See bloggage on http://edwardvanhoutte.blogspot.be/2013/01/the-gates-of-hell-guest-lecture.html

1. Text and Image based Digital Humanities:
providing access to textual heritage in Flanders
Edward Vanhoutte
Director of Research & Publications, Royal Academy of Dutch Language & Literature
Research Associate, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
Editor-in-Chief, LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (OUP)
edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
@evanhoutte
Guest Lecture – Würzburg – 13/12/2012

2. Overview
●Humanities Computing
●Digital Humanities
●Projects
●Discussion
Guest Lecture – Würzburg – 13/12/2012

3. Auguste Rodin (1940-1917)

4. Gates
Of
Hell
Rodin
Museum
Paris

5. Humanities Computing

6. Failure

7. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)
●Construction started 1943
●Ballistic research during WWII
●Operational in 1946

8. EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer)
●First binary stored program computer
●Ballistic research during WWII
●Operational in 1951

9. Problem:
Computers were operational
But
War was over

10. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Again, it [the operating mechanism, EV] might act upon other things
besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental
relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of
operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the
action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine.
Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched
sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were
susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might
compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of
complexity or extent. (Lovelace, 1961 [1843], p. 248-249)

11. Warren Weaver (1894-1978)
Science: Humanities:
Mathematics Machine Translation

12. Machine Translation
Warren Weaver:
●Cryptanalysis
●Cold War
Andrew Donald Booth (1918-2009)
●Linguistic problems
●Concordances
●Frequency lists
●Lemmatization
→ Disputed authorship
→ Stylometry

13. Electronic Text Analysis
Roberto Busa (1913-2011)
1950: plans for the Index
Thomisticus
Encoding categories of vocabulary during input
→ automatic linguistic analysis

15. Machine Translation
Computational Linguistics (1966)
Electronic Text Analysis
Humanities Computing

17. Gates
Of
Hell
Rodin
Museum
Meudon

20. 2004

22. Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanist?
What is it?
What is its purpose?
→ Definition?

31. The application of computational methods to research and teaching in the humanities.
—John Unsworth
The use of digital media and tools to answer traditional humanities questions, and the
study of new questions that are formed by the intersection of modern
methods/tools/models and humanitistic sources.
—Laurie Allen
Researchers working with digital materials, tools, or methods in the humanities;
researchers creating new digital materials, tools, or methods in the humanities;
researchers studying computing using humanities methods.
—Stan Ruecker
A very rewarding activity which still scares people who don't understand that computers
can generate meaning
—evanhout

32. Instead of a definition, we have a genealogy, a network of
family resemblances among provisional schools of thought,
methodological interests, and preferred tools, a history of
people who have chosen to call themselves digital humanists
and who in the process of trying to define the term are creating
that definition.
—Rafael Alvarado
<http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=717>
→ Social Category

33. Instead of a definition, we have a genealogy, a network of family resemblances
among provisional schools of thought, methodological interests, and preferred tools,
a history of people who have chosen to call themselves digital humanists and who
in the process of trying to define the term are creating that definition.
—Rafael Alvarado
<http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=717>
→ Social Category
A tactical convenience
—Matt Kirschenbaum

34. At a moment when the academy in general and the humanities
in particular are the object of massive and wrenching changes,
digital humanities emerges as a rare vector for jujitsu,
simultaneously serving to position the humanities at the very
forefront of certain valueladen agendas—entrepreneurship,
openness and public engagement, futureoriented thinking,
collaboration, interdisciplinarity, big data, industry tieins, and
distance or distributed education—while at the same time
allowing for various forms of intrainstitutional mobility as new
courses are mooted, new colleagues are hired, new resources are
allotted, and old resources are reallocated.
Matthew Kirschenbaum

38. Subscriptions: +25%
Submissions: +300%

39. Digital Humanities
● Of the humanities
● Innovative
● Asks the same questions in a different way
● Interdisciplinary
● Multilingual
● Interactive
● Self critical
● Community building
● Fun
The future of the humanities

40. Digital Humanities
Tries to model the surrounding world in order to
reach at a better understading of humans, their
activities and what they produce.

41. Text and Image based Digital Humanities:
providing access to textual heritage in Flanders
Edward Vanhoutte
Director of Research & Publications, Royal Academy of Dutch Language & Literature
Research Associate, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
Editor-in-Chief, LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (OUP)
edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
@evanhoutte
Guest Lecture – Würzburg – 13/12/2012