The NeDiMAH Conference ‘Beyond the Digital Humanities’ was held at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, on Tuesday 5th May 2015. NeDiMAH is the final project of the European Science Foundation, backed by research funders in a large number of European countries. This four-year long project has explored the digital methods of practitioners in the arts and humanities, and the outputs of the project include the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO), to be sustained by DARIAH, and the Methodology Map of DH in Europe.
In a collaboration in 2014, CLARIN and NeDiMAH worked together to produce a workshop in the Hague, also with colleagues from the University of Passau and Huygens ING, on the topic of ‘Exploring Historical Sources with Language Technology: results and perspectives‘, and we are currently exploring the possibilities of how NeMO can be used to categorize CLARIN's tools, together with DARIAH and DiRT.
The day's proceedings raised a number of interesting issues relating to possible tensions between the constantly creative, innovative and changing nature of digital methods, and the ambition to create large-scale infrastructures to support them. If the methods are constantly subject to critique, modification and change, then is it possible to provide stable tools and datasets which are adequate for digital scholarship?
The opening keynote of the day was from Lucy Kimbell (University of Brighton) on Open Policy Making in a Digital World: Opportunities and Possibilities for Academic Research, who took on the difficult task of trying to get the audience excited about the her work embedded in them UK government bureacuracy. She introduced initiatives like open policy making, the government digital service, open data institute, GovJam, and Policy Lab UK. She made it clear that data science and social science research were informing the bureaucracy, but struggled to articulate the role of the arts and humanities, except to suggest that we could follow the example of the ‘cultural intervention’ in the general election campaign that was Ed Miliband’s desperate interview with Russell Brand (aka #Milibrand).
Brett Bobley from the National Endowment for the Humanities (a US federal funder of research in the humanities) looked back to the ‘Our Cultural Commonwealth’, published almost ten years ago, to see what has changed and what is still relevant. He drew attention to the fact that notion of the ‘digital humanist’ was not foreseen by the report and which still strikes many as weird. Brett also introduced Trans-Atlantic Platform, which is building on the success of the Digging into Data challenge to develop more international funding schemes, and now involving 11 countries.
From the audience, Peter Fletcher from the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK suggested that a lot of discussion was about sharing data and tools, and that it needs infrastructure for this sharing to be done effectively, and for the resources to be sustainable. Various academic communities have come together and agreed priorities for building central repositories and experimental facilities. Milena Zic-Fuchs, a linguist from the University of Zagreb, supported the call for infrastructure to support digital research, and urged the audience to support initiatives such as CLARIN and DARIAH, but also to look towards not just pan-European but global collaborations.
A final panel on ‘Genres of scholarly knowledge and production’ featured Lorna Hughes, whose straightforward presentation of an exemplary research project (The Snows of Yesteryear: anarrating extreme weather) reinforced my view that what we really need are compelling case studies which demonstrate the possibilities of digital transformations and show real-life success stories (warts and all), and which can stand on their own research projects in the humanities, not just interesting because of the digital component. Andrew Prescott offered a clear and useful explanation of the polar positions of (i) empirical, data-driven research and (ii) critiquing, questioning and problematizing the assumptions inherent in data and tools, such as canonicity, and post-colonial and environmental critiques. Barry Smith gave an entertaining presentation of work on smells from the Centre for the Study of the Senses, which engaged the public, neuroscientists and restaurant chefs with a philosopher in a humanities research project. Patrik Svensson made an appeal to the builders of infrastructure to cater not just for data and tools, but for the research processes and methods which humanists employ. Rounding off the day, Milena Zic-Fuchs outlined some of the background to NeDiMAH and the concurrent emergence of research infrastructures in the social sciences and humanities. Short essays from these and most of the other speakers are available in the conference booklet at http://nedimah.eu/sites/default/files/nedimah-booklet-final-copy-v11-for-web.pdf. The booklet is an excellent idea for ensuring that the conference proceeding are documented and available for a wider public, and it is an idea which could usefully be used much more widely.
The discussion on the day may have left some with the impression that we are faced with a choice between scientific infrastructure and authentic humanistic research. Or, to put it another way, between, on the one hand, the utopian folly of building Procrustean infrastructure, anti-theoretical, and populated with non-contextualized data, and, on the other hand, the development of a critical digital humanities with the goal of exposing the folly, puncturing the hubris, limiting environmental impact, and checking the privilege of the digital humanities. While this is rather a crude statement of the extreme positions, it should be a useful reminder to those of us who are building infrastructure to make sure that the services that we provide are constantly informed by the real digital practices and concerned of the researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
A longer version of this post appeared at http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/martinw/2015/05/05/beyond-the-digital-humanities/.