Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, Wolfson College, Oxford14 July 2014

1. David De Roure
Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines
The humanities in the digital world

2. What Digital Humanities isn’t
A silo
Digital Research in the Humanities
But equally
Humanities in Digital Research
Digital Humanities at Oxford video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdlOC0sFo5k

3. The Big Picture
More people
Moremachines
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
e-infrastructure
Online R&D
(Science
2.0)
Social
Machines
@dder

4. Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552

5. ChristineBorgman

6. Pip Willcox
@marstonbikepath
Datasets or dataflows?

7. F i r s t

9. theODI.org

11. New Social Process
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-riots

12. www.zooniverse.org

13. Scientists
Talk
Forum
Image
Classification
data reduction
Citizen Scientists

14. Community
Software
Supercomputer
Digital Music
Collections
Student-sourced
ground truth
Community
Software
Linked Data
Repositories
Supercomputer
23,000 hours of
recorded music
Music Information
Retrieval Community
SALAMI

15. Pip Willcox

16. Interdisciplinary and “in the wild”
In it not on it Pull not Push

17. A revolutionary idea…
Open Science!
rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org

18. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stacks_in_Michigan_State_University_library.JPG
Executable Documents
Knuth, Literate Programming

19. The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research
Object
Principles

20. Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)
Social Machines

21. SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org

22. Scholarly
Machines
EcosystemDavid De Roure, JCDL 2013

23. Richard O’Bierne

24. “Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all
human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that
built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and
must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—
has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose
collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent
male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive
atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase
participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

25. By Ségolène Tarte, David De
Roure and Pip Willcox
Working out the Plot
The Role of Stories in
Social Machines

26. Stories within
Social Machines
Stories about Social Machines
Social
Machines for
stories
Now we consider...
SOCIAL MACHINES AS STORIES

27. STORYTELLING AS A
STETHOSCOPE FOR SOCIAL
MACHINES
1. Sociality through storytelling
potential and realization
2. Sustainability through reactivity and
interactivity
3. Emergence through collaborative
authorship and mixed authority
Zooniverse is a highly
storified Social Machine
Facebook doesn’t allow
for improvisation
Wikipedia assigns
authority rights rigidly
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033

28. A computationally-
enabled sense-making
network of expertise,
data, software,
models and narratives
Iain Buchan

29. Don’t retrofit digital
Think post-digital, post-disciplinary
Social Machines
Humans in the loop, empowered
Challenge assumptions

30. Thanks to Christine Borgman, Iain Buchan, Chris Lintott,
Richard O’Bierne, Nigel Shadbolt, Ségolène Tarte, Pip Willcox;
FORCE11, SOCIAM; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JISC,
EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC.
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
sociam.org

31. www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@dder