Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

Authors : Jan Luhmann, Manuel Burghardt

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated.

While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73).

This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens).

As a method of analysis, we use latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering.

Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science.

Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH.

URL : Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24533

Transparency, provenance and collections as data: the National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry

Author : Sarah Ames

‘Collections as data’ has become a core activity for libraries in recent years: it is important that we make collections available in machine-readable formats to enable and encourage computational research. However, while this is a necessary output, discussion around the processes and workflows required to turn collections into data, and to make collections data available openly, are just as valuable.

With libraries increasingly becoming producers of their own collections – presenting data from digitisation and digital production tools as part of datasets, for example – and making collections available at scale through mass-digitisation programmes, the trustworthiness of our processes comes into question.

In a world of big data, often of unclear origins, how can libraries be transparent about the ways in which collections are turned into data, how do we ensure that biases in our collections are recognised and not amplified, and how do we make these datasets available openly for reuse?

This paper presents a case study of work underway at the National Library of Scotland to present collections as data in an open and transparent way – from establishing a new Digital Scholarship Service, to workflows and online presentation of datasets.

It considers the changes to existing processes needed to produce the Data Foundry, the National Library of Scotland’s open data delivery platform, and explores the practical challenges of presenting collections as data online in an open, transparent and coherent manner.

URL : Transparency, provenance and collections as data: the National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry

Original location : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/article/10.18352/lq.10371/

Humanités numériques et archives : la longue émergence d’un nouveau paradigme

Auteur/Author : Frédéric Giuliano

Cet article vise à démystifier le domaine de recherche que sont les humanités numériques en révélant sa contribution et l’immense potentiel de ses approches pour la pratique archivistique et bibliothéconomique.

L’auteur y présente une réflexion sur les apports conceptuels et technologiques des humanités numériques tout en soulignant les défis que doivent relever les professionnels de l’information associés à ces projets, mais aussi les nouveaux rôles que ces derniers sont appelés à y jouer.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1063788ar

 

From Digital Library to Open Datasets : Embracing a “Collections as Data” Framework

Authors : Rachel Wittmann, Anna Neatrour, Rebekah Cummings, Jeremy Myntti

This article discusses the burgeoning “collections as data” movement within the fields of digital libraries and digital humanities. Faculty at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library are developing a collections as data strategy by leveraging existing Digital Library and Digital Matters programs.

By selecting various digital collections, small- and large-scale approaches to developing open datasets are explored. Five case studies chronicling this strategy are reviewed, along with testing the datasets using various digital humanities methods, such as text mining, topic modeling, and GIS (geographic information system).

URL : From Digital Library to Open Datasets : Embracing a “Collections as Data” Framework

DOI : https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i4.11101

Les humanités numériques n’existent pas

Auteur/Author : Éric Guichard

Nous commençons par exposer la complexité de la culture numérique et de la culture de l’écrit, qui définit le cadre de la première. Nous montrons que cette culture nous fait osciller entre bricolage et réflexivité (comme par le passé) et nous invite à expliciter le lien entre pensée et calcul.

Nous précisons les termes d’une « culture numérique minimale », que des pans de l’Université refusent d’intégrer alors qu’elle est souvent maîtrisée par les partisans des « humanités numériques ».

Pour autant, le mouvement des « humanités numériques », sauf à le considérer comme un syndicat de lettrés mal accueillis par l’Université, pose problème : il se veut fédérateur alors que les pratiques numériques savantes restent disciplinaires ; les définitions des disciplines données par ses hérauts sont approximatives et sou-vent erronées ; et les transformations induites par l’informatique et l’écriture numérique touchent toutes les disciplines.

Ce qui conduit des informaticiens à investir le champ des sciences sociales sans se revendiquer des « humanités numériques » et à soulever des questions humanistes pertinentes. Enfin, les initiatives des Gafam et de l’Union Européenne, relayées par les agences de financement de la recherche, favorisent une industrialisation des sciences de la culture et une caporalisation des sciences humaines et sociales que cachent mal les écritures de l’histoire des « humanités numériques ».

Restent des enjeux authentiquement humanistes, scientifiquement et politiquement bien plus stimulants que la quête d’une définition ou d’une institutionnalisation des « humanités numériques ».

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02403315

Digging into data management in public‐funded, international research in digital humanities

Authors : Alex H. Poole, Deborah A. Garwood

Path‐breaking in theory and practice alike, digital humanities (DH) not only secures a larger public audience for humanities and social sciences research, but also permits researchers to ask novel questions and to revisit familiar ones. Public‐funded, international, and collaborative research in DH furthers institutional research missions and enriches networked knowledge.

The Digging into Data 3 challenge (DID3) (2014–2016), an international and interdisciplinary grant initiative embracing big data, included 14 teams sponsored by 10 funders from four nations.

A qualitative case study that relies on purposive sampling and grounded analysis, this article centers on the information practices of DID3 participants. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 53 participants on 11 of the 14 DID3 projects.

The study explores how Data Management Plan requirements affect work practices in public‐funded DH, how scholars grapple with key data management challenges, and how they plan to reuse and share their data. It concludes with three recommendations and three directions for future research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24213

Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions

Authors : Elias Oltmanns, Tim Hasler, Wolfgang Peters-Kottig, Heinz-Günter Kuper

Ensuring the long-term availability of research data forms an integral part of data management services. Where OAIS compliant digital preservation has been established in recent years, in almost all cases the services aim at the preservation of file-based objects.

In the Digital Humanities, research data is often represented in highly structured aggregations, such as Scholarly Digital Editions. Naturally, scholars would like their editions to remain functionally complete as long as possible.

Besides standard components like webservers, the presentation typically relies on project specific code interacting with client software like webbrowsers. Especially the latter being subject to rapid change over time invariably makes such environments awkward to maintain once funding has ended.

Pragmatic approaches have to be found in order to balance the curation effort and the maintainability of access to research data over time. A sketch of four potential service levels aiming at the long-term availability of research data in the humanities is outlined: (1) Continuous Maintenance, (2) Application Conservation, (3) Application Data Preservation, and (4) Bitstream Preservation.

The first being too costly and the last hardly satisfactory in general, we suggest that the implementation of services by an infrastructure provider should concentrate on service levels 2 and 3. We explain their strengths and limitations considering the example of two Scholarly Digital Editions.

URL : Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-051