DHA 2012

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.

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 clouds of points – of the individuals surveyed, and of the lifestyle modalities investigated. In both cases, items are located closer to one another in the cloud if they are more closely related.

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 from council) and the civic consultation facility Casey Conversations (a PhD project which offers discussion boards on key advocacy issues, without direct council involvement in the discussions).

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.

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. This early attempt at social networking successfully managed to spread awareness about the campaign and its cause; the site became a method for interactive social education.

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 the digital humanities, and is shaping new perspectives on academic literacies.