Research Conditionsand DIGITAL HUMANITIES

What are the prospects for the Next Generation?

Panel 1

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Dr Arianna Ciula

DHIP IHA 11 June 2013

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Academic culture

“Digital Humanities should not be considered to only be an academic phenomenon. I think that a move towards the digital is present in academia, publishing, marketing, business, and much much more. It is likely to end up being the overall presence in how people do their jobs, no matter what their job is, in the next few years.” (Fraser 2013)

Humanities united at war

• Fragmentation of disciplines → regain combination ≠ homogenisation

“disruptive political force that has the potential to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practice” (Gold 2012)

To question the “scholarly infrastructure” (Svensson 2012) as a whole and To channel a common “transformative sentiment” (Svensson 2012)

“digital humanities as representing or manifesting

the humanities” and as “means to discuss the future of the humanities at large”

(Svensson 2012) e.g. http://4humanities.org/

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Changes

Are these changes “facelifts” or are they changing the humanities?

Focus on social value:

“Is digital humanities is [sic] a "distinctly social enterprise"? I wonder if as the locus of research moves from the mind of the researcher into the world where others can participate directly, in real time, in its development, collaboration becomes not simply possible but more desirable -- not just because the talents of others are needed but because it is somehow an inherently social activity?” (McCarty 2013)

Keep calm... and act (laboratores as per Burghart 2013 – but not slaves!)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

Towards a “A de-constructionist scholarly information continuum” (Gradmann and Meister 2008)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

Publication cultures in SSH “complex document models

and publishing formats heavily intertwined with core research operations” - text as “complex, semiological digital object” (process and product)

text turned into 'heuristic machine' through the digital e.g. dynamic edition (Buzzetti and Rebhein 2008)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

• Call for researchers to steer the digital realm to better fit their publication cultures and innovate their scholarship:

“In a vision that ultimately renders obsolete Snow’s simplistic dichotomy of the ‘two cultures’ one could conclude that for digital publishing to truly work both in the STM and SSH communities we need a broader vision of ‘E-Science’ and ‘E-Scholarship’ alike which then includes digital publishing as one of its constituents.” (Gradmann and Meister 2008)

Digital repositories and Open Access policy → call for institutional actors to re-think their roles and experiment with new models (Romary 2013)

Global AND Public Humanities

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

From publishing to research

“texts (in the broad sense of linguistic, visual, acoustic, filmic works) → not static objects but encoded provocations for reading.” (Drucker 2012)

“The challenge is to shift humanistic study from attention to the effects of technology (from readings of social media, games, narrative, personae, digital texts, images, environments), to a humanistically informed theory of the making of technology (a humanistic computing at the level of design, modeling of information architecture, data types, interface, and protocols).” (Drucker 2012)

Collaboration and Interdisciplinary aspect

“Trading zones do not necessarily stop at departments or schools. Importantly, such zones or meeting places could, and probably should, extend outside the humanities proper to other parts of the university and, if appropriate and mutually beneficial, to industry, cultural institutions and the art world. […] An open meeting place and energetic trading zone does not necessarily make a sharp distinction between research, education and other activities.” (Svensson 2012)

“The great project of humanities computing is the

development of a hermeneutic—a concept and practice of interpretation—parallel to that of the dominant, postwar, theory-driven humanities: a way of performing cultural and aesthetic criticism less through solitary points of view expressed in language, and more in team-based acts of building.” (Nowviskie 2012a)

“Digital scholarship happens within complex networks of human production. […] meaningful human partnerships” (Nowviskie 2012b)

Collaborative nature of digital humanities work and openness

Collaboration and Interdisciplinary aspect

Interdisciplinary aspect as bridge across scientific cultures

Historical and comparative perspective Early modern Europe: “the humanities not only preceded the sciences but also

shaped them to a very large extent via the formal and empirical study of music, art, language and texts” (Bod et al. 2010, 11-12)

19th century reform of the universities and formation of modern scientific disciplines → sealed faith of the ‘humanist mathematics’, break with the classics (Bod et al. 2012, 12)

Discipline formation as a form of hybridization rather than specialization (Bod et al. 2012)

Institutional perspective Tensions with established disciplines and scientific

culture of the humanities (see also Svensson 2012)

Learn to collaborate

“Mutual respect entails being interested in other people’s research and practice, acknowledging different epistemic traditions, engaging in dialogue and collaborative work regardless of someone’s position in the university hierarchy or other structures, but also respecting more "monastic" work processes […] and a temporary reluctance to be highly dialogic.” (Svensson 2012)

and so if we want young people to better understand and appreciate the way their world actually operates, we need to teach them about collaboration and to collaborate in their schoolwork. And because digital humanities is more self-conscious than the more established disciplines where this kind of collaboration is commonplace, it leads to more purposeful engagement with the subject.” (Meeks 2013b)

(Higher) Education

“Collaboration is important from both a professional perspective and a social perspective. The world that your students are going to go out into is not one where they will work alone at one station, and punch a time clock and go home, but one where they are constantly in touch with everyone they are working with. More importantly, their world outside their work is the product of such collaboration.[...] Steve Jobs didn’t go into his workshop and carve out an iPhone by himself,

Know-how attributes vs. Human project

“We [...] cannot make knowing or not knowing Mark Up the one thing everyone not in the field knows about us or we will destroy our field by provincializing it ― and by stigmatizing our students out of the one area where there are jobs right now. […] An ideal job candidate burns with the passion of making a field anew. Vision, expansiveness, imagination, ideas, and brilliance are the requirements. Knowing or not knowing HTML is way down the list of attributes that make colleagues know that you are the one they need for a better and brighter future.” (Davidson 2011)

(Higher) Education

Essential 'Apprenticeship' → 'human project' (McCarty 2013)

“Information literacy in a variety of now commonplace representations of data” (Meeks 2013b)

Understanding the modern world “Digital humanities, along with providing a more sophisticated understanding

of humanities phenomena, provides a more sophisticated understanding of a modern world that runs on the very same tools and techniques outlined above”

Critique (ethical and social ramifications) “By bringing the digital into the humanities, we provide a space to question

the effect of these pervasive techniques and tools on culture and society. Digital humanities [...] is extremely self-conscious and self-critical, it lingers on definitions and problems of its scope and place, and it especially turns a jaundiced eye to technological optimism of all sorts, even as it attempts to integrate new technologies into the asking of very old questions.”

(Higher) Education

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Early career and junior researchers as agents of change

Avoid prescribed roles (Svensson 2012)

Hybrid role (legacy of humanities computing)

“The digital humanities specialist is a participatory mediator who must be able to draw on deep awareness and experience of the intersecting intellectual space where the modelling occurs.” (McCarty and Short 2012)

Investors

“young researchers with an investment in the digital humanities who are anchored in a traditional disciplinary and scholarly context” (Svensson 2012)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?

See also Moulin et al. 2011

“evaluation of humanities scholars as individuals” → “it feels increasingly alien to the collaborative and publicly iterative modes in which we and our colleagues at other digital centers now operate to produce and disseminate knowledge” (Nowviskie 2012a)

'fiction' of “final outputs” (Nowviskie 2012b)

(Meeks 2013a)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?

(Meeks 2013a)

“humanities computing has a long history of tension in terms of establishing academic job opportunities and career paths, which is partly related to an often institutionally peripheral position, a different professional structure than most disciplines (including heaver reliance on skills and practices not typical of traditional humanities scholarship) and no clear way to a tenure track or equivalent position nor a highly qualified expert role.” (Svensson 2012)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?

(Meeks 2013a)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Scholarly changes

Inherent to disciplines “Connecting to the heart of the disciplines involves relating to the core

challenges and needs of those disciplines. This does not imply a pronounced service function [...] or aligning with disciplinary agendas but rather to be engaged in an intellectual dialogue that sparks core interest among scholars from those disciplines.” (Svensson 2012)

e.g. Palaeography

2004: the term 'Digital palaeography' didn't even exist! 2010: ERC Starting Grant http://digipal.eu/ 2011: ESF Exploratory Workshop Use of digital tools/resources: from defensive approach (2001 and before)

to common (unquestioned?) practice (2013) → critical use, engaged modelling and discussion of limitations

From auxiliary discipline to integral perspective in connection with philology, linguistics and cognitive sciences?

Which work is the most known? (production/reception)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Scholarly changes

Illegible?

“Products of digital work in the humanities are evident all around us, but the arguments that they instantiate remain deceptively tacit to those who have not learned to appreciate their sites of discourse, their languages and protocols. Humanities-computing arguments are made collectively and tested iteratively. The field advances through craft and construction: the fashioning and refashioning of digital architectures and artifacts. It is little wonder that bibliographers, archivists and textual critics, and archaeologists and other specialists in material culture were the first to grasp the implications ofdigital technology for humanities scholarship. Methodological, embodied, and quiet knowledge transfer lies at the heart of our work, which can remain frustratingly illegible to scholars whose experience rests more in verbal exchange.” (Nowviskie 2012a)

Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?

Scholarly changes

Agenda and (human) Infrastructure

• “Despite all the focus on cyberinfrastructure and scholarly workflows, we’re fashioning ever closer, more intimate and personalized systems of production.” (Nowviskie 2012b)

• Contextualise an infrastructure within an agenda against 'disciplinary servitude': “many of the scholars […], not paid to think and act like scholars, have lost sight of that which infrastructure is for” (McCarty 2012)

• “There is a need for iterative and integrated processes, which influences and, to some extent, shapes both the research and the technological development. Such a process must allow for some risk taking and experimentation (we do not always know what specific technologies are good for, if anything), and must be adaptive (the research challenges may change as a result of availability or development of certain methods and technologies) and critically engaged.” (Svensson 2012)

References (or 'networked spaces')“Ces nouvelles plateformes de discussions en ligne pourraient former un nouveau centre de débats entre

scientifiques, en complétant – sans les remplacer – les débats par articles et revues interposés ; mais également de contacts entre professeurs, étudiants, érudits.” (Dubois 2013)

Bod, Rens, J. Maat, and T. Weststeijn, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. I: The Humanities in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam University Press. 2010. Print and Web.

--, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines. Amsterdam University Press. 2012. Print and Web.Burghart, Marjoerie. “The Three Orders or Digital Humanities Imagined #dhiha5”. http://dhiha.hypotheses.org/ Digital Humanities à l'IHA. 28 April 2013. 31 May

2013. http://dhiha.hypotheses.org/817Buzzetti, Dino, and Malte Rehbein. "Towards a model for dynamic text editions". Digital Humanities 2008. Ed. Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Mikko Jokelainen, Ilkka

Juuso, and Tapio Seppänen. Oulu: University of Oulu, 2008. 78–81.Davidson, Cathy N. "Advice to DigHum Job Candidates: Don't Lead with HTML". http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ HASTAC blog. 13 January 2011. 28 May 2013.

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/advice-dighum-job-candidates-dont-lead-html Drucker, Johanna. “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship”. Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print

and Web. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/part/3Dubois, Antonin. “Quelques remarques personnelles sur les “digital humanities” en SHS #dhiha5”. http://parhei.hypotheses.org/ Recherches, réflexions et

perspectives franco-allemandes sur l'Histoire. 14 May 2013. 31 May 2013. http://parhei.hypotheses.org/167 Fraser, Benjamin. “DH/Digital Humanities in general – 4 points and a rant followed by a question”. http://urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com/ Urban Cultural

Studies blog. 5 March 2013. 24 May 2013. (http://urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/dh-in-general-4-points-and-a-rant-followed-by-a-question/)

Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print and Web. (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/) Gradmann, Stefan, and Jan Christoph Meister. “Digital document and interpretation: re-thinking ‘text’ and scholarship in electronic settings”. Poiesis & Praxis.

International Journal of Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment, 2008. Electronic pre-publication: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g370807768tx2027/fulltext.html

McCarty, Willard. "The residue of uniqueness". Controversies around the digital humanities, ed Manfred Thaller. Historical Social Research - Historische Sozialforschung 37.3: 24-45. 2012. Print and podcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuRftmWUJmA (preprint available at http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20The%20residue%20of%20uniqueness.%20HSR-HS%2020120401.pdf)

--. “Subject: indigenous knowledge?” Humanist Discussion Group. Vol. 26, No. 941, 4 April 2013. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Web. 24 May 2013.

-- and Harold Short. Proposal for a Research Centre in Digital Humanities. June 2012. Unpublished.Meeks, Elijah. “The Digital Humanities as a Donkey”. https://dhs.stanford.edu/ The Digital Humanities Specialist. 19 February 2013. 27 May 2013 (

https://dhs.stanford.edu/the-digital-humanities-as/the-digital-humanities-as-a-donkey/)--. “Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship”. https://dhs.stanford.edu/ The Digital Humanities Specialist. 11 February 2013. 27 May 2013

(https://dhs.stanford.edu/algorithmic-literacy/digital-literacy-and-digital-citizenship/) Moulin, Claudine, Nyhan, Julianne, Ciula, Arianna et al. Research Infrastructures for the Digital Humanities, ESF Science Policy Briefing. 2011. Print and Web.

<http://www.esf.org/publications>Nowviskie, Bethany. “Praxis, Through Prisms: a Digital Boot Camp for Grad Students in the Humanities”. The Chronicle of Higher Education 2012: Vol. 58, Issue 35.

Web. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Digital-Boot-Camp-for-Grad/131665/ (available at --. “Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due),” Journal of Digital Humanities 1.4 (Winter 2012). Web.

http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-collaborative-digital-scholarship-by-bethany-nowviskie/ Romary, Laurent. “Scholarly Work and Open Access”. ALLEA Symposium on Management of large data corpora, 29 April 2013. Web.

http://www.allea.org/Content/ALLEA/General%20Assemblies/General%20Assembly%202013/Teilpräsentationen_Speaker_29%20April/Laurent_Romary_ALLEA-29April2013_V3-1.pdfSvensson, Patrik, “Envisioning the Digital Humanities”, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2012: v6 n1. Web. 24 May 2013.