UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Last night we were discussing Alan Liu’s 2003 paper entitled The Humanities: A Technical Profession. Lui raises questions about the concept of Knowledge, of protocols, organisation and information behaviour and the institutional nature of the humanities.  Liu discusses in his paper,  the idea that humanities scholars are now “knowledge workers” and that a distinguishing feature of “knowledge work” is that it is governed by a set of common norms and values in institutional, disciplinary, communicational, and technical protocols.  This raised questions from the group because it was felt that formal norms and values systems are often difficult to apply to humanities research.  This led on to a discussion about what constitutes ‘excellence’ in digital humanities work, as often it is not as quantifiable as ‘pure’ science or computer science.

The discussion raised some very interesting questions with the group and then sparked some lively discussions on twitter.

Here are some of the questions we raised:

• Is there a distinction between research and scholarship?
• Is technology infrastructure like communism? Good idea but actually really prescriptive on the community?
• Digitised humanities vs born digital humanities. who would win? Is there a difference?
• Difference between applying techniques and DH scholarship. What is actually different?
• Is IT now defunct? Would we ever use it as a term now? What for?
• Why do we separate practioners and academics?
• Is humanities actually a science?
• Why do we have so many names and awkward phrases for DH are they different? Is e-humanities the same as DH?
• Evolved semantics? Does it not mean the same thing as it always did?
• Should Programming be mandatory for humanities students?
• Ideas of commodity causing problems in DH?
• Is Language as a tool taken for granted?
• How do we identify excellence in digital humanities scolarship?

A selection of the tweets:

In response to: is technology infrastructure like communism?

sdbeck: Technology infrastructure is only prescriptive when its governed by IT staff, not by end users. User governance works.

clairey_ross: does user governance always work? Wikipedia for example I find quite prescriptive

sdbeck: Wel, Wikipedia might be seen as user-governance run amok. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

sdbeck: On the other hand, if the cyberinfrastructure is only run by technical folks, you only get the tools they understand.

clairey_ross: Is there a non amok example of ‘good’ user governance?

sdbeck: I’m thinking more along the lines of core infrastructures (wikis) not specific applications (wikipedia).

sdbeck: wikipedia is proscriptive because it wants to force consistency and standardization. but Dublin Core gives authors ability to develop their own tools, with guides for interoperability.

imagine if all wikis could readily share data without centralization.

Ajprescott: it is striking how in v capitalist countries (USA, japan) the electrical and other infrastructure is v ramshackle.

In response to: should programming be mandatory for humanities students?

PatParslow: A knowledge of programming or software design should probably be mandatory. Don’t need to be software engineers tho, surely?

benbull: “Programming should be mandatory for humanities students? #ddh” -I disagree. because IMHO programming is a discipline which takes years to learn to do well, and that’s if you’re is CS grad. it’s the principles which take the years to perfect, languages come and go. I do see your point, but I just don’t agree.

SdFunkyChick : no, it shouldn’t. I see programming as a particular set of skills & interpretation of humanities subject fields that not everyone can easily get. I see the programming in humanities as a speciality in the field which compliments research by providing tools but … Whether this should be taught to students as compulsory part of their studies, I’m not convinced

In response to: Is IT now defunct? Would we ever use it as a term now? What for?

PatParslow: Technology related to information. I would use it to describe such things, but not what I do, I don’t *do* nouns, per se

re ‘doing’ IT; do you *do* DH? Or do you do things in the conceptual domain of DH?

SimonTanner: sometimes the problem is that we feel IT or DH is “done” to us rather than us doing it ;o)

PatParslow: Does DH take similar grammatical role to “washing up” or “aerobics” there? So it is an activity (a nounal verb??)

SimonTanner: I make my living from IT & DH! But _sometimes_ it’s done cos it’s bright & shiny not cos it benefits R&D outcomes. thus always must focus in on the scholarly benefits & outcomes rather than the tech for tech sake.

PatParslow: you often cannot know what affordances the shiny gives until you play with it. Pedagogy first is rather strange

SimonTanner: research desires objectives – if is “let’s play with tech and see what happens” great, but still needs stating

pedagogy is teaching focussed not research. Research objectives are not in conflict w process of discovery

PatParslow: Pedagogical objectives better not be in conflict with process of discovery either!

SimonTanner: Tech is merely a tool & as such must serve our objectives not dominate them. My concern is dominate = bad research

PatParslow: Research methods, pedagogy – both also only tools (and, indeed technologies)

ernestopriego:…but ‘tech’ can be the object of study itself *and* the tool to study it…

PatParslow: I prefer not to elevate pedagogy (or Res methods) above other tools. Though I may be influenced by shiny

We raised a lot of questions, if anyone has any answers to them please do let us know.

Here we proudly present our new publicity material for the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities, designed by Melissa Terras and Rudolf  Ammann (Rudolf previously designed the UCLDH logo, and has been working with us to keep up our digital identity since).

We had to follow quite strict style guidelines from UCL Communications. They tend to use a London landmark to publicise courses. The idea of using an image of London Bridge was mooted- given that the degree will be bridging two disciplines -but we didnt want to use the stock photo given. How could we demonstrate cultural heritage, plus digital transformations, using a picture of London Bridge?

The answer is using a historic image. So an out-of-copyright Victorian postcard was purchased from eBay that had the right feel. Experiments with pixelation were mocked up, and Rudolf suggested this “look through the window” design, with one pixel skewed to add movement and suggest transformation. UCL Comms did a good job in complying with our demands on making it look good as well adhering to the style guide.
If anyone out there wants physical copies to stick up at their institution, get in touch…

There is in an interesting debate to be held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 21st October 2010. UCLDH is very interested in the future of the publishing and the influence of e-books and paywall, and is working on the INKE project, researching to advance our understanding of how reading texts and using information is affected by digital delivery.

The ICA debate poses some interesting questions: Are publishing and print media obsolete in the age of the Internet and the iPad? And if not, how should newspapers, books and magazines reinvent themselves to stay alive?

To find out more about the debate and to book a place please visit the ICA site.

Today I am giving a keynote lecture at Bangor University as part of their AHRC funded CEDAR (Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities) doctoral programme. Today is the final symposium and the whole programme seems to have been an interesting way to introduce graduate students to digital methods and allow them to present about their work.

I will be presenting on “Digital Transformations: Digital scholarship and the future of research in humanities disciplines”. I’m going to talk about the nature of DH research as team based collaborative work and how that changes the expectations of what constitutes scholarship in the humanities. Given that the audience consists of graduate students I’m going to look at the professional roles that they may play in future, including Alt-ac careers. Of course I’ll be talking about our experience at UCLDH and the importance of work with users, engaging with cultural heritage and the wider public.

Today sees the launch of the Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk, an online tool designed to harness the efforts of all Bentham fans – whether schoolchildren, history enthusiasts, academics or armchair philosophers – to bring his work into the digital age and the world at large.

The Transcription Desk allows participants to transcribe material from facsimile images of Bentham’s previously unpublished manuscripts. The resulting transcripts will be included in a freely-accessible database of Bentham’s Manuscripts at UCL, and will assist in the preparation of future printed volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham at the Bentham Project.

This is the first major crowdsourcing transcription project which we hope will provide interesting results on the nature of community engagement.

The project is administered by the Bentham Project and UCLDH and funded by the AHRC.

The Transcription Desk is now open to the public and we encourage everyone to have a go at transcribing Jeremy Bentham’s papers! All  contributions and all thoughts on anything relating to Bentham and the project in general are welcome. You are warmly encouraged to explore the site, create a profile and post comments on our discussion board. You can also track the progress of transcription by viewing the Benthamometer.

We hope you will get involved!

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The next Decoding Digital Humanities meetup will be held on:

Date: Tuesday, 21th September 2010
Time: 5.30pm – 7.30pm
Location: Jeremy Bentham pub, 31 University Street, London, WC1E 6JL (map)

This months topic has been suggested by Richard Lewis: The Humanities: A Technical Profession

The reading is: Lui, A. 2003. The Humanities: A Technical Profession

Hope to see you there!

If you cannot make this date but are interested in future meetings, you can join the the DDH e-list!