Blog

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

His example here is a study of the global logistics industry, with specific focus on transit labour in a number of cities in Asia, Australia, and Europe; logistics is key to forms of differential inclusion (for example through special administrative …

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.

(Hard) …

Canberra.
The next panel at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 is starting with Tony Bennett, whose interest is in visualising socio-cultural relations. Franco Moretti has set out the differences between ‘seeing like a state’ (top-down, from above) and ‘seeing like a novellist’ (from within the space itself, in a contextually situated fashion). There’s also a way of ‘seeing like a sociologist’, Tony suggests – a map which makes visible the underlying social universe.

Tony’s aim here is to compare major studies on cultural tastes in Britain and Australia, using multiple correspondence analysis: a form of geometric data analysis which generates two …

Canberra.
The final speaker in this DHA 2012 session is Julie Freeman, whose interest is also in online political participation; her focus is on the City of Casey local government authority in Victoria, comprising a population of 256,000 citizens served by 11 councillors. How are online tools and platforms used in local government in this case?

Casey has its own council Website, of course, as well as a Twitter and Facebook presence (which is mainly used to disseminate media releases), the civic networking site Casey Connect (a council-provided platform for local clubs and associations to present themselves, at arms’ length …

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Sora Park, whose interest is in the processes of online discussion participation, initially especially in the context of the 100 days of political protest in South Korea in 2008. Different online discussion platforms have different affordances, of course – some will list only the most recent or most popular (or most recently popular) posts, for example, thus directing users’ attention towards specific contributions.

Questions around online discussion address topics such as whether there is true debate or just an exchange of partisan statements; whether there is a disparity between readership and authorship; whether …

Canberra.
The first paper session at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference starts with a paper presented by Cynthia Witney, and deals with the differences between social networks and online communities. This is part of an ARC Linkage project which develops guidelines for an online community for breast cancer survivors, also sponsored by the Steel Blue boot company’s ‘purple boots’ philanthropic campaign.

Part of the aim here was also to move the campaign into a Web 2.0 space by developing a ‘purple boot brigade’ social network site; an early version of this network (based on Ning) attracted some 880 supporters …

Canberra.
It’s a rainy morning in Canberra, and I’ve made it to the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for the Digital Humanities. The opening keynote is by Alan Liu, who begins by noting the rise of the ‘digital humanities’ concept, and its attendant controversies (what do we mean by the term, in the first place?).

Alan’s specific interest is in literary studies, and in the debate between ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading. New critical close reading first forged the professional identity of the humanities, especially in literary studies, but distant reading has now emerged as a conscious agenda of …