Multi-Conference event, are: 1- SIIE (https://siie2019.loria.fr/ & www.siie.fr) on « Information Systems and Economic Intelligence », 2- ISKO-Maghreb (https://isko-maghreb2019.loria.fr/ & www.isko-maghreb.org) on « Digital Sciences: impacts and challenges on Knowledge Organization », 3- CITED (https://cited2019.loria.fr/) on « Advanced Technologies, Renewable Energies and Economic Development », 4- TBMS (https://tbms2019.loria.fr/) on « Big-Data-Analytics Technologies for Strategic Management: innovation and competitiveness », with the following state of mind: - How to strengthen alliances between multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary? - How to multiply skills on common study objects? - How to innovate in the solutions to found and to propose in society in respect of the sustainable development? The OCTA’2019 international Multi-Conference on « Organization of Knowledge and Advanced Technologies » aims to develop subjects like: - Information Systems: architectures, models, implementations and developments, - Economic Intelligence (or Competitive Intelligence) applying methodology, context studies and implementation of systems, - Knowledge Organization applying conceptual work, process, systems (KOS) and services, - Advanced Technologies for renewable Energies, production systems, green economy, ecological engineering, etc. - Advanced Technologies for Big Data Analytics, - Strategic Management and Systems using Big Data, - Governance Organizations applying Enterprise Strategies, Strategic Management and Economic Intelligence, etc. - “Digital Sciences”, Collective Intelligence, Digital economy on Web X.0, or Web X.Y.Z.α (ie. Web’s evolution, which aims to harness the potential of the Web in a more interactive and collaborative way, with a focus on social interaction and the assistance of an artificial intelligence), - Digital and Dematerialisation effects in the Green Economy, - Data, Big Data, Knowledge Management, Decision-making and Complexity, - Data science and new trends in Economic Development: Modern finance and technological advances, Green economy and sustainable development, Green finance, Environmental Accounting, Green marketing, Green management, e-Governance, etc. and other emergent related fields. We give interest in approaching the Humanists by subjects like: - Digital Arts & Humanities and the potential of the Creativity: Design and Model in Digital Art, Creativity process in Digital Arts, Studies in Digital Arts & Humanities and its Applications, e-Creativity, e-Art, Digital Media and Technology, Digital way to produce Art, Creativity using Digital Art Form, - Digital Arts in Business and Society: boosting the Creativity Potential for Business and Competitiveness. - Digital Humanities and impacts in research and application: “Digital Humanities” context related to aspects of the “Knowledge Organization” and management of “Science” modalities. and other related fields.

Digital Humanities projects have shown to be projects of collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation. As digital humanities researchers are creating and discovering new methods of collaboration, libraries have been reflecting on how they can best support and nurture such collaborations. This paper aims to demonstrate a practical case of what the University of South Florida Digital Collections has done to support the accessibility and discoverability of a new archaeological dataset in collaboration with a Digital Humanities research facility on campus. This paper is a case study to showcase the process employed by the University of South Florida Libraries in its partnership with an on campus digital humanities institute in the creation of a new digital collection. The partnership resulted in a prototype archaeological data repository named the Andean Archaeological Data Project, and a digital collection that was successfully housed in the existing digital library platform, through which public access to the material is natively enabled through the library web pages. The authors have come to the conclusion that with the proper infrastructure and the appropriate skill sets, a digital library can be a long-term platform for dynamic digital humanities research data.

The objective of this work is to discuss how vocabularies can contribute to assigning computational semantics to digital research data within the context of Big Data, so that computers can process them, allowing their reuse on large scale. A conceptualization of data is developed in an attempt to make it clearer what would be data, as an essential element of the Big Data phenomenon, and in particular, digital research data. It then proceeds to analyse digital research data uses and cases and their relation to semantics and vocabularies. Data is conceptualized as an artificial, intentional construction that represents a property of an entity within a specific domain and serves as the essential component of Big Data. The concept of semantic expressivity is discussed, and is used to classify the different vocabularies; within such a classification ontologies, are shown to be a type of knowledge organization system with a higher degree of semantic expressivity. Features of vocabularies that may be used within the context of the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data to assign machine-processable semantics to Big Data are suggested. It is shown that semantics may be assigned at different data aggregation levels.

Our University Library (UBL) have seen the need and potential for strengthening the infrastructure for digital full text resources at the University of Bergen and we wanted better to establish the library’s role in this area.Five years ago, several research communities expressed concerns that it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the competence necessary to run and maintain both physical and digital research archives. More specifically a concrete need for supporting XML-based digital humanities text resources was voiced. We felt the UBL could meet this need by providing a new service.A combination of data modeling, data conversion and an active use of open data solutions has in our view shown itself to be an effective solution. We find that in-house data modeling and processing competence is essential in order to cope with tasks connected to digital text and image resources.Our poster will outline our digital service provision by giving selected references and examples.The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) is one example of a recipient of UBL data services. WAB maintains a richly encoded XML version of the complete Nachlass of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.A library web resource building upon library data modeling and conversion is MARCUS, which shows how catalogue data and image data for the University Library’s own manuscript collections and photographic collections are currently digitized and interconnected using electronic representations of documents and Linked Data/RDF (Resource Description Format) metadata. MARCUS meets UBLs long felt need for a unified special collections digital system. This relates not only to document storage, display and dissemination, but also to the library workflow for the special collections. Both WAB and MARCUS benefits, strategically and day-to-day, from the same competencies within the library.We think that a sensible future-oriented solution entails that each institution, to a greater degree than before, works with modeling and conversion of its own data. Our view is that using Linked Data/RDF encoding will pave the way to connecting data sets in such a way that they enrich one another. Rather than functioning as system providers, we envision large institutions processing and sharing open datasets, as well as encouraging and enabling others to do the same.In line with LIBERs Ten recommendations for libraries to get started with research data management our view is that data modeling and data conversion, within the frame of an active use of open data solutions, are services that belongs within the portfolio of the research library. Presented by Irene Eikefjord, Senior Librarian, University of Bergen Library

Chapter 5 - Digital Research Data: Where are we Now?

Editorial Commentary

Digital data archiving and research data management have become increasingly important for institutions in South Africa, particularly after the announcement by the National Research Foundation, one of the principal South African academic research funders, recommending these actions for the research that they fund. A case study undertaken during the latter half of 2014, among the biological sciences researchers at a South African university, explored the state of data management and archiving at this institution and the readiness of researchers to engage with sharing their digital research data through repositories. It was found that while some researchers were already engaged with digital data archiving in repositories, neither researchers nor the university had implemented systematic research data management.

Providing secured and restricted access to digital objects, especially access to digital research data, for a general audience poses new challenges to memory institutions. For instance, to protect individuals, only anonymized or pseudonymized data should be released to a general audience. Standard procedures have been established over time to cope with privacy issues of non-interactive digital objects like text, audio and video. Appearances of identifiers and potentially also quasi-identifiers were removed by a simple overlay, e.g. in text documents such appearances were simply blackened out. Today’s digital artifacts, especially research data, have complex, non-linear and even interactive manifestations. Thus, a different approach to securing access to complex digital artifacts is required. This paper presents an architecture and technical methods to control access to digital research data.KeywordsAccess PolicyGeneral AudienceDigital ArtifactEmulation ComponentStatewide Health PlanningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Digital technology that is prevalent in people's everyday lives, including smart home devices, mobile apps and social media, increasingly lack regulations for how the user data can be collected, used or disseminated. The CSCW and the larger computing community continue to evaluate and understand the potential negative impacts of research involving digital technologies. As more research involves digital data, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) take on the difficult task of evaluating and determining risks--likelihood of potential harms--from digital research. Learning more about IRBs' role in concretizing harm and its likelihood will help us critically examine the current approach to regulating digital research, and has implications for how researchers can reflect on their own data practices. We interviewed 22 U.S.-based IRB members and found that, for the interviewees, "being digital" added a risk. Being digital meant increasing possibilities of confidentiality breach, unintended collection of sensitive information, and unauthorized data reuse. Concurrently, interviewees found it difficult to pinpoint the direct harms that come out of those risks. The ambiguous, messy, and situated contexts of digital research data did not fit neatly into current human subjects research protection protocols. We discuss potential solutions for understanding risks and harms of digital technology and implications for the responsibilities of the CSCW and the larger computing community in conducting digital research.

1 - Defining digital curation in the digital humanities context

This article describes the development of the digital infrastructure at a research data centre for audio-visual linguistic research data, the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, over the past ten years. The typical resource hosted in the HZSK Repository, the core component of the infrastructure, is a collection of recordings with time-aligned transcripts and additional contextual data, a spoken language corpus. Since the centre has a thematic focus on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and provides its service to researchers within linguistics and other disciplines, the development of the infrastructure was driven by diverse usage scenarios and user needs on the one hand, and by the common technical requirements for certified service centres of the CLARIN infrastructure on the other. Beyond the technical details, the article also aims to be a contribution to the discussion on responsibilities and services within emerging digital research data infrastructures and the fundamental issues in sustainability of research software engineering, concluding that in order to truly cater to user needs across the research data lifecycle, we still need to bridge the gap between discipline-specific research methods in the process of digitalisation and generic digital research data management approaches.

Reproducibility has become a requirement in the hard sciences, and its adoption is gradually extending to the digital humanities. The FAIR criteria and the publication of data papers are both indicative of this trend. However, the question that arises is whether the strict prerequisites of digital reproducibility serve only to exclude digital humanities from broader humanities scholarship. Instead of adopting a binary approach, an alternative method acknowledges the unique features of the objects, inquiries, and techniques of the humanities, including digital humanities, as well as the social and historical contexts in which the concept of reproducibility has developed in the human sciences. In the first part of this paper, I propose to examine the historical and disciplinary context in which the concept of reproducibility has developed within the human sciences, and the disciplinary struggles involved in this process, especially for art history and literature studies. In the second part, I will explore the question of reproducibility through two art history research projects that utilize various computational methods. I argue that issues of corpus, method, and interpretation cannot be separated, rendering a procedural definition of reproducibility impractical. Consequently, I propose the adoption of ‘post-computational reproducibility’, which is based on FAIREST criteria as far as digital corpora are concerned (FAIR + Ethics and Expertise, Source mention + Time-Stamp), but extended to include further sources that confirm computational results with other non-computational methodologies.

This article focuses on curation of digital research data and development of related infrastructure. It explains that data-intensive computational approaches to science is playing an increasingly important role in scholarly research. However the sheer volume of digital data produced in the sciences is staggering, posing a daunting challenge to researchers and to publishers alike. It notes on the move by institutions to colloborate and make cross-section partnerships.

Dijital insani bilimler araçları; dijital insani bilimler alanında kaynak ve koleksiyonların oluşturulması, yorumlanması ve paylaşılması için geliştirilen yazılım ve uygulamaları kapsar. Günümüzde basit hesaplamaların ötesine geçen dijital araçlar, araştırmaları niteliksel olarak etkileme potansiyeli taşımaktadır. Dijital insani bilimler araştırmalarının önemli bir bileşeni olan dijital araçlar, insani bilimler alanında dijital kaynaklara erişim sağlamak, yorumlamak, oluşturmak veya iletişim kurmak için giderek daha fazla geliştirilmekte ve desteklenmektedir. Dijital araçlar, dijital insani bilimler alanındaki en genişletilebilir varlıklar arasındadır. Dijital araçlar ilgili araştırmacılar tarafından görülebilir, erişilebilir veya anlaşılabilir değilse, kullanımları azalır, bu durum söz konusu araçların daha sınırlı ölçüde yapılanmasına veya genişletilebilir olmasına dolayısıyla da araştırmaları daha az desteklemesine neden olabilir. Son yıllarda bilgi yönetimi ve dijital insani bilimler arasında hızla gelişen etkileşim, dijital insani bilimler alanındaki araçların değerlendirilmesi konusunda merak uyandırıcı olmuştur. Konuya ilişkin mevcut literatüre dayalı olarak yapılan bu araştırmanın amacı, dijital insani bilimler alanında sıklıkla kullanılan araçların tanıtım ve değerlendirmesini yapmaktır. Çalışmanın, dijital insani bilimler ve bilgi yönetimi paydaşlığını gerekli kılan uygulamalara katkı sağlaması beklenmektedir.

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