Digital Humanities Projects Research Articles

My Pleasing Progeny: At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

Abstract This article gives a history of the digital humanities project At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, from its beginnings in 2007 to the present. In particular, it recounts the mistakes and successes, joys, and frustrations of creating and maintaining the project, as well as some observations about working on digital humanities projects.

Sociotechnical Factors Affecting Interoperability of Digital Humanities

ABSTRACTIn the past two decades, the digitization of humanities resources has rapidly expanded, giving rise to the field of Digital Humanities (DH). This evolution has fostered a growing need for effective interoperability—the ability to access and integrate data across diverse digital collections, tools, and platforms. Despite significant technological advancements and the development of standards aimed at facilitating interoperability, challenges persist. These challenges are not only technical but are also influenced by sociocultural factors, which include organizational and cultural elements. This paper aims to bridge the gap in the literature concerning these sociotechnical factors affecting interoperability within DH projects and collections.This paper presents the analysis of the real‐world experiences of DH researchers attempting to connect material from different sources. Each participant described a specific incident where combining software or content was particularly problematic. This data was analyzed via thematic analysis. The findings reveal a complex landscape of interoperability challenges, underpinned by a range of sociotechnical factors. These factors include, but are not limited to, discrepancies in metadata standards, differences in organizational cultures, and varying levels of technical expertise among practitioners. By highlighting these factors, the paper contributes valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of interoperability issues in DH, offering evidence‐based plans to address these challenges.

Code review in digital humanities

Abstract Software and computational methods offer tremendous possibilities for digital humanities research, both accelerating existing work and opening up entirely new questions. However, software also has the potential to introduce new kinds of errors into the research workflow. How do we know that the software developed for a digital humanities project is error free and does what we think it does? Code review is a widespread technique to improve software quality and reduce the number of flaws, where a programmer other than the author reviews and comments on the source code. However, given that many digital humanities developers work in developer teams of one, code review is often not possible. In this article, we share progress and insights from an effort to establish a community code review process for digital humanities, and provide background to help understand the need and potential impacts of this work.

Recent Digital Humanities Projects in Russian and Eastern European Studies

Recent Digital Humanities Projects in Russian and Eastern European Studies

Towards Acknowledgement and Accreditation of Digital Labour in Digital Humanities: A Case Study from Emerging Indian Digital Humanities Projects

Digital labour (DL) in the context of digital humanities (DH) broadly comprises the process of data collection, curation, analysis, and visualization, leading to the creation of a final project. DL, when analyzed from an Indian DH perspective, consists of humanities scholars acquiring additional technical knowledge required for the research, finding suitable resources (technical and otherwise), infrastructures, and collaborating with other disciplines, etc. This DL, together with manual labour (ML) of writing about outcomes (Anderson et al. 2016), is complicated and time-consuming for DH scholars. Yet DL gets recognized due to the nascent state of DH in the subcontinent. Despite the evident DL involved in the creation and successful proliferation of DH projects, it is seldom addressed in academic scholarship (Anderson et al. 2016) and even more rarely in Indian DH academia. The lack of proper infrastructure (Anderson et al. 2016) and deficiency in technical knowledge (Thangavel and Menon 2020) have resulted in a greater DL among the DH practitioners in India when compared to their peers elsewhere, yet it has gone unrecognized, given the lack of literature and research on DL in Indian DH. The existing resistance in humanities towards accommodating the new approaches of DH (Greetham 2012) has made DL manifold. In an effort to recognize DL in DH, this paper attempts a definition of DL in DH, especially in the Indian context, followed by a broad classification of digital labourers (DLers) in DH in India. The paper utilizes a case study of selected DH projects in India to understand the gaps in recognizing the DLers and DL in Indian DH projects, especially the DL of students and researchers. The findings from the case study further lead to the proposal of a possible framework to address the emergence and evolving nature of DL in DH, as well as to compensate for the same appropriately.   Le travail numérique (TN) dans le contexte des humanités numériques (HN) comprend largement le processus de collecte, de conservation, d'analyse et de visualisation des données, menant à la création d'un projet final. Lorsqu'il est analysé du point de vue des HN indiennes, le travail numérique consiste pour les chercheurs en sciences humaines à acquérir des connaissances techniques supplémentaires nécessaires à la recherche, à trouver des ressources appropriées (techniques et autres), des infrastructures et à collaborer avec d'autres disciplines, etc. Ce TN, ainsi que le travail manuel (TM) de rédaction des résultats (Anderson et al. 2016), est compliqué et prend du temps pour les chercheurs en HN. Pourtant, le TN est reconnu en raison de l'état naissant des HN dans le sous-continent. Malgré l'implication évidente du TN dans la création et la prolifération réussie des projets d'humanités numériques, il est rarement abordé dans les travaux universitaires (Anderson et al. 2016) et encore plus rarement dans les universités indiennes spécialisées dans les HN. Le manque d'infrastructures appropriées (Anderson et al. 2016) et les lacunes en matière de connaissances techniques (Thangavel et Menon 2020) ont entraîné une plus grande TN parmi les praticiens des HN en Inde par rapport à leurs pairs ailleurs, mais cela n'a pas été reconnu, étant donné le manque de littérature et de recherche sur le TN dans le domaine des HN en Inde. La résistance existante dans les sciences humaines à l'égard de l'adaptation aux nouvelles approches de HN (Greetham 2012) a multiplié les TN. Dans un effort pour reconnaître les TN au sein des HN, cet article tente de définir les TN pour les HN, en particulier dans le contexte indien, suivi d'une classification générale des travailleurs numériques (en anglais "digital labourers") dans les HN en Inde. L'article utilise une étude de cas de projets HN sélectionnés en Inde pour comprendre les lacunes dans la reconnaissance des travailleurs numériques et des TN dans les projets HN indiens, en particulier les TN des étudiants et des chercheurs. Les résultats de l'étude de cas conduisent en outre à la proposition d'un cadre possible pour aborder l'émergence et la nature évolutive des TN dans HN, ainsi que pour compenser ces mêmes TN de manière appropriée.  

An STS analysis of a digital humanities collaboration: trading zones, boundary objects, and interactional expertise in the DECRYPT project

A widely shared recognition over the past decade is that the methodology and the basic concepts of science and technology studies (STS) can be used to analyze collaborations in the cross-disciplinary field of digital humanities (DH). The concepts of trading zones (Galison, 2010), boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989), and interactional expertise (Collins and Evans, 2007) are particularly fruitful for describing projects in which researchers from massively different epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) are trying to develop a common language. The literature, however, primarily concentrates on examples where only two parties, historians and IT experts, work together. More exciting perspectives open up for analysis when more than two, more nuanced and different epistemic cultures seek a common language and common research goals. In the DECRYPT project funded by the Swedish Research Council, computational linguists, historians, computer scientists and AI experts, cryptologists, computer vision specialists, historical linguists, archivists, and philologists collaborate with strikingly different methodologies, publication patterns, and approaches. They develop and use common resources (including a database and a large collection of European historical texts) and tools (among others a code-breaking software, a hand-written text recognition tool for transcription), researching partly overlapping topics (handwritten historical ciphers and keys) to reach common goals. In this article, we aim to show how the STS concepts are illuminating when describing the mechanisms of the DECRYPT collaboration and shed some light on the best practices and challenges of a truly cross-disciplinary DH project.

Post-Internet Latinx Art

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

The Digital Vibrations of Contours

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

Digital Humanities at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

Digital Desmadres (Mishmashes), Tape, Ink, Paint, Cardboard, Kraft Paper, Xeroxes, Fabric (and more Tape)

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

Disruptive Latinx Visualities and the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

Piñata Problems

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

Introduction to the Dialogues on Latinx Digital Humanities and Visual Culture

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

The Human Labor of Digital Humanities

At the institutional and individual level, interest is growing in theatre and performance studies digital humanities (DH) projects. Too often, this interest fizzles out in the leap from digital imaginings to production timelines that real people must execute (with real budgets). A thorough understanding of the labor structures that drive such projects is necessary in developing realistic, sustainable models of DH work.

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.

Computational philosophy: reflections on the PolyGraphs project

In this paper, we situate our computational approach to philosophy relative to other digital humanities and computational social science practices, based on reflections stemming from our research on the PolyGraphs project in social epistemology. We begin by describing PolyGraphs. An interdisciplinary project funded by the Academies (BA, RS, and RAEng) and the Leverhulme Trust, it uses philosophical simulations (Mayo-Wilson and Zollman, 2021) to study how ignorance prevails in networks of inquiring rational agents. We deploy models developed in economics (Bala and Goyal, 1998), and refined in philosophy (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2018; Zollman, 2007), to simulate communities of agents engaged in inquiry, who generate evidence relevant to the topic of their investigation and share it with their neighbors, updating their beliefs on the evidence available to them. We report some novel results surrounding the prevalence of ignorance in such networks. In the second part of the paper, we compare our own to other related academic practices. We begin by noting that, in digital humanities projects of certain types, the computational component does not appear to directly support the humanities research itself; rather, the digital and the humanities are simply grafted together, not fully intertwined and integrated. PolyGraphs is notably different: the computational work directly supports the investigation of the primary research questions, which themselves belong decidedly within the humanities in general, and philosophy in particular. This suggests an affinity with certain projects in the computational social sciences. But despite these real similarities, there are differences once again: the computational philosophy we practice aims not so much at description and prediction as at answering the normative and interpretive questions that are distinctive of humanities research.

Between corpora, tools and authority files

In this article, we discuss the ways in which Digital Humanities projects organise their resources, and argue for the need to collaborate with specialised services from other institutions for specific tasks, just as research publishers do. More specifically, we argue that libraries have a new central role to play in the publication of research data in repositories. Using the TextGrid Repository (TGR) as an example, we present its main components, its history, its main features, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages in comparison with similar repositories and technologies. We then present its current development within the Text+ consortium, both in the form of new features but also in the integration of existing corpora, making it interesting not only for German literature (as has been the case until now), but also for other traditions, especially Spanish literature.

The Laborious Cleaning: Acquiring and Transforming 19th-Century Epistolary Metadata

The paper documents the process of collecting, consolidating, and publishing epistolary metadata from Finnish cultural heritage organizations to create an archive for bottom-up analyses of 19th-century epistolary culture. We describe and discuss the data survey that was conducted to gather information about available letter collections across Finland, as well as the cleaning and harmonizing of over 350,000 letters from twelve different sources in various digital formats. We have also developed a data model that combines event-based and letter-based aspects of the metadata. Furthermore, the paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the initial phases of data-intensive research and the importance of discussing the labor of cleaning data. We believe that our experiences described in this paper can have wider significance for other digital humanities projects in Europe.

Digital Humanistic Crowdsourcing of Gamification Based on Interactive Digital Narrative: Taking Henan Yuediao Opera as a Case

ABSTRACTIn the “intangible cultural heritage” digital humanities project, crowdsourcing plays a key role. Based on the related theories of gamification and narrative, it takes the traditional Chinese opera Henan Yuediao as a case, designs a humanistic contextualized crowdsourcing platform based on interactive digital narration, and tests its usability and feasibility. The research is conducive to promoting the in‐depth mining and utilization of archives.

Mutual Sustainability among Communities and Their Knowledge Infrastructures

ABSTRACTDigital, community‐based knowledge infrastructures confront complex, systemic challenges to their sustainability over time. From digital community archives to computationally amenable corpora, databases, or data models created by and serving research communities, these sites of grassroots knowledge production tend to be maintained without long‐term institutional commitments. Yet, they hold unique cultural evidence of enormous value. Prior work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship has surfaced numerous factors in project sustainability, including technical, organizational, and financial concerns. The roles of communities themselves in sustaining community‐based knowledge infrastructures, however, are under‐studied. This qualitative, multi‐case study of digital humanities projects and digital community archives addresses community‐centered approaches to understanding and implementing sustainability for digital knowledge infrastructures. This study finds that communities of various kinds—from public communities to networks of research practice—conceive of the sustainability of their digital projects as inextricably linked to the sustainability of communities themselves. We offer an exploration of factors in the mutual relationship of sustainability between communities and their knowledge infrastructures, including how they support the wellbeing of individuals and cohesion among communities, and how they promote activism and advocacy efforts within broader publics and disciplinary cultures.