Big Digital Humanities Initiatives

Canberra.
The next panellist at the DHA 2012 ‘Big Digital Humanities’ plenary is Harold Short. He begins by reviewing the different types of digital humanities infrastructure which are now being developed, and notes activities at institutional, national (including the recent Research Data Storage Initiative in Australia), and international levels here. This is a new development – for too long, digital humanities have piggybacked onto existing science infrastructures, but now they are increasingly developing tools to suit their own, specific needs.

At national levels around the world, there are various major initiatives (such as the National Library of Australia’s Trove project of Australian resources, which also invites user contributions for correcting its contents) which are doing important archival work; at other levels, too, important collections are being created and maintained.

This also leads to a new scale of evidence, requiring new means of linking and combining disparate sources of data – and such tools should not just be used to perpetuate existing forms of scholarship, but also to generate entirely new forms of enquiry. Not least, this needs to engage centrally with ‘born digital’ data (from cultural to commercial sources) – but at the same time, many very ancient documents are now also joining the digital world, and this also enables a range of new, digital, ‘small-scale’ scholarship.