1. Digital Humanities in the UK:
Advancing Computation Methods in the
Digital
Humanities through the Arts-
Humanities. net project:
Dr Craig Bellamy
Centre for eResearch (CeRch)
Kings College London:
2. Issues:
• The digital humanities is a large and
dispersed field/ many institutional models
• Diverse methodological practices
• Capturing/structuring knowledge in the
field through the arts-humanities.net
project
• Promoting digital scholarship/
preservation/ metadata
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12. Developing a Taxonomy for the Digital Humanities
Torsten.Reimer@kcl.ac.uk
Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
browse
partner
resources
structure
arts-
humanities
.net
map
digital
humanities
build
resource
map
Partners:
-DHO, Dublin
-OeRC, Oxford
-(Network of Expert Centres)
www.arts-humanities.net/ictguides/methods
22. Summary
• Arts-humanities.net An attempt to capture
knowledge within the digital humanities
field
• Preservation/ data-structure important for
long-term scholarship of History of
Science works
• Taxonomy an attempt to map/promote
interdisciplary methodological practice
across the humanities
Editor's Notes
This presentation is about a digital humanities ‘knowledge base’ we are developing at the Centre for eResearch at King’s College in London called Arts-humanities.net. It is being developed to promote digital scholarship in the arts and humanities disciplines and has been under development for a few years now in various guises; it was previously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is now funded by the UK’s Joint Information Services Committee or JISC.
Today I will:
1) Give an overview of what we are trying to do with the service and how it broadly promotes digital humanities projects and methods
2) I’ll demonstrate some of the ways we record information about and promote projects such as the Darwin Letters and Newton papers;
3) And then I will show how we are trying to embed the system within the broader Digital Humanities field using some Web 2 tools and techniques.
Digital Humanities (or Humanities Computing) is a banner term that encompasses all the humanities disciplines and the various uses of computing within them. And because of its breadth and range of institutional models it is often difficult to define and capture information within the field. For the purposed of the arts-humanities.net project we define it as:
“the application of computational methods and associated tools to address specific humanities research problems. Distinct from general computing approaches, the Digital Humanities is embedded within the research concerns of the disciplines and sub-fields that make up the humanities. The methods employed in the field may be used to uncover new knowledge about corpora or to visualize or present research data in such a way as to uncover additional insights and meaning”
And the Centre where I work at King’s College in London used to be the Arts and Humanities Data Service (that was funded for 11 years and ceased operation last year) and we were a national service with a remit to collect all the digital outputs from the arts and humanities research project in the UK funded by the major research council.
We still have a number of digital collections persevered on our servers that we are slowly giving back to individual institutions to preserve in their own individual university repositories (with mixed success because a lot of universities still don’t have digital repositories). And the value of preservation is to make digital works accessible in the long terms in such as way that they retain their meaning for scholarship.
The Arts-humanities.net project is arranged around Methods, Projects, Tools, and Centres which are some of the key reference points in the Digital Humanities. We also announce events and publish case studies and briefing papers about the application of computing methods to particular research questions in various fields. And we publish articles and training material to help others either use digital sources, tools and methods in their research , or indeed create their own digital projects.
And we have about 300 projects listed on the database so far. Many of the project that we lists were created under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Resource Enhancement scheme that funded projects aiming to improve access to and use of important research corpuses (including of course, history of science projects).
What we are particularly concerned with is not only listing digital projects on out site, but also recording how they were built and what computational methods (if any) that were used in their construction so we can communicate this to others.
An example of one of the History of Science projects that we list on our site is the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. We write a citation of the project, list the subjects that it covers, the tools and methods utilised; we describe the meta-data applied and the digital outputs it created. We also list the creators and authors of the work in the hope that other will contact them thus creating virtual communities.
And this particular project, the Complete Works of Charles Darwin online, was produced at the University of Cambridge. It is perhaps the largest publication of Darwin’s works and contains 40,000 pages of searchable text and 130,000 electronic images. And it contains all of Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts as well as many his published ones.
And the Darwin Archive has used a number of methods that we record so as to communicate them to others in case they wish to create a similar resource.
And the Darwin Project, despite the scholarly work that has gone into its critical publication, is a fairly straight-forward digitisation project. It has used the methods of 2D scanning and OCR to capture the text and images, it has been structured in a data-base, and is delivered online through the web. And it has used the Dublin Core meta-data standard to describe the digital artifacts produced; which is a fairly common scenario for a project such as this one.
And from a preservation perspective the digital data formats created are also important. And I note that this project has used JGP Interchange format files; and I am not completely sure why this is or if this is a particularly good preservation standard.
And we don’t actually fill in the information about the projects ourselves because often we don’t have access to all the knowledge of how they were created, but instead invite people to fill in details about their own work (which does on occasions raise issues of accuracy).
Often the knowledge about how projects were created is not recorded anywhere else and this is one of the gaps that our particular project is attempting to address
And this is an example of one of the pages from the actual Darwin archive. Note the image on the right of the original text and the translation and contextual annotations are on the left.
This particular document is form an admissions book and records Darwin's admission to Christ’s College Cambridge (not his residence in College, which began in Lent Term (January) 1828. Reproduced with permission of the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Christ's College, Cambridge)
And in the digital humanities field, this particular project is in the Critical Edition vein of digital scholarship; which is perhaps the most dominant form of scholarship in the Digital Humanities in the UK (although increasingly Computing Science methods are being used in the field and there are a number of programmes in the UK that seeks to promote this interdisciplinary arrangement with Computer Science).
Another important project we record on our site is the Newton Manuscript Project produced by Imperial College London (now it is housed at the University of Sussex; I assume because the Principle Investigator change institutions).
And this is a collection of Newton’s non-Scientific papers; his unpublished theological papers. Its central focus is a series of (XML encoded) transcriptions of Newton's theological works, personal notebooks, and biographical information about Newton dating from the eighteenth century, and many of his early scientific papers.
And again this project is in the Critical Edition vein of digital scholarship.
This is a Screen Shot from the actual Newton site.
And this is Newton’s Fitzwilliam Notebook, containing expense lists, a confession of Newton's sins, and miscellaneous problems in mathematics and physics.
And note the editors annotation at he top about how the notebook was translated (and there are extensive annotations that have been encoded throughout this work).
And again we record the information about how the digital resources were created and the standard that were employed. And Newton Manuscript Project uses the XML-TEI standard, which is perhaps on the most important contributions that the Digital Humanities has made. And TEI for those who don’t know, is a publishing standard or encoding standard that allows humanists to structure data and present data in such a way that it retains and advances the meaning of the original resource.
And something I did notice about the Newton Archive Project is that it is one of the projects that are still being preserved on one of our servers from the old Arts and Humanities Data Service.
We also preserve a lot of detailed information relating to editorial principles and technical issues. And after Arts and Humanities Data Service lost it funding last year we were asked to give all the preservation copies back to their Copyright owners so what will happen to the Newton project in the longer term, I am not completely sure (but it is still online being maintained by its authors of course).
And one of the most important overall aims of the Arts-humanities.net project is capture and promote the methods that are being used within arts and humanities disciplines; partly so we can promote their re-use across projects and disciplines (thus attempting to create epistemic cultures or ‘communities of practice’).
The taxonomy partly serves as a controlled vocabulary for the site. By gathering information about methods in a controlled fashion, the sites capability for structured searching is greatly enhanced. But also importantly we are trying to do normalize some of the application of computing methods within the humanities so that theycan be communicated and re-used by others.
And our Taxonomy has been taken up by other projects; notably the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin and the Oxford eResearch Centre.
And in the top level of the Taxonomy we have 7 categories (such as data capture, data analysis, data structuring etc.).
And the top-level categories are an attempt to represent the work-flow involved in creating and using digital resources in the arts and humanities.
And if we choose one of these say Data Structuring and Enhancement
It comes up with a number of sub-categories.
Say if we choose one Text Encoding (Descriptive) (we get one of the methods used to make online critical editions). And we define this method as:
…the addition of character and symbols at certain places in a text in order to convey information about concrete and abstract concepts (i.e. genres, topical subjects); its logical structure (i.e. identification of headings, paragraphs); its linguistic components, or about concrete and abstract named entities (i.e. identification of personal names, geographic names).
And note that this is one of the methods used by the Newton Project:
And if we need a tool to undertake this Text Encoding method; then the most popular one used within the Digital Humanities is called oXygen XML editor (which we list and provide links to projects that have used it).
And I will just talk briefly about one of the most important component of the site; and this is it users.
And we have experimenting with a Web 2 framework to get users to discuss projects and method; with fairly limited success so far.
We at King’s contribute most of content to Arts-humanities.net site, and we have had some success at getting users to contribute information about their projects, but when it comes to actually discussing projects or providing more information about tools and methods used in their projects, then they have been less forthcoming.
People do use the system to post information about events and jobs in the Digital Humanities, but beyond that the community section of the site has been less successfully than the other components of the site.
This is an example of a user profile on the site; and users can create their own blogs and wiki entries and forum topics. They can also join a number of special-interest groups such as Digital Historian, Music and Sound, Mapping the Past etc.
And we hoped that these special interest groups would swap information with each other about their use of tools and methods.
One of the newer groups is called Digital Classics; and they usually blog the proceedings of their seminar series.
This particular group is from Centre for the Computing in the Humanities, also at King’s College.
Another group is called Digital Historian. This particular group has 269 subscribers, but most of the content offered by the group is event information or announcements of a particular type.
If we are to fully realise some of the potential of the ‘Web 2.0’ approach, we need to develop a much better user engagement strategy and build-in some reward structures for useful contributions.
And this is especially true in terms of the taxonomy of the system as this records all the methods used in the community and this is very difficult to develop in a centralised fashion (and would be much more valuable with greater community involvement).
So to summarise it is hoped that by listing in a qualitative manner a number of digital arts and humanities projects in the UK along with the methods and tools employed, that we will provide a service that is useful for new and established scholars who wish to crate and use digital resources such as the Darwin Paper and the Newton Archive. And in terms of preservation (as we found out), it is not so much about preserving the digital objects themselves but preserving the institutional structures to look after them.
An we hope that our Taxonomy as a formal way of structuring knowledge will be an impetus for collaboration between fields and with their particular methods as it promotes overlapping domains. ie. Text Encoding method primarily developed in Classics, may be useful in another disciplines such as the History of Science and the Newton project.
And through the Web 2.0 techniques that we have employed, it is hoped that a community of practitioners will develop who will make contact with each other and discuss the issues that will lead to the creation of further tools and projects.
Thank you.
