Digital Humanities Centers: why do they exist, where did

they come from, how have they evolved, and how do they work?

John UnsworthApril 6, 2010

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

EDAC computer, 1949

History of Digital Humanities

“Unlike many other interdisciplinary experiments, humanities computing has a very well-

known beginning. In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, began what even to

this day is a monumental task: to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of

St Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin.

Father Busa imagined that a machine might be able to help him, and, having heard of

computers, went to visit Thomas J. Watson at IBM in the United States in search of support

(Busa 1980). Some assistance was forthcoming and Busa began his work. The entire texts

were gradually transferred to punched cards and a concordance program written for the

project. The intention was to produce printed volumes, of which the first was published in

1974 (Busa 1974).”--Susan Hockey, “History of Humanities Computing” in the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities. http://bit.ly/9Oj0mg

Stantec Zebra, 1950s

History of DH Centers

“The 1960s also saw the establishment of some centers dedicated to the use

of computers in the humanities. [Roy] Wisbey founded the Centre for Literary

and Linguistic Computing in Cambridge in 1963 as support for his work with

Early Middle High German Texts. In Tübingen, Wilhelm Ott established a group

which began to develop the suite of programs for text analysis, particularly for

the production of critical editions. The TuStep software modules are in use to

this day and set very high standards of scholarship in dealing with all phases

from data entry and collation to the production of complex print volumes.” --Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing” http://bit.ly/9Oj0mg

NCSU Mavac, 1960s

DH conferences & Journals

“The first of a regular series of conferences on literary and linguistic computing and the

precursor of what became the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing/Association for

Computers and the Humanities (ALLC/ACH) conferences was organized by Roy Wisbey and

Michael Farringdon at the University of Cambridge in March, 1970. . . Subsequent meetings

were held in Edinburgh (1972), Cardiff (1974), Oxford (1976), Birmingham (1978), and

Cambridge (1980) all produced high-quality papers. The Association for Literary and

Linguistic Computing was founded at a meeting in King's College London in 1973. Initially it

produced its own Bulletin three times per year. It also began to organize an annual meeting

with some invited presentations and by 1986 had a journal, Literary and Linguistic

Computing.

--Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing” http://bit.ly/9Oj0mg

Heathkit Personal Computer, 1970s

In the U.S.“Computers and the Humanities began publication in 1966 under the editorship of Joseph

Raben. By the mid-1970s, another series of conferences began in North America, called

the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities (ICCH), and were held in

odd-numbered years to alternate with the British meetings. The British conference and

the ALLC annual meetings gradually began to coalesce. They continued to concentrate on

literary and linguistic computing with some emphasis on "linguistic", where they offered a

forum for the growing number of European researchers in what became known as corpus

linguistics. ICCH attracted a broader range of papers, for example on the use of computers

in teaching writing, and on music, art, and archaeology. The Association for Computers

and the Humanities (ACH) grew out of this conference and was founded in 1978.” --Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing” http://bit.ly/9Oj0mg

Apple I home computer, 1976

And in CanadaThe University of Toronto was an early adopter, with mainframe-based computing activities in

humanities disciplines starting in the late 1960s, initially organized around concordancing

programs. In the early 1980s, a Humanities Support Group was established to help faculty in

the humanities make better use of computer technology. Ian Lancashire, professor of English,

became director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and

Science, in 1986, and in 1987, Willard McCarty began publishing the email discussion group

Humanist from that Centre. Humanist is still going, and can be found at

http://digitalhumanities.org/humanist/

IBM personal computer, 1980s

From Projects to CentersMost early DH centers grew out of specific DH projects—Wisbey’s

Center for Literary and Linguistic Computing at Cambridge in the 1960s,

Bob Kraft’s Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies begun in

the early 1970s at Penn, or the Perseus Project begun at Harvard in

1985. Often these projects were driven by the vision and dedication of

a single individual. By the late 1980s, in a discussion about how to start

a center, on Humanist, Ian Lancashire said:

IBM Server, 1990s

Centers“If a college has two or three faculty committed to humanities computing, for whatever

reasons, it has what's needed to get started. From that point on, centres of quite different

characters take root. Several models operate successfully throughout North America.

They develop according to the professional goals of those faculty and so any one cannot

easily be taken as "the best way" to found a centre. To administrators who think in the

long term, who develop strategies to increase the influence and so the budget of their

universities, however, the argument that computing humanists will better enable their

institutions to meet society's needs will be almost universally admitted. This is especially

true now that the novelty of seeing humanities faculty using computers has been

exhausted and it is no longer "innovative" (in a national or an international community) to

set up humanities computing centres. The argument now has to be that it is

**essential** to create them.”--http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Archives/Virginia/v02/0338.html

The hand-held computer, circa 2007

CLIR report on DH Centers (2008)

http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub143abst.html

DH Centers Defined

• “A digital humanities center is an entity where new media and technologies are used for humanities-based research, teaching, and intellectual engagement and experimentation. The goals of the center are to further humanities scholarship, create new forms of knowledge, and explore technology's impact on humanities-based disciplines.”

-- Diane Zorich

DH mind-mapping

Types of DH Centers

“DHCs can be grouped into two general categories:

• Center focused: Centers organized around a physical location, with many diverse projects, programs, and activities undertaken by faculty, researchers, and students. These centers offer a wide array of resources to diverse audiences. Most DHCs operate under this model.

• Resource focused: Centers organized around a primary resource, located in a virtual space, that serve a specific group of members. All programs and products flow from the resource, and individual and institutional members help sustain the resource by providing content, labor, or other support services.”

Findings

The study findings also show that DHCs are entering a new phase of

organizational maturity, with concomitant changes in activities, roles, and

sustainability. Of late, there is a growing interest in fostering greater

communication among centers to leverage their numbers for advocacy

efforts. However, few DHCs have considered whether an unfettered

proliferation of individual centers is an appropriate model for advancing

humanities scholarship. Indeed, some features in the current landscape of

centers may inadvertently hinder wider research and scholarship. These

include the following:

Findings (1)

• The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital

production that is detrimental to the needs of humanities scholarship.

Today's centers favor individual projects that address specialized research

interests. These projects are rarely integrated into larger digital resources that

would make them more widely known and available for the research

community. As a result, they receive little exposure outside their center and

are at greater risk of being orphaned over time.

• The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage

resources community-wide. Centers have overlapping agendas and activities,

particularly in training, digitization of collections, and metadata development.

Redundant activities across centers are an inefficient use of the scarce

resources available to the humanities community.

Findings (2)

• Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the "big" issues in building a

humanities cyberinfrastructure, such as repositories that enable long-term

access to the centers' digital production, are missing from the current

landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on

individual partner interests; they do not scale up to address community-wide

needs.

Findings (3)

Findings (4)

• The findings of this survey suggest that new models are needed for large-

scale cyberinfrastructure projects, for cross-disciplinary research that cuts a

wide swathe across the humanities, and for integrating the huge amounts of

digital production already available. Current DHCs will continue to have an

important role to play, but that role must be clarified in the context of the

broader models that emerge.

Findings (5)

• When one is investigating collaborative models for humanities scholarship,

the sciences offer a useful framework. Large-scale collaborations in the

sciences have been the subject of research that examines the organizational

structures and behaviors of these entities and identifies the criteria needed to

ensure their success. The humanities should look to this work in planning its

own strategies for regional or national models of collaboration.

My own opinions

• The CLIR-Zorich report has a library perspective, and therefore promotes infrastructure over innovation. That’s understandable, and libraries are key partners for digital humanities, but individual scholars need to be able to experiment, in order to innovate, discover new knowledge, develop new methods.

My own opinions

• I think there’s a generation’s worth of work to do in negotiating the proper relationship between libraries and scholars around digital collections—at least, this will be true if scholars create as well as consume digital resources, and especially if the resources scholars create stand in some concrete relation to digital primary resources.

Local Factors

In my experience as a consultant to many universities interested in launching digital humanities initiatives, the most important factor in creating success is understanding local conditions, and designing the initiative to fit them. With that in mind, I have some questions for the audience, which I hope will allow us to generate some locally useful ideas.

Questions

1. What are humanities faculty rewarded for at SIUE?

2. What do you see as your best opportunities, if you start

something in digital humanities?

3. What is or could be distinctive at SIUE, in this area?

4. What are the strong and weak points of the relationship

between the humanities faculty and the library?

Questions (2)

5.What demand do you perceive from undergraduates, in digital

humanities, and what opportunities do you see to involve them

in this activity?

6.What is the role of graduate students? Particularly, what are

the distinctive advantages of students at the masters level with

a professional orientation? How can they be enfranchised as a

resource and partner in this effort?