Blogs

Canberra.
The final speaker at DHA 2012 this afternoon is Mitchell Whitelaw, whose interest is in data visualisation. The work he’s presenting here builds on the Prints and Printmaking Australia Asia Pacific database, and Mitchell’s project has explored the opportunities to present these data (20,000 works, 4,000 artists) in new, visual ways.

Mitchell has done similar work for other national archives collections, as well as for Flickr Commons image datasets. Such work provides exploratory visualisations of cultural collections, so far mainly with applications built in Processing and Java – but those technologies don’t work very well in browser environments, so recently this work has shifted more towards in-browser visualisations (using HTML and Javascript).

Canberra.
OK, I skipped the first afternoon session at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 for a quick excursion to Parliament House – and thanks to the vagaries of Canberra taxi services, missed half of the first paper in the next session as well. So, we pick up again with Stewart Wallace from the Dictionary of Sydney project. The dictionary contains some 22,000 entities called ‘factoids’, linked together in various ways.

As a project, it is about urban history; it began with the work of historians, and attempts to reflect their journeys, and to connect their knowledge. The underlying architecture comprises a single digital repository, containing various entities and their interrelations, and presenting these in XML format to be used in various forms of presentation and visualisation.

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at DHA 2012 is Antonina Lewis, who begins by highlighting the question of entities in describing linked data. Along with additional issues, such as data storage and retention, they raise a range of key questions for the creators, custodians, and curators of linked data.

Importantly, interpretation of data requires context; this is especially true for collections of coded data, where coding schemes and the various provenance of data sources are also crucially important for meaningful interpretation.

Canberra.
The second speaker in the linked data panel at DHA 2012 is Steven Hayes, who begins by introducing the network model of representing relationships between entities. This model has been employed by the Heurist database system, which Steven says represents a new ‘linked data’ mindset in humanities research.

From the perspective of that mindset, how linked are our data? Steven presents a number of criteria for ‘proper’ linked data: are they available online, in machine-readable form, using non-proprietary formats, using RDF standards, and linked to other RDF repositories, for example (the linked data checklist proposed by Tim Berners-Lee)?

Canberra.
Following the plenary panel, I’ve made it to a Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 panel on linked data, which opens with Toby Burrows. He begins by outlining the shape of what we now call e-Research: it ranges from supercomputing, large data visualisations, and other major, expensive projects mainly in the ‘hard’ sciences through to work being done in the humanities (notably excluding mere digitisation initiatives).

In the humanities, why do we bother? We could simply remain within our own niche areas, or leave the computational work to someone else; humanities work also adds to the problem by introducing further, major collections of cultural and communicative data. But the digital deluge is here, and cannot be ignored; further, mere computational methods are not enough, but crucially need better input from humanities scholarship, and this must also be translated into better recognition and funding for humanities research.

Canberra.
The final panellist on this DHA 2012 panel on ‘Big Digital Humanities’ is John Unsworth. His definition of the digital humanities is narrower than that of the others: he defines it as a form of humanities scholarship that builds centrally on computational methods – for example, research which uses ‘big data’ resources to do work which could not be done in any other way.

John uses the Hathi Trust Digital Library as an example: a collection of some 10 million (and growing) digitised publications which emerged in tandem with the Google Books initiative and is supported by libraries which contributed to the initiative; the Trust also operates a research centre which enables users to do computational work building on this vast resource.

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.

Canberra.
The second day of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 starts with a panel on the ‘Big Digital Humanities’ involving Peter Robinson, Harold Short, and John Unsworth. Peter begins by noting the fairly recent history of humanities computing, and the rapid development of this area. This has led to many initiatives to teach more digital humanities methods to graduates – but is this actually useful? The aim must be to get better, not necessarily bigger. Just getting bigger would mean to fail.

There is a substantial push towards the digital – more and more of our culture (including existing works) is being transferred to digital formats. Scholars will need to be able to deal with this – but this requires a number of scholars well beyond the humanities itself. We’re not ready for this – and in fact, we’re moving in the wrong direction.

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at DHA 2012 is Ned Rossiter, who shifts our focus to the question of labour. He highlights what he calls the new zeal in visualising humanities research, but suggests that there isn’t enough drive towards new research methods, or towards the recognition of labour issues in the industries which digital humanities research investigates.

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Zoë Sofoulis, whose focus is on cross-connections between urban water management and humanities research. Humanities perspectives are often overlooked in national infrastructure planning and development, which means that social concerns are often ignored in such processes; the same is true also for national research strategies, even though humanities research is often vastly less expensive than research in conventional science and technology sectors. Over 50% of researchers are in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) field, but 95% of the research funding goes to the science, technology, engineering and manufacturing (STEM) sector.