A digital humanities workshop in four keys: medicine, law, bibliography and crime – Liveblog

This afternoon I am attending “A digital humanties workshop in four keys: medicine, law, bibliography and crime“, a University of Edinburgh Digital Humanities and Social Sciences event. I will be liveblogging throughout the event and you can keep an eye on related tweets on the #digitalhss tag. The event sees four post doctoral researchers discussing their digital humanities work.

As usual this is a liveblog so my notes may include the odd error or typo – please let me have your thoughts or corrections in the comments below!

Alison Crockford – Digital articulations: writing medicine in Edinburgh

In addition to the four keys we identified we also thoughts about the four ways you can engage with the humanities field more widely. And in addition to medicine I will be talking about motions of public engagement.

Digital articulations plays on the idea of the crossover of humanities and medicine. So both the state of being flexibly joined together and of expressing the self. The idea came from the Issecting Edinburgh exhibition at Surgeons Hall. Edinburgh has a very unique history of medicine when compared to other areas of the UK. But scholars don’t give much consideration to the regional history and how medicine in an area may be reflected in literature. So you get British texts or anthologies with may be one or two Scottish writers bundled in. Edinburgh is one of the most prominent city in the history of medicine. My own research is concerned with the late 19th century but this trend really goes back at least as far as the fifteenth century. As an early career researcher I can’t access the multimillion pound grants from the ESRC you might need… So digital humanities became a kind of natural platform. I wanted to build a better more trans historical perspective on literature and medicine, would need input from specialists across those areas, I would also need ways to visualise this research in a way that would make sense to researchers and other audiences. I was considering building an anthology and spoke to a colleague creating a digital anthology. I chose to do it this way with a tool called omecca, in part because of its accessibility to other audiences. Public engagement is seen as increasingly favourable, particularly for early career researchers I’m interested in tools to foster research but also to do so in digital spaces that are public, and what that means.

I don’t have a background in digital humanities and there doesn’t seem to be a single clear definition. But I’m going to talk about some of the possibilities, what drives a project, how does that influence the result, etc. I will take my cues from Matthew Kirshenball’s 2002 essay on digital humanities and English literature. He sees it as concerned with scholarship and pedagoguey being more public, more collaborative, and more connected to infrastructure.

I was reassured to know I am not alone in looking at this issue and to have questions, there was a blog post on HASTAC – the humanities, arts, science and technology alliance and cOllaboratory. This was looking at the intersection between the digital humanities and public engagement, despite that organisation being already active in that space. I get the sense that this topic comes up as being there, but perhaps only recently ave there been deliberate reflections on the implications for that.

The digital humanities manifesto 2.0 which talks about increasingly public spheres. There’s a kind of deprivation in kirshenberg’s take on digital humanities and public engagement. I’m not sure public engagement deserves such derisive treatment, even though I am concerned about how public engagement and similar values judgement is increasingly chipping away at the humanities. But there is more potential there…

Many digital humanities tools are web based apps, they are potentially public spaces, and there are implications on our perspectives on any digital humanities, or indeed any humanities work. For instance the Oxford digital humanities conference last year, lookin at impact, nonetheless talked about public engagement as something more than just dissemination, but also something richer. Thinking about the participation of your audience, their needs and interests, not just your own.

Bowarst states that humanities scholars may risk letting existing technologies dictate their work, rather than being the inventors and designers of their tool. Whilst we may be more likely o be adopters I do not think that it is always the case nor neccassarily a problem. Working as Wikipedian in Residence at NLS I have been impressed with the number of GLAM collaborations embracing a range of existing kit: flickr, WordPress, Omeka, Drupal.

Omeka is designed for non technical users, it is based around templates and editable content. It is about presentation of materials. They are designed for researchers, those already interested… Who will SE it as a tool fr their research but not for wider audiences (e.g. Digitising historical serialised fiction and depictions of disability in nineteenth century literature). But these can look samey as websites, there are limitations without design support. However looki b at Lincoln 200 or Indeed George Arthus Plimpton rare book and manuscript page vs treasures of the New York Public Library website which is more visual and appealing. So I am interested in having the appeal of a public orientated website with the quality of a scholarly tool.

So looking At Gothic Past we see something that is both visual and of quality. You can save materials. The ways these plugins, opportunities for discourse etc. in Omeka etc. one up public engagement in richer ways…

Returning to medical humanities.. I think it has inherent links to public engagement, it helps enhance understand perceptions of health and illness. It’s impact can be so universal. Viewing medicine through the lens of literature enables a massively diverse audience who have their own interest, experience and perspectives to share. Giving a local focus also connects to the large community interested in local history. And designing the resource for that diverse audience with these many perspectives will help shape the tool. Restricting a resource to researchers

Q&A

Q) really interesting oaicularly the problems of digital humanities and research… Could yo say more about Omeka and how you plan to use it?
A) I have a wish list for what I want to make from Omeka. I would like logins, the ability to save material, and to have user added content and keywords to drive the site, so that there is input from other audiences, not just researchers but also public audiences. For instance exhibitions around digital patienthood. I hoe to be a good customer. If you don’t have the technological skills, you still have to put in the time to understand the software, to create good briefs, two months in I’m still working with the web team to create a good resource. I want to be a good customer so that I get what I want without making the teams life hell!

Q) what do you think being a good client means for our students. Bergson mentions that the more we rely on existing technologies, the harder it becomes. Think outside the box.
A) I think some f those coming up behind me have a better nderstanding of things digital… But those are the corporately driven websites, but they don’t neccassarily look. Eying that. Maybe you need something akin to research methods, looking at open source materials and resources. But realistically that may not be possible.

Q) I wanted to ask abut the way the digital humanities is perceived as a thing. In your public engagement work is that phrase used?
A) I think largely people think that these are the humanities and these are digital tools. There are parallel conversations in humanities and in the cultural contexts… The ideas of the digital library just being the library. So this doesn’t seem to be specific to academia, it is a struggle fr others to work out how to incorporate the digital into your experience.
Q) we are alread post digital?
A) kind of… The ideas of a digital resource from a library being a different tool doesn’t really seem to be what you actively consider, you see a cool tool.

Q) do you think the schism between research and public engagement exists in the cultural sector?
A) they have a better potential chance to do that. They must provide materials for research and also public engagement and public audiences. We think about research and sharing further but these organisations think inherently about their audiences, but the resources are great for research, for instance the historical post office directory research. The sector is a good place to look to to see what we might do.

Chen Wei Zhu – Rethinking property: copyright law and digital humanities research

Chen Wei did his research on open source but spen much of that time at the British Library.

I will be doing a whistle stop tour of copyright law, mainly drawing on the non digital. Just to set the scene… When did the digital humanities staRt? 1946 is a convenient start date, an Italian Jesuit priest tried to index the massive work of Thimas Equinus, they were digitised, put onto CDROM and now online. But at that time the term wasn’t digital humanities but “humanities computing”. I tried Googles n-gram viewer and based on that corpus you see that “humanities computing” comes in in the 1970s but “digital humanities” emerges in the 1990s. Humanities computing is still hugely used but will be interesting to see when “digital humanities” becomes dominant or bigger. A health warning here… Best between 1820s and 1922. 1922 in the US marks the beginning of copyright, but in Europe materials published before then were already in copyright. And another Heath warning… oigkes scanning kit isn’t perfect before 1820s because of print inconsistencies and changes. E.g. “f” instead of “s”. It fell out of use after times newspaper dropped the long f/s in 1893. So much data to clear up.

So what are the digital humanists opinion and understanding of copyright. I feel that digital humanities scholars are quite frustrated. E.g. burdock et al 2012 sees it this way. Cohen and Rosenzweig 2005 see it as an issue of Things never being fixed? [check this reference]

The US copyright office is shutdown… The US federal government closure included the copyright office being shut down. It is still saying it is shut… There will be a huge backlog for registering copyright.

So how did copyright law begin? What is the connection between the loch ness monster and copyright? The story goes that st columba is not only the first sighted of Nessie, and the first person engaged in copyright dispute. There is a mythical connection too…

The first copyright dispute is sometimes called the patron saint of copyright, huge misunderstanding, he is more the first pirate, copying a manuscript without the permission of his tutor. When he was caught secretly copying the book of psalms st finnian was very angry, he wanted to restrict the copy. The idea “to every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy”. So this was the first copyright case. Columba had the decision go against him, and he rose up against the king s he led something of a bloodbath.

Now in this case there was no clear author of either finnian or columba. Ad no publishing planned r taking place. SL skip forward to 12th century china we see Cheng Sheren, the first publisher to register their copyright. We see a picture like Pre 18th century England, where the publisher has copyright. In china as in 16th and 17th century England is all about censorship not copyright in any other sense.

The Statute of Anne 1710 is the first copyright act, which brings in the rights of authors and does not include censorship clauses. The first modern copyright law. But author based copyright didn’t really take off until the early nineteenth century, think this was another ethos. Only as authors are seen as romantic genius in the romantic age does this model takes off. Publishers recede to the background to manage economic aspects and authors move to the forefront.

Enter stage left the authors guild. So Authors Guild vs HathiTrust (2012). The Authors Guild has around 8000 members at present. The authors ar encouraging decision that the distinct judge recognised a fair use defence for HathiTrust Trust to digitise copies of texts. The judge argued two types of transformations: full text search, and accessibility of text. That is very very important as an aspect of the ruling. And the judge was convinced of fair use defence. Some humanities scholars submitted, matthew jocker did an analysis of the use of digitised text.

Where we are… We started from the year 1550 and ended in 2012. The meaning of copy has changed. Is digitisation the same as copying by hand? And for digital humanist and copyright lawyer we have to reimagine the role of copyright and the role of the author in copyright. Could see authors as intellectual property owners. We didnt see intellectual property as a term emerge until 1960s when we saw an influential book and the IPO set up, but that idea does change our thoughts of copyright to some extent. But we also see open source, coined in 1988.. There are parallel growth there… We are more a steward and custodian rather tha exclusive intellectual property owner.

Q&A

Q) just to be a pedant here… Your discussion of the romantic author… I think you got it reversed… The law precedes the author by a distance. In the 18th century original works, poems, epic poems like the work of alexander pope etc. for the sake of erectile, their rank of gentlemen, and royal sponsors made books of vellum, extremely expensive.. The way the publishers got around the need to publish these expensive texts was to republish out of copyright works, recycled materials (including shakespeare), etc. cheap material on recycled rag paper. When new works appear, when paper costs drop, then you see new types of writing replacing old writing and publishers have little say… And in the early nineteenth century you see authors assert power. Profit and capitalisation of ideas in republishing of works is so crucial to current Authors Guild debate is important.

A) I’m glad you mentioedn Alexander pope, he is quoted in 1771 case. Almost all cases in 1710s onwards are between publishers but pope actually sued his publisher in that time. That is a gradual change… Going o the nineteenth century.

Q) us versus uk
A) divergence of law… In 1922… Us copyright act was a 56 year act. In 1978 that was in place… Anything Pre 1922 Out of copyright. UK it is 70 years after authors death. Canada 50 years, sheet music sites in Canada. Stuff out of copyright in Canada but not in the uk. But you can access in the uk. Definitely territorial but internet access is not.

Q) interesting you raised music, a whole other complicated history there.
A) absolutely, very complex. For instance Stravinskys work was very difficult for him to copyright because of Russia’s take on property.

Q) the ease of violating copyright law… Working fr Wikipedia and Wikipedia UK… It can be twisted around. The NLS we frequently have conversations about releasing digitised materials. In the uk unlike the us new digitised material has new rights attached. But we have just been putting content out there.
Comment) the British library lets you use copies of less that 3000 copies but if you have an ebook contract you have to pay huge sums for an image.
Q) it costs more to enforce copyright and fees. The NLS have a non commercial clause for digitised materials, usually we won’t charge if the come and ask us. But cost of enforcement can be higher than perusing. Is this unique to digital?

Gregory Adam Scott – The digital bibliography of Chinese Buddhism as a research and reference tool

Gregory is a digital humanities post doctoral fellow at IASH, his doctorate looked at printing and publishing in early Buddhist cultures. His talk has a new title “building and rebuilding a digital catalogue for modern Chinese buddhism”.

I chose this title inspired bynjorge Louis borges’ “the library of babel” containing the sum of all possible knowledges, versions with all typographic mistakes, the catalogue itself… I evoke this to represent the challenge we face today in looking at mountains of data, whilst the text may be less random we still risk becoming lost in our own library of babel.

My own work looks at a more narrow range of data. I began studying the digital catalogue of Chinese Buddhism cataloging texts from 1866 and 1950. But first a whistle stop tour of printing and religious printing in china. A woodblock print edition if the diamond Astra from 886 CE remains the earliest printed text that records the year of printing. In ore modern east Asian print history religious texts we some of the most frequently printed texts. The printing blocks of the Korean buddy canon was an enormous undertaking in terms of time, cost and political support. Often the costs were supported by ideas that contributing to publishing religious works would be something of a merit economy, bringing good things to you and to your family, which can then be gifted to others – s these texts often include a credit to donors in which they dedicated the texts to loved ones.

Yang Wenhui (1837-1911) and his students published hundreds of texts, thousands of copies and was a hugely influential lay Buddhist publisher. As we see the introduction of movable type and western printing processes this was hugely important, more work was printed in a thirty seven year window than in the previous two thousand years. This is great interma of accessing primary sources but problematic for understanding printing cultures. We see publishers opening up. The history of modern china is pepped with conflict and political and cultural change. And religious studies were often overlooked in the move towards secularisation, this is now slowly changing. And libraries were often free from key religious texts and it can be particularly hard to track the history of print in this time because of variance of names, of contributors, of texts, and of cataloging.

So I wanted to go back to original sources to understand what has been published. S I started with five key sources who had created bibliographies based on accessing original materials rather than relying on primary sources. There were still errors and inconsistencies. I merged these together where appropriate. I wanted to maintain citations so that original published sources could be accessed, that the work could be understood properly.

I did this by transcribing the data. I used a simple bare bones methods with XML. Separating the data and the display of the data. If someone wants to transform the data this format will allow them to do that. This is used simply, tags and descriptions are as human readable as possible. I want future researchers to be able to understand this. I also used Python for some automated tasks for indexing some of these texts.

Looking at the web interface that I put online, it uses Php, the same stack as Omeka. The database runs on SQL. There is a search interface where you can enter Chinese keywords and eventually you will be able to search by year or pairs of years. It returns an index number, title, involved author etc. simple but helpful information. It includes 2328 entries whe the spike at the golden age of china in 1902 is very evident. And then each item has its own static HTML page. That is easy to cite and includes all information I know about this text. S far I think this resource has been useful to produce data t pint the way towards future work… Less the end f research, more the beginning. This work has let me see previously undiscovered texts, you can also look across trends, across connections, the relationships to the larger historical picture. It could also be applied to other disciplines regions.

All of my input to this project is provided under creative commons (non commercial). Bibliographic data isn’t copyright able as it is lucid knowledge but the collection of that could be seen to be original work so I’ve said it is my work that I am happy for others to use.

The reason there is such a spike in 1902, where a date is not known it is assigned to that date free which all texts will have a date.

This catalogue is different from book suppliers data as the purpose is so different, my research use is not for purchase in the same way. I want to add features and finesse this somewhat but my dream is if doing what I’d call “Biblio-Biographies” to see the appearance of text over time, seeing nowhere it appears in publishers catalogues… and how the pricing and presentation changes. For instance looking at the Diamond Sutra we see different numbers of editors, one offers a special price for 1000 copies. I used bibliographic sources but there are so many more forms and formats that I will need to consider, each source will be treated differently. Adverts may appear for publications that were never produced. Have moved from bibliography, to catalogue to something else.

Q&A

Q) why not use existing catalogue tools
A) didn’t have anything with the right sort if fields, very different roles of authors, editors, etc. not in a standard format, consider MARC but it wailed be relatively easy to transform the XML to MARC.

Q) are you thinking about that next stage, about having ways for more people to contribute.
A) I have been involved in the wiki based dictionary of Chinese buddhism, we opened it up to colleagues and nothing happened. But only us, the co-editors contributed. Big issue is about getting credit for your work which may be the issue for contribution.
Comment) have a look at the website Branch on nineteenth century literature, have asked for short articles and campaigned for MLA bibliographies inclusion and that helps with prestige. Just need big names to write one thing…

Q) could you say something more about other sources
A) there are periodicals, a huge number of the,. A lot of these focus in on ocular printings of texts, some include advertisements, etc. so these texts point off to other nodes and records.

Q) you talked about deliberately designing your catalogue for onwards for transformation, and whether you’ve thought about how you will move forward with the structure for the data…
A) I’m not sure yet but I will stick to the principle that simple is good and reusable, and transform ale are good.
Comment) you might want to look at records of music and musical performance.
A) I’ll keep that in mind, Readings of these texts are often referred to as performances so that may be a useful parallel.

Louise Settle – Digitally mapping Crime in Edinburgh, 1900-1939

Louise is a digital humanities post doctoral fellow at IASH and her work builds upon her PhD research on gender and crime in the nineteenth century.

I want to talk about digital technologies and visualisation of data, particularly visualisation of spatial data. I will draw upon my own research data on prostitution. And considering the potential fr data analysis.

My thesis looked at prostitution in Scotland from 1892 and 1939. The first half looked at the work of reformers, and the second half looks at how that impacted on the life of women at this time. S why do crime statistics matter? Well it sets prostitution in context, recording changes and changing attitudes. My data comes from the borough court records, where arrests took place, where police looked for arrests, and the locations of brothels at this time. Obviously I’m only looking a offences, so the women who were caught, and that’s important in terms of understanding the data. Because these were paper records, not digitised, I looked at four years only coinciding with census years, or the years with full data nearest census years.

I used Edinburgh Map Builder, developed as part of the Visualising Urban Geographies project led by Professor Richard Roger who helped me use this tool, although it is a very simple tool to use. This allows you to use NLS historical maps, Google Maps and your own data. There are a range of maps available so you pick the right map, you can zoom in and out, find the appropriate area to focus on. To map the addresses, you input your data either manually or you can upload a spreadsheet and then you press “start geocoding” to have your records appear on the map. You can change pin colours etc. and calculate the difference between different points. Do have a look and play around with it yourself.

The visual aspect is a very simple and clear way to explore your subject, and the visual element is particularly good for non specialist audiences, but it also helps you spot trends and patterns you may not have noticed before. So looking at maps of my data from 1903, 1911, 1921 and 1931. The maps visualise the location of offences, for example it was clear from the maps that the location changed over time, particularly the move from the old town to the new town. In 1903 offences are spread across the city. In 1911 many more offences particularly around the mound. In 1921 move to new town further evident. By 1931 the new town shift is more evident, some on Calton hill too.

The visual patterns tell us a lot, in the context of the research, about the social geography of edinburgh. Often old town is seen as working class area and new town as a middle class area. Prostitution appears to move towards to centre but that is also the grin statistician, the shopping areas, the tourist areas. This tells us there is more work there. They keep being arrested there but that does not deter them. Small fines and prison spells did not deter. Entertainment locations were more important than policing policies. You can see that a project that is not neccassarily about geography has benefitted from that spatial analysis aspect.

If you have spatial information in your own research then do have a look at Edinburgh Map Builder. But if you have data for elsewhere in the UK you can use Digimap which includes both contemporary and historical maps. There are workshops at Edinburgh University, and the website on the bottom there. That’s UK-wide. And a new thing I’ve been playing with is HistoryPin – this uses historical photography. You can set up profiles, pictures, paints, etc. you can plot these according to location. You can plot particular events, from your computer or smartphone. Yo can look at historical images and data. So I have been plotting prostitution related locations such as the Kosmo Club, the coffee stalls on The Mound. You can add your data and plot them on the map. Very easy to use site and this idea of public engagement, this is a great tool for doing this.

Q&A

Q) I was quite interested in those visual tools and the linking of events tying them to geographical places. And there are other ways to visualise social network maps, I wonder how it would be to map those in your work, there must be social connections ther. Social network analysis can look very similar… I wanted to know if you have considered that or come across that sort of linkage.
A) I haven’t but that sounds really exciting.

Q) I wanted to ask you about the distribution and policing. If one were to return to the maps. Some marked differences in the number of offences – arrests? – how much detail did you take out of it? You said they were going back and were not deterred. In 1911 markedly different numbers. But even at the times when there was actually more policing towards the old town, the police were just sticking to the main routes. So was the old town a lawless zone at that time? Police not wanting to venture into dark alleys. And how long does Edinburgh’s tolerance zone persist. And it’s curious o see that without Leith too! As now the city operates a more direct reflection but perhaps before the amalgamation of the authorities perhaps there wasn’t such a direct deflection affect?
A) in terms of Keith it was occurring there. The argument is coming from the suggestion that it was informally tolerated in the old town… I don’t disagree that it happened in the old town but my arguement is that it is also happening in the new town and measures there don’t stop it when they should. And my research also sees the police not always caring and judges and juries moving for reform rather than harsher sentences. Cafes and ice cream parlours were a cause of concern in Glasgow in 1911 which may impact the figures then. The 1903 records are not correct, it may be an outlier as the general trend is of decreasing offences over time…

Q) about the visualisation tool, you have tremendous amount of interest in those maps, are this emails important for research design, for research questions. Or would you wish for a tool with more possibility for contextualisation. Fr instance statistics from authorities etc, to interpret your findings. What possibilities for researchers to have these tools yield more stuff?
A) the maps are interesting, they are more appealing. But these need to be used with tables, charts, statistics. If just presenting on the work I would have included those other factors. So in 1903 you lose some density when all dots are in the same place. But an interactive tool to do that would be great.

Comment) what is so attractive of visualisation is speed and efficiency but that also means there is a risk in concluding too quickly, of not necessarily reflecting reality of prostitution – the reader may read your map of offences in that way, that will be easy to do but the methodology can be dull to people and that can mean misunderstandings.
A) absolutely. This needs to be in context.

Q) could you have layers comparing income against offences etc. if you’d found any projects that were developing more complex…
A) the big project is the Edinburgh Atlas, there is a mini conference on hidden histories and geographies of edinburgh on mapping crime, it’s on the IASH mailing list, there are others doing that.

Q) you talked about women seduced by foreigners in edinburgh?
A) in edinburgh there was concern about Italians at ice cream parlours, brazilians were the concern in Glasgow. And in edinburgh there was also a German Jewish pimp of concern as well.

Discussion more widely…

Comment) I’m primarily a learnin technologist and I send my life trying to get people to start from the activity they want to undertake, and not starting with the tools. I found it refreshing tat you all started with your data and looking for tools with the right affordances. How did you find you were helped with that search for a tool.
Louise) it was human contacts. I saw a lecture from professor Richard roger.
Ally) it was similar for me, I found a software through a contact but found it hard to find what else was out there. It basically came down to Omeka or Drupal that the web team knew about. but it would have been great to know what was out there, what the differences are, what resources there are. Even looking through DHNow and DH Quarterly there isn’t a sense of easily identifying the options for the tools. That can be a bit of an issue.
Greg) I used the tools colleagues were using to build my own…
Comment) HCI has the notion of affordances, what it easily enables you to do and what else it could enable yo to do. Is there something there about describing affordances for the humanities. My sense is that often they are pitched towards the sciences, sometimes terminology varies event, so understanding affordances varies.
Ally) sometimes developing your own tools is good, but even a little knowledge and terminology let’s me get better results from these tools, if. Come to these tools end these colleagues with no knowledge then I will not have a successful outcome. I want to really explore Omeka so that I feel confident and able with it.

Question) have the tools changed your research questions or ways of working?
Louise) not me
Ally) for me the have. I was introduced to the 19th century disability reader digital anthology and knowing what was capable with the tools changed what I wanted to d with my project. It did to some degree. By the basic aim was I want to know more about late nineteenth century medical history hasn’t changed. But the project has
Wei Chen) I find the legal documents, creative commons licenses etc. most useful, I was able to be involved in the first version of the Chinese Creative Commons license.
Greg) it hasn’t changed my questions but the scale of work possible and how I might explore it has changed for me.

Question) what advice would yo give for people thinking about digital tools for research
Greg) don’t be afraid to just try things out, work out what’s possible…
Louise) do ask for help, do take advantage of courses…

Question) I was struck with the issue of time when you gave your presentations. Have you reflected on the process of the use of time. How to use jt creatively and consain it. And how that use of time perhaps changed your view of get, of hard copy materials.
Ally) with digital projects you can find you go with the additional time used. Yo should not underestimate the time neccassary. But at the same time I would spend hours and hours leafing through texts to answer a research question. I want t use this tool to reduce the time to find the data I need, to access it, to interpret it. But this project is about developing this oll to benefit myself and others later. You need to be realistic, step back, and be realistic about what is possible.
Louise) that’s part of the issue of digital humanities. My work will be in a traditional book format but the Historypin work, very engaging, but not counting towards career, towards a job. That’s a challenge fr digital humanities and for early career researchers, it’s why our scholarships are so good.
Wei Chen) and there is the distant versus close reading difference. Close reading still has a role but that distant reading allows us to interrogate that reading, to find that resource, etc.
Greg) nothing we are doing are unrecognisable research but we are able to perhaps examine more material, or to do things more quickly. We are not doing everything differently but using new tools in our work.

Question) do you think this investment in tools is changing humanities as a result f this temporal and labour investment in tools. Ally you talked about putting off other work…
Ally) well I am song research, You always have to manage many projects at once. And ther will be an impact. But. Chose the digital path because time and financial limitations changed what was possible. It could have been done another very expensive way. So I’m not putting off research, I would probably be spending years collating information… Instead I am setting something up to facilitate my own research in the future. The relationship between distant and close reading. That divide isn’t as fiery as it appears.
Comment) the superficial view of the digital is happening in teaching. Universities jump on the digitisation bandwagon in a way that changes how humanists are employed, how software are copyrighted and licensed. All these tools help universities save money. One can overreact… Ealignments f labour and resources makes not so positive inroads…
Ally) it’s a huge problem, I have huge concerns about the University’s MOOC programme. There was discussion of open access individuals to talk about what these means…
Louise) not sure but I know colleagues are concerned.
Wei Chen) open access is about economic growth, not hardcore humanist values. Humanist values should be at the core for digital humanists, there will be an increasingly curatorial role fr all formats of material
Comment) abit critical engagements

Question) one of my concerns about this sort of work, and the work in geography in ways of making and curating an archive. I was wondering about the length of time an archive is available after a project. There was a BBC project to save our sound and it finished and the map is no longer accessible… So who looks after and preserves data.
Greg) I think it’s hard to “lose” data, it’s abit implementation not methods.
Ally) I think it’s about how digital humanities adopt tools, about reflecting on project aftermath. When looking into project funding you don’t want that tool lost. It’s not an issue f methodology or individuals but it has implications for future archiving.
Comment) which is why Greg’s work in XML matters
Me) and the use of research data management plans and research data repositories to help ensure planning and curating of data at the outset, and to ensure lon terms access and sustainability.

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