Digital Humanities Community Research Articles

Finding the Right Platform

This Report from the Field introduces a collaboratively authored set of documentation that compares digital publishing platforms that are typically used by library publishers. This report discusses how we created this set of crosswalks that compare 10 publishing platforms, most of which are academy-owned and open-source. These platforms are used to create eBooks, digital humanities projects, journals, collections, and community projects, and the crosswalks compare a set of common features each has, including hosting options and cost, ingestion options, interactivity, archive and preservation features, export options, accessibility, and other features. We walk readers through how to use this Creative-Commons-licensed tool to compare platforms, features, and project types, with the hopes that users (be they librarians or authors) can easily compare and make decisions about which platform might best suit their publishing needs.

Person‐OrientedOntologies Analysis for Digital Humanities Collections from a Metadata Crosswalk Perspective

ABSTRACTMapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical DH collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. However, there is still no general and useful person‐oriented ontology in DH community. Many practical DH projects have developed their own ontologies by DH experts, but these ontologies are not interoperable. Therefore, it is important to explore existing biographical ontologies and develop a comprehensive person‐oriented ontology for DH.Using the metadata crosswalk method, we examined the ontologies provided for persons in three DH collections to analyze how they map onto standard ontologies such as FOAF (friend of a friend). This paper uncovers a significant and consistent gap between standard biographical ontologies and those used in practical DH collections, arriving at a set of heterogeneous problems, including different granularities of metadata. Consequently, we propose three key person‐oriented ontological types of elements, drawing on this metadata crosswalk: basic biographical elements, relational elements, and explanatory elements (such as career, connected with role and time). This metadata crosswalk provides a foundation for future matching between person‐oriented ontologies and facilitates semantic interoperability between DH collections.

Examining the representation of landscape and its emotional value in German-Swiss fiction between 1840 and 1940

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the representation and affective encoding of fictional space in a corpus of 125 Swiss literary prose texts of the 19th and early 20th Century written in German, offering a contribution to both spatial and affective literary studies. Motivated by questions about the iconic dichotomy between ‘urban’ and ‘rural/natural’ space in literary works (Sengle; Fournier; Nell and Weiland) – and in Swiss literature around 1900 in particular (Rehm) – we use computational methods to detect and examine how different types of space are distributed and affectively encoded in German-Swiss literature. Taking into account the complexity of cultural perceptions and representations of space across history, we examine the presence of ‘urban’ and ‘rural/natural’ fictional spaces and their potential role in constructing a ‘Swiss’ national literature (Böhler; Zimmer), and their affective encoding. In order to do this, we first compiled a comprehensive dictionary of named and non-named spatial entities in the broad spatial categories RURAL and URBAN, and examined the presence of sentiment and emotions (valence and discrete emotions) and their ‘strength’ (arousal) in relation to these. We used current state-of-the-art sentiment lexicons for German available to the digital humanities community. Similarly to Heuser et al., we mapped the spatial entities and the sentiment lexicons onto our corpus, and focused on spans of +/-50 words around the detected entities, in order to examine the specific sentiment and emotions related to space. In an exploratory analysis, we offer here a first-time data-driven perspective on rural and urban fictional space, incorporating the dimension of affective encoding of space systematically.

Text Mining of Twitter data for Mapping the Digital Humanities Research Trends

Digital humanities have become a more relevant field of study due to the extraordinary growth in digitisation of the humanities data. Due to collaborative development of humanities and computing, many academics are convinced of the worth of digital humanities (DH) that actually provides the best insight into humanities studies. The panoramic view of the development of big data in humanities reflects its trendy directions and evoked new challenges in DH. It is complicated to analysed the objectives of digital humanities data with simple data analysis tools where as text mining can help to facilitate the qualitative findings in DH. In the humanities disciplines, data is often in the form of unstructured and text mining is a way of structuring and analysing digitised text-as-data. Twitter is a online social networking platform which offers an opportunity for quality information sharing, collaborative participation digital humanities community. This paper is attempted to study the extensibility of digital humanities on twitter and also to interpret the evolution of twitter usage by analysing tweets posted related to DH via python data analysis.

Knowledge Production through Open Data for Digital Humanities

The study examines how open data can be used to generate meaningful insights into the cultural, historical, and geographical features of India and can be the best tool for digital humanities researchers, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways. An attempt is made to explore the potential of open data in digital humanities projects and discuss the need to create a comprehensive digital humanities platform that caters to the needs of different stakeholders as well as the advantages and challenges of open data and government initiatives in digital humanities. Additionally, the implications of open data and government initiatives in terms of improving access to digital humanities resources, increasing collaboration, and enhancing the quality of digital humanities projects and their contribution to creating a vibrant digital humanities community in India. The paper concludes that open data can be a powerful tool for digital humanities researchers in India, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and to interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways.

“Digital Humanities-2023” in Graz live: ideas, methods and pumpkin seed oil

The article presents the observations of a live participant of the “Digital Humanities -2023”, held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2023. The “Digital Humanities” Congress is held annually by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Digital Humanities (DH) are at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It involves the development and use of digital resources and methods in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH scholarship means collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. The annual ADHO Conference on Digital Humanities is the central and largest event of the international Digital Humanities community and brings together scholars from around the world, providing them with a unique opportunity to exchange ideas and research results, and to promote future collaboration. Particular attention is paid to historical issues presented at the congress, both in workshops and at section meetings and poster presentations. Statistical observations are presented, and a frequency analysis of the occurrence of keywords is carried out. The main conclusion of the study is the observed trend towards an increase in historical reports, posters and workshops. A noticeable increase in interest in historical sources, historical databases and geographic information systems, and virtual reconstruction of the past using a wide range of digital humanities research tools is noticeable (in comparison with the programs and publications of past Digital Humanities congresses). The 2023 conference theme, “Collaboration as an Opportunity,” is about the transdisciplinary and transnational collaboration, showing how increased cross-national collaboration—across continents and geopolitical locations—can transform regional knowledge hubs into international networks of excellence in research for the benefit of the global digital humanities community. Historians have firmly taken their place in contemporary digital humanities research.

Pioneering Interdisciplinary Academic Field of Digital Humanities in Latvia

A mainstream tendency for multimediality of information and exponential growth of data have promoted major changes in the academic paradigm, supporting the transition towards interdisciplinary research-based studies, which has affected the development of the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH). The paper aims at providing insights into the different activities implemented by the DH community in Latvia, which have contributed to the advancement of the field and stimulated the inclusion of digital research-related courses in the Latvian higher education curricula, reflecting on the establishment and implementation of the Master study programme in Digital Humanities at RTU considering it in its wider Latvian, pan-European, and global context.

Starpdisciplinārās akadēmiskās jomas digitālās humanitārās zinātnes aizsākumi Latvijā

A mainstream tendency for multimediality of information and exponential growth of data have promoted major changes in the academic paradigm, supporting the transition towards interdisciplinary research-based studies, which has affected the development of the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH). The paper aims at providing insights into the different activities implemented by the DH community in Latvia, which have contributed to the advancement of the field and stimulated the inclusion of digital research-related courses in the Latvian higher education curricula, reflecting on the establishment and implementation of the Master study programme in Digital Humanities at RTU considering it in its wider Latvian, pan-European, and global context.

Introducing the Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report Dataset

The UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network was jointly funded in July 2020 by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the ground-breaking Collaboration in Digital Humanities Networking Grant Scheme. The joint aims of the Network were to: a) undertake research and consultation towards the implementation of a permanent UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association; and b) to develop a clear roadmap for collaboration in the field between the two countries. An ancillary objective of the Irish Network members is to provide an up-to-date evaluation of the role and scope of Digital Humanities in Ireland, both past and present, to facilitate longer-term thinking about Digital Humanities so that we might optimise future developments in the field, including the nascent UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association. To that end, the respective partners are developing a Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report. The research informing the Landscape Report will be delivered in two phases. The initial phase took place between March and September 2021 and comprised the identification via desk research, collection and collation of data pertaining to Digital Humanities entities in Ireland. The second phase of the data gathering/collection exercise entails the presentation of the preliminary dataset to the wider Digital Humanities community for input and suggestions. To that end, we have created an Open Science Framework (OSF) repository. This contribution introduces the Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report dataset, its methodology and primary sources and offers some preliminary observations and analysis. It concludes with some suggestions for potential use cases and further directions for the dataset.

Whose digital Middle Ages? Accessibility in digital medieval manuscript culture

ABSTRACT This essay examines why online availability should not be conflated with accessibility in discussions of the digital humanities and medieval studies. Expert-oriented projects and discussions of the digital humanities in medieval Iberian studies tend to get “lost in collation.” These projects lose sight of the promises of democratization and accessibility that the digital humanities community values in favor of the traditional demands of philology.

Evaluating a Taxonomy of Textual Uncertainty for Collaborative Visualisation in the Digital Humanities

The capture, modelling and visualisation of uncertainty has become a hot topic in many areas of science, such as the digital humanities (DH). Fuelled by critical voices among the DH community, DH scholars are becoming more aware of the intrinsic advantages that incorporating the notion of uncertainty into their workflows may bring. Additionally, the increasing availability of ubiquitous, web-based technologies has given rise to many collaborative tools that aim to support DH scholars in performing remote work alongside distant peers from other parts of the world. In this context, this paper describes two user studies seeking to evaluate a taxonomy of textual uncertainty aimed at enabling remote collaborations on digital humanities (DH) research objects in a digital medium. Our study focuses on the task of free annotation of uncertainty in texts in two different scenarios, seeking to establish the requirements of the underlying data and uncertainty models that would be needed to implement a hypothetical collaborative annotation system (CAS) that uses information visualisation and visual analytics techniques to leverage the cognitive effort implied by these tasks. To identify user needs and other requirements, we held two user-driven design experiences with DH experts and lay users, focusing on the annotation of uncertainty in historical recipes and literary texts. The lessons learned from these experiments are gathered in a series of insights and observations on how these different user groups collaborated to adapt an uncertainty taxonomy to solve the proposed exercises. Furthermore, we extract a series of recommendations and future lines of work that we share with the community in an attempt to establish a common agenda of DH research that focuses on collaboration around the idea of uncertainty.

Building a Global Open Extensible Biodiversity Commons Network

Recent global events reinforce the need for local to global coalitions to address a variety of socio-environmental challenges such as the current COVID-19 pandemic (Cook et al. 2020) and biodiversity loss in general. Scientists reviewing data and fitness for current and future use note urgent necessary changes needed in data collection, specimen collection and preservation, infrastructure, human capacity, and standards-of-practice (Raven and Miller 2020, Morrison et al. 2017, Cook et al. 2020). Multi-faceted research questions often require cross-disciplinary collaboration. A recent paper analyzed conservation and disease mitigation research author networks and discovered that certain disciplines do not work together unless the research has outcomes that serve all groups involved (Kading and Kingston 2020). This research reinforces the finding that common goals offer a powerful way to build effective cross-disciplinary networks, speed up collaboration, and more effectively take on complex research. To move toward a Digital Extended Specimen (DES), the alliance for biodiversity knowledge is engaging in community building. The above summary when coupled with conversations from our alliance-led online consultations reinforces known threads and reveals some emerging themes about partnerships and collaborations. Our group continues to work on defining what a Digital Specimen is (or is not) and then communicating that succinctly to the worldwide community. At the same time we recognize the need for an extensible digital specimen object, we note the need for an extensible network. We note that groups need to and are motivated to solve local issues (as in for their town, or their country or continent). So, looking for and selecting common threads across these regional scales will be key to realizing and motivating effective partnerships and networks. Foremost, this includes expanding participation beyond Europe and North America. We recognize the need to form new partnerships to expand our network and learn from our new partners. For example, the Digital Humanities community would like to talk about the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, biology, and collections that can help each other to do better research. With this talk, and through participation in TDWG2021, we seek to share information and insights gathered so far about next steps and about building and sustaining the network we need to realize a biodiversity data commons and get input from those who participate in our session.

Infrastructuring digital humanities: On relational infrastructure and global reconfiguration of the field

AbstractHow do the power dynamics of actors in digital knowledge production define the contours of global science and humanities? Where are scholars now in their efforts to improve a networked, global academic system based on the values of equal access to resources, inclusive participation, and the diversity of epistemologies? This article intervenes in these questions by discussing social dimensions of global knowledge infrastructure—connection, standardization, and access—to understand the specification and materialization of global digital humanities (DH). As digital practices expand across the world, the DH community struggles to ensure inclusive participation and equal opportunities in developing the field. This article shows that discrepancies in global DH lie at the root of existing infrastructure inequalities. Drawing on science and technology studies, it then argues that in order to overcome these imbalances, the academic community can seek the ‘infrastructuring’ of DH. Infrastructuring is an analytical concept that shifts attention from ‘structure’ to ‘process’ of co-creation in the vein of participatory design that foregrounds public engagement, shared interest, and long-term relationships with stakeholders to create networks from which equal opportunities and new forms of connections can emerge. This would involve building an inclusive network of unique nodes of local communities on top of the global knowledge infrastructure.

The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences

The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences is a database of conference metadata relevant to the digital humanities community dating back to the 1960s. It includes details about hundreds of conferences, and for a subset of them, details about work presented at those events. Weingart, Eichmann-Kalwara, Lincoln, and research assistants collected information by hand or with machine assistance from paper programs, listserv announcements, published proceedings, PDF programs, and conference websites. Data are in CSV tables with a data dictionary describing how they can be linked together, for use by digital humanists and bibliometricians to study the history of the digital humanities community.

Text analysis using deep neural networks in digital humanities and information science

AbstractCombining computational technologies and humanities is an ongoing effort aimed at making resources such as texts, images, audio, video, and other artifacts digitally available, searchable, and analyzable. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNN) dominate the field of automatic text analysis and natural language processing (NLP), in some cases presenting a super‐human performance. DNNs are the state‐of‐the‐art machine learning algorithms solving many NLP tasks that are relevant for Digital Humanities (DH) research, such as spell checking, language detection, entity extraction, author detection, question answering, and other tasks. These supervised algorithms learn patterns from a large number of “right” and “wrong” examples and apply them to new examples. However, using DNNs for analyzing the text resources in DH research presents two main challenges: (un)availability of training data and a need for domain adaptation. This paper explores these challenges by analyzing multiple use‐cases of DH studies in recent literature and their possible solutions and lays out a practical decision model for DH experts for when and how to choose the appropriate deep learning approaches for their research. Moreover, in this paper, we aim to raise awareness of the benefits of utilizing deep learning models in the DH community.

Citational politics: Quantifying the influence of gender on citation in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Abstract Using citation analysis, we consider the role of gender in citation practices in conference special issues of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Our examination of citations in Digital Humanities conference special issues from 2006 to 2015 demonstrates gender bias in citational practices. This bias is consistent with broader trends in citational politics across the academy more broadly but is a threat to equity and justice within the scholarly community. We further offer proposals for improving citational practices to resist gender bias. Quantifying the impact of gender on citations, we argue, is one approach to understanding gender inequalities within digital humanities communities and to generating solutions to promote the broadest representation of digital humanities scholarship in scholarly communications.

Digital Journeys @ UOW Australia: From Digital Dexterities to Digital Humanities and Beyond

In 2018, the University of Wollongong (UOW) launched The Future-Ready Library strategy. The inevitable question arose: How does one become ‘future-ready’? The answer lies, in part, in proactively engaging with evolving technologies and improving individual staff digital dexterities. Coinciding with release of The Future-Ready Library strategy, the Digital Literacy Workplace Program was put in place to foster upskilling opportunities for Library staff. One of the outcomes of this program was the creation of a local Digital Humanities Community of Practice in 2018. This article focuses on the transformative journey of the Community of Practice in developing staff digital dexterity through the completion of mini projects. These mini projects incorporated both hard and soft skillsets to develop agile, future-focused, T-shaped professionals. While initially directed at developing digital dexterity and increased knowledge of the Digital Humanities, the Community of Practice recognized the need for adoption of a broader, more strategic approach, to support clients and staff in this area. This resulted in the launch of the Digital Scholarship Strategy project in 2020. The project group was tasked with scoping the feasibility of initiating a Library-led roll-out across the organization, or a tighter focused implementation within the UOW Library operational environment. The expedited move to online teaching and learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the timeliness and applicability of these initiatives.

Finding Our Way to a Digital Humanities Community at SUNY Oswego

Finding Our Way to a Digital Humanities Community at SUNY Oswego

Interfaces, ephemera, and identity: A study of the historical presentation of digital humanities resources

Abstract This article reports on a study of interfaces to long-lived digital humanities (DH) resources using an innovative combination of research methods from book history, interface design, and digital preservation and curation to investigate how interfaces to DH resources have changed over time. To do this, we used the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine to investigate the original presentation and all subsequent changes to the interfaces of a small sample of projects. The study addresses the following questions: What can we learn from a study of interfaces to DH material? How have interfaces to DH materials changed over the course of their existence? Do these changes affect the way the resource is used, and the way it conveys meaning? Should we preserve interfaces for future scholarship? We show that a valuable information may be derived from the interfaces of long-lived projects. Visual design can communicate subtle messages about the way the resource was originally conceived by its creators and subsequent changes show how knowledge of user behaviour developed in the DH community. Interfaces provide information about the intellectual context of early digital projects. They can also provide information about the changing place of DH projects in local and national infrastructures, and the way that projects have sought to survive in challenging funding environments.

The Switchover: Teaching and Learning the Text Encoding Initiative in Spanish

This article analyses the current situation of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in a Spanish-speaking digital humanities (DH) education and research context. It also examines the challenges faced when teaching TEI in Spanish and takes into consideration two main issues: the still not well-defined DH curriculum in many Spanish-speaking countries and the different pedagogical approaches to the TEI depending on the learning context: face-to-face instruction, distance education, and the Foreign Language Classroom. It aims as well to raise awareness about the lack of basic pedagogical materials—tutorials or guidelines—devoted to TEI in Spanish, an obstacle that has hindered the growth of a TEI community of practice from Spain and Latin America. It also offers some strategies and new resources that could benefit the outreach and adoption of the TEI inside and outside the Spanish-speaking DH community, while facilitating a new TEI curriculum in a higher education context.