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Beyond

the Digital

Humanities Final Network Event: May 5th 2015

Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities | NeDiMAH

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NeDiMAH was supported by the following European Science Foundation Member Organisations:

Bulgaria / Bulgarian Academy of  Science (BAS) Republic of Croatia / Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ)

Denmark / The Danish Council of Independent Research (FKK)

Finland / The Academy of Finland – Research Council for Culture and Society

France / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)Germany (2011-2014) / German Research Foundation (DFG)

Hungary / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) / Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA)

Ireland / Irish Research Council (IRC)

Luxembourg / Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)

Netherlands / Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)

Norway / Research Council of Norway (NCR)

Portugal / Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

Romania / National Research Council (CNCS)

Sweden / Swedish Research Council (VR)Switzerland / Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

United Kingdom / Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in theArts and Humanities) was a European Science Foundation Research Network Programme. It was launched in May 2011 and concluded in May 2015.

The Network carried out a series of activitiesand networking events on the practice of, and evidence for, digital research in the arts and humanities acrossEurope.

NeDiMAH activities and research produced three key outputs:• A map visualising the use of digital research across Europe • An ontology of digital research methods in the humanities

(NeMO: the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology)• A collaborative, interactive online forum for the European

community of practitioners active in this area.

All NeDiMAH activities were open to the Europeancommunity of scholars.

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Introduction and Welcome

On behalf of the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), I am delighted to welcome you to ‘Beyond the Digital Humanities’, our final Network event.

Since May 2011, NeDiMAH has run a programme of activities and built a collaborative research forum to investigate the use of digital methods in arts and humanities research.

The Network has organized 47 activities, exploring key areas of theory and practice in a number of methodological areas, including: the analysis of time and space, visualization, linked data, large scale data analysis, editing, manuscript imaging, temporal modeling, and scholarly communications. The reach of these activities has been documented visually in a series of maps of digital humanities activities across Europe. Through our activities, the Network has been able to get a sense of the diversity of practice of digital humanities around Europe, to understand the collaborative and trans-national nature of digital humanities, and to demonstrate the integration of digital approaches into all aspects of the research lifecycle. Our objective has been to understand better the impact that digital methods have had on transforming scholarship in the arts and humanities, and the potential for extending the benefits of digital research to the creative industries, the commercial sector, and public policy and planning.

Collaboration has been key: with scientific and technical disciplines; with data science; with libraries, archives and museums; with existing European research infrastructures including CLARIN (clarin.eu) and DARIAH (daraiah.eu), and with commercial entities. The very complexity of the digital environment means that individual researchers and small groups are less able to exploit it effectively, so collaborative models are emerging as the norm. As we look forward ‘beyond the digital humanities’, the evidence gathered by NeDiMAH is an excellent basis for understanding the impact of core elements of current digital research: the seamless integration of data, and a critical engagement with its management and preservation as part of the humanities research life-cycle; the ability to scale up (and down) while working with heterogeneous data from diverse sources; skills for the critical analysis and interpretation of data created locally, and by commercial entities; and the experience of embedding digital scholarship in cultural contents, and those that promote widest public engagement.

At a time when attempts to define the digital humanities can be contentious, NeDiMAH has provided a powerful example that the digital humanities is essentially understood through practice, and that a critical framework for digital research within the ‘big tent’ of digital humanities must be based on a reflection of the diverse and rich work carried out to date. This will be the basis for future knowledge production in the humanities that takes advantage of digital tools, methods and content. Our main output has been the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMo, nedimah.dcu.gr), a formal expression of the practice of digital humanities that explores this richness and complexity, and provides a valuable resource for critical and peer review of digital outputs. It also demonstrates directly the scholarly ecosystem that underlies digital research in the arts and humanities as a distinctive intellectual practice with considerable impact within and without the Academy.

Lorna M. Hughes

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Hosted by the School for Advanced Study, University of London, this is the final event of the ESF-funded Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH.eu) which has been chaired by the UK from 2011-15. The event will review the lessons that have emerged from the work of NeDiMAH and other current initiatives in the UK and elsewhere, but will also look forward to key emerging challenges and opportunities.

Some commentators argue that we are now in a ‘post-digital era’, in which we are coming to terms with the effects of the changes associated with the rise of the PC and network technologies in the 1990s. Within the arts and humanities, digital methods were initially developed and deployed by a relatively small community, but they are now becoming more mainstream and can no longer be treated as separate specialised activities. Moreover, research questions, primary materials and interfaces are now becoming increasingly intertwined, which among other things means a shift in emphasis from presentation to interpretative tools. As a result of these and other developments, while digital humanities has become increasingly popular and influential as an academic subject area, its relationship to more orthodox academic disciplines and creative practice looks increasingly complex and unclear.

This day will seek to build on the work undertaken by NeDiMAH and elsewhere to consider and identify future potential links and connections which will help develop the vision of a digitally transformed arts and humanities. It will consider the relationship between policy, research and practice in this area and examine its potential contribution to such current grand challenges as creative cities, cultural heritage, big data and the relationship to new forms of science.

Beyond the Digital Humanities

5 May 2015

Organised by: School of Advanced Study, University of London

Venue: Senate House, University of London Malet Street London

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9.30 Introductions and overview

9.45-10.45 Keynote: Lucy Kimbell, University of Brighton Open Policy Making in a Digital World: Opportunities and Possibilities for Academic Research

Lucy Kimball’s background and activities are a mixture of academic research and consulting in design innovation, especially in digital/services and policy, and post-graduate teaching. She aims to critically explore what design practices - sometimes called "design thinking" - bring to policy-making, social innovation and organisational challenges. She is particularly interested in making better connections between academic research and practice and in how design and participatory innovation enable this.

10.45-11.15 Coffee

11.15-12.30 Roundtable on creativity and cultural heritage Chair: Fotis Jannides, University of Würzburg Alessio Assonitis, The Medici Archive Project, Florence Helle Porsdam, University of Copenhagen Jon Pratty, Arts Council England Teal Triggs, Royal College of Art

12.30-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14.30 Keynote: Brett Bobley, National Endowment for the Humanities The Trans-Atlantic Platform and New International Collaborative Initiatives for Exploring Data

Chair: Susan Schreibman, Maynooth UniversityIn 2004, the American Council of Learned Societies appointed a commission, led by John Unsworth and a team of North American and European advisors, and tasked them to write a report on the state of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. This report, Our Cultural Commonwealth, was published in 2006 and was a hugely important document in the establishment of digital humanities as an enterprise in the United States. The recommendations in the report had a great deal of influence on the ultimate creation the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH. In this talk, Brett Bobley will use Our Cultural Commonwealth as a framing device to describe how Digital Humanities has changed, and will continue to change, nearly ten years on. One key point is how international the field has become, as practitioners around the world share research methods and embark on new collaborations. To that end, he will discuss recent conversations with other funders under the umbrella of the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

14.30-15.45 Roundtable on new forms of data and collaboration Chair: Sean Ryder, NUI Galway, Chair of HERA

Keri Facer, University of Bristol Jacqueline Hicks, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies Catherine Moriarty, University of Brighton Jessica Parland von Essen, University of Helsinki

15.45-16.15 Coffee

16.15-17.30 Roundtable: Genres of scholarly knowledge and production Chair: Brett Bobley, National Endowment for the Humanities Lorna M. Hughes, School of Advanced Study, University of London, NeDiMAH Chair. Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow Barry Smith, School of Advanced Study, University of London Patrik Svensson, Umeå University Milena Žic-Fuchs, University of Zagreb, and Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Reception

PROGRAMME

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Alessio Assonitis

Alessio Assonitis is Director of the Medici Archive Project. He received his doctoral degree in Renaissance art history from Columbia University in 2003. He has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Herron School of Art, Christian Theological Seminary and University of California- Education Abroad Program (Florence). In 2003-4, he served as Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He arrived at the Medici Archive Project (www.medici.org) in the fall 2004, with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He became Research Director in 2009 and Director in 2011. He has published on Quattrocento and Cinquecento painting in Rome and Tuscany, antiquarian studies, history of the Mendicant orders, Medici history, early modern travel history, book history, and archival studies. In 2010-14, thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he and his staff created BIA (bia.medici.org), an online digital platform solely devoted to the research on and teaching of the over three-million letter archive of the Medici Grand Dukes (1532-1743). As of April 2015, BIA’s online community stands at over 2400 registered users - professors, curators, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and even high school students - who actively contribute to the academic exploration and mapping of this archive directly on the BIA platform.

SPEAKERS

BRETT BOBLEY

Brett Bobley serves as the Chief Information Officer for the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is also the Director of the agency’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH). Under ODH, Brett has put in place new grant programs aimed at supporting innovative research projects that use computational methods for analyzing text, sound, images, and other cultural heritage materials in pursuit of humanities scholarship. Brett’s office has international grant programs in place with Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. He is currently working closely with the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences to try to put new multi-lateral grant programs in place with countries from North America, South America, and Europe. Brett has a master's degree in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of

Chicago. In 2007, Brett was recognized by the President of the United States for his exceptional long-term accomplishments with a Presidential Rank Award.

KERI FACER

Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and Leadership Fellow for the AHRC/RCUK Connected Communities Programme. She works on the idea of Learning Cities, exploring the relationship between formal educational and research institutions and popular and public forms of knowledge production, in particular in relation to anticipations of environmental, technological and social change. Before her return to universities, she was Research Director at Futurelab where she brought together researchers, educators, digital artists, computer scientists and young people to create prototypes of new approaches to education. She has led large scale curriculum design programmes and collaborated with organisations including the BBC, RSA, Baltic Arts Centre, Becta, TDA, Electronic Arts and Microsoft as well as with Local Authorities across the UK. She also led the Beyond Current Horizons strategic foresight programme for the Department for Children, Schools and Families. This programme brought together researchers from arts, humanities, sciences, engineering and social sciences to examine the socio-technical changes that education and society may be facing over the coming century. Her most recent publications include Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change and The Politics of Education and Technology.4

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Jacqueline Hicks

Jacqueline Hicks has spent the last fifteen years reading, writing and talking about the political economy of Indonesia. Her PhD research on Indonesian corruption turned into a job teaching Southeast Asian politics and then a period of living in Jakarta to work as a journalist and consultant for democratic governance programmes, including at the EC, UNDP, Amnesty International and others. Having returned to academia in 2010 via a visiting fellowship at Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, she began working on the Elite Network Shifts project at KITLV in the Netherlands in 2013, which experiments with information extraction and social network analysis to draw out information about Indonesian

political elites from digitised newspapers. As one of a core team of three researchers – one a computational linguist, the other a mathematician – she has learned a great deal about computational techniques and been inspired by many working in the area. As well as trying to think up creative ways to use the results generated by her colleagues, she has found a role applying political economy eye to computational techniques in “tool criticism.” Last year, she opened her computer’s command-line interface for the first time ever.

Lorna M. Hughes

Lorna M. Hughes is Chair in Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her research covers the use of digital tools and methods for the analysis of large-scale digital collections, with a focus on collaborations between humanities and scientific disciplines. She is the author of Digitizing Collections: Strategic Issues for the Information Manager (2004), the editor of Evaluating & Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections (2011), and the co-editor of The Virtual Representation of the Past (2007). She is the Chair of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (www.nedimah.eu). Other notable digital projects include the AHRC-funded The Snows of Yesteryear: Narrating Extreme Weather (eira.llgc.org.uk) and the Jisc-funded The Welsh Experience of the First World War (cymruww1.llgc.org.uk).

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Fotis Jannidis

Fotis Jannidis is Professor for Literary Computing and German Literary History at the University of Würzburg. He studied at the universities of Trier and Munich (Germany). His research interests are the study of literary history using text mining methods and the history of the German novel. He is co-editor of the digital edition of the works of the young Goethe and co-editor of the new digital edition of Goethe’s Faust. He has also been involved in the development of TextGrid, a virtual research environment for digital editions. He is member of the digital humanities center Kallimachos at the University of Würzburg. For a list of publications see: www.jannidis.de

SPEAKERS

Jan Boeve/De Balie

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Lucy Kimbell

Lucy Kimball is currently AHRC design research fellow embedded in the Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office, and principal research fellow at the University of Brighton. She is also associate fellow at Said Business School, University of Oxford, where she was previously on the faculty and where she teaches an MBA elective on designing better futures. She is also an associate at Normann Partners, an international strategy and futures consultancy. Her Service Innovation Handbook (2014) for managers and entrepreneurs offers a designerly approach to service innovation. She is currently Co-Investigator on Developing Participation in Social Design: Prototyping Projects, Programmes and Policies (“protopublics” for short) for the AHRC. This follows Mapping Social Design Research and Practice in 2013-14. In 2012 she led the Young Foundation's contributions to the European Commission Framework 7 research project on mapping controversies, EMAPS. Her research is informed by her data art practice including work shown in Making Things Public curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2005.

@lixindex http://mappingsocialdesign.org http://protopublics.org https://researchingdesignforpolicy.wordpress.com

CATHERINE MORIARTY

Catherine Moriarty is Curatorial Director of the University of Brighton Design Archives and Professor of Art and Design History. Having undertaken research in archives, museums and picture libraries since the 1990s she is particularly interested in how technology has transformed both the tools and practices of research, stewardship and curation, as well as the very objects encountered in these processes. Catherine has led numerous digitisation projects and was a member of the steering committees of the Archives Hub, of the AHRC-funded project Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951 and, currently, the project board of the UCL-led AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future. Catherine worked at the Royal Commission on the

Historical Monuments of England and at the Imperial War Museum, and she has published widely on commemoration and sculpture after the First World War. In 2008 she was awarded the University of Melbourne Macgeorge Fellowship for her research on the sculptor Paul Montford and the book from this project was published in 2013. She is co-editor of the Sculpture Journal. http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/catherine-moriarty

JESSICA PARLAND VON ESSEN

Jessica Parland von Essen studied history at the University of Helsinki, where she completed her PhD in 2005. The same year she also got her degree in Library and Informations Science at Åbo Akademi. She became an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki in 2012. She has studied book history, worked with digital archiving and long term preservation and she also taught digital humanities. Currently she works with the Open Science and Research Initiative, which is a great endeavour by the Finnish government to enhance research data management and scientific communication and strengthen science by promoting open science.

SPEAKERS

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Helle Porsdam

Helle Porsdam is Professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School, an Arcadia Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge (2011) and is currently a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Among her publications may be mentioned Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (1999) and From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (2009). Most recently (2010-13), she has been the project leader of CULTIVATE, a HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area, ESF) project on copyright, creativity and cultural heritage institutions. She has just received funding from the Danish Velux Foundation for the

project, The Past’s Future: Digital Transformations and Cultural Heritage Institutions (2015-19).

Andrew Prescott

Andrew Prescott is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow and Theme Leader Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Research Council strategic theme ‘Digital Transformations’. Andrew was by training a medieval historian and completed his doctoral thesis on the records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Andrew was from 1979-2000 a Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library, where he took a particular interest in the development of digitisation and networking strategies and was involved in a number of pioneering projects in this field, most notably as lead BL curator for Electronic Beowulf edited by Kevin S. Kiernan. Andrew has worked at digital humanities units and libraries at the

University of Sheffield, University of Wales Lampeter and King’s College London, and has a wide strategic perspective on the range and organisation of digital humanities projects. His publications include English Historical Documents (1988), Towards the Digital Library (1998) and The Benedictional of St Aethelwold (2001). He is currently working on two major publications, Digitising the Middle Ages and In the Time of Rumours: Exploring the Revolt of 1381. Andrew tweets as @ajprescott and his blog is digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk.

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JON PRATTY

Jon Pratty is currently Relationship Manager for Creative Media, Arts Council England across the South East area, based in Brighton, Cambridge and London. He is leaving ACE in June 2015 to work as a consultant digital producer. Jon was part of the team working on The Space, the Arts Council England/BBC partnership project, and he also initiated and helps develop Brighton Digital Festival. Keenly interested in learning and creative media, he helped Artswork develop and deliver three arts/digital/learning clusters in the South East. At ACE Jon is currently working on digital projects involving culture/heritage/tourism and open data, and is centrally involved with developing the Digital Public Space forum. Jon was on the advisory board of the Brighton FUSE report, is a board member of Film Hub South East, and is a Director of Tech Resort Eastbourne.

SPEAKERS

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Barry Smith

Barry C. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where he established the Centre for the Study of the Senses, which pioneers collaborative research between philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists. He has held visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley and the Ecole Normale Superiéure in Paris. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has published on self-knowledge, linguistic knowledge, consciousness, the emotions, taste and smell. He now works mainly on the multisensory perception of flavour and has published in Nature and Food Quality and Preference, as well as carrying out consultancy work for the food and drinks industry. In 2007, he edited Questions of Taste: the philosophy of wine (Oxford University Press, 2007), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (with Ernest Lepore) (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Knowing Our Own Minds (with Crispin Wright and Cynthia Macdonald) (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has appeared frequently on BBC Radio’s In Our Time and Nightwaves, and also on Start the Week. And in 2010, he was the writer and presenter of a four-part series for the BBC World Service called The Mysteries of the Brain. He is also the wine columnist for Prospect Magazine.

SEAN RYDER

Sean Ryder is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His publications include James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings (2004) and numerous articles on nineteenth-century Irish culture and literature. He is project director of the Thomas Moore Archive, a digital edition of the literary and musical works of Irish poet Thomas Moore, and has been project director of the EU-funded TEXTE project on textual editing with new technologies. He is a member of the Irish Research Council and chair of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) consortium.

Susan Schreibman

Susan Schreibman is Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of An Foras Feasa, the Humanities Research Institute, at Maynooth University. Dr Schreibman has published and lectured widely in digital humanities. Her current digital projects include Letters of 1916, a crowd-sourced scholarly edition of letters about Ireland, and Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge, a 3D simulation of one of the largest battles to take place during the Easter Rising in April 1916. Her publications include Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal (Bloomsbury 2013), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) and A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2008). She is currently co-editing a new edition

of the Companion to Digital Humanities (forthcoming 2015). She was the founding Editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative and is the Irish representative to DARIAH a European infrastructure in Digital Humanities, as well as co-Chair of its Virtual Competency Centre on Education and Research.

SPEAKERS

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Patrik Svensson

Patrik Svensson is Professor of Digital Humanities at HUMlab, Umeå University. He directed HUMlab between 2000 and 2014. His interests include academic infrastructure, the digital humanities as a field, knowledge production, complex display environments and educational technology. He has published four articles on the digital humanities in the Digital Humanities Quarterly (2009-2012). The edited volume Between Humanities and the Digital (co-edited with David Theo Goldberg, MIT Press) will be out in May 2015. He recently curated the Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production conference and the subsequent online enactment (https://medium.com/genres-of-scholarly-knowledge-production). Svensson's current work includes work on presentation software (with Erica

Robles-Anderson) and intellectual middleware (with Johanna Drucker). And at this moment, he is particularly excited about seeing his concept for a new angled screen display studio take form in HUMlab as the newest addition to this humanistic infrastructure.

Teal Triggs

Teal Triggs is Professor of Graphic Design and Associate Dean, School of Communication, Royal College of Art, London. She is also an Adjunct Professor at RMIT, Australia. As a graphic design historian, critic and educator she has lectured and broadcast widely and her writings have appeared in numerous edited books and international design publications. Her research has focused primarily on design pedagogy, self-publishing, and feminism. Teal has received several project grants focussing on feminism and graphic design history and, more recently, she was recipient of the Fleur Cowles Endowment Fund, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Her research has also extended into community-based learning projects including A Sense of Place: Life Histories of Residents on the Aylesbury Estate funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. She has also led a number of interdisciplinary research teams in developing methods combining social science and design-led solutions including as co-Investigator on Designing for the 21st Century Research Cluster: ‘Digital Design, Representation, Communication and Interaction: Screens and the Social Landscape’ (AHRC). Teal is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication Design (Routledge/International Council of Design); co-editor of Visual Communication (Sage) and Associate Editor of Design Issues (MIT Press). She is currently co-editing with Leslie Atzmon The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury). Her previous books include: Fanzines and The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovations in Contemporary Type Design, both published by Thames & Hudson. She is a Fellow of the International Society of Typographic Designers, the Royal College of Art and the Royal Society of Arts.

Milena Žic - Fuchs

Milena Žic - Fuchs is Professor at the University of Zagreb, and a Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences. She teaches Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics and American Linguistics, and introduced Cognitive Linguistics into Croatian research. She has been a Fulbright guest lecturer at State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Her publications include Knowledge of Language and Knowledge of the World (1991), a dictionary of acronyms co-authored with Stjepan Babić (2007), and Cognitive Linguistics and Language Structures: the English Present Perfect (2009), for which she received the National Award for Science for 2011. She has been Chair of the Standing Committee for the Humanities and the Scientific Review Group for the Humanities for the European Science Foundation. In 2013 Milena Žic Fuchs was elected member of Academia Europaea, and from 2014 she is the Chair of the ERC.

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SPEAKERS

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/ MODELLING TIME

The primary focus of digital humanities in its several decades of history has been preserving, recording, understanding and interpreting artefacts of human culture using ever more advanced digital methods of exploration. Research started out with the study of probably the most obvious medium, i.e. text that embodies the widest spectrum of written human history from language to literature to history. This focus has gradually been extended to the study of, among others, the arts, music, architecture and archeology. By exploring these and similar manifestations of human culture using digital methods we are getting closer and closer to the formal understanding of what we, humans, actually are, with these results even offering a gateway to the STEM disciplines.

There is one important area that is still lacking a similar formal approach: human interaction. Even though various fields in behavioral science, especially social psychology, have the goal to model human interaction, these models mostly do not go beyond descriptions of behaviour in various specific social settings. The challenge is how to capture within an abstract model the observed individual and temporal variability of actors of an interaction. Namely, in order to perform a communicative act, one uses a set of multimodal (verbal and nonverbal) means and markers so that most often any of them can be omitted and their sequence can also be discontinuous; as a result these two conditions present a serious problem for rigorous formal study, one that digital humanities also advocates.

At a NeDiMAH Multimodality Workshop at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, researchers learned about a new methodology applied to the discovery of temporal patterns in human interaction that are highly variable in behavioural sense, but clearly formal to our intuition. The methodology that aims to discover temporal patterns usually hidden to the naked eye was introduced by one of the developers of the corresponding research tool, the software package Theme, which participants tested at the Workshop. This methodology can be applied to any set of data organised around time, and therefore has applications in behavioral science, sports, history, or even neuroscience. It is a clear case where we can see the wider impact of digital humanities research in fields where it has not been present before, or where it can in the future offer further novel meaningful ways of scientific exploration. The workshop itself was an international event: presenters and participants (the latter also including PhD and MA students) were from a number of European countries, reflecting transnational aims, methods and tools.

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‘Multi-Modal Communication: resources and application’ workshop 11-13 February 2015, University of Debrecen, Hungary

The NeDiMAH programme of activities engaged with a number of important methodological areas in the digital arts and humanities, and a selection of these are presented here. For more information, and full reports of all 47 NeDiMAH activities, see the website: www.nedimah.eu

Laszlo Hunyadi, University of Debrecen, Hungary

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/ Information visualisation

Over the past two years, workgroups in NeDiMAH have carried out an extensive survey of digital practitioners and their practices related to the use of visualisations and the representation of space and time. This work, through a formal survey and targeted workshops, has been extensively mined and collated and the findings will be presented, shared, and refined to form a guiding instrument for practise in these fields.

A spectrum of visualisation technologies and methodologies was addressed with anthropological, genealogical, historical, archaeological, literary, sociological, museological, geographic and linguistic applications explored as well as traditional infoviz and dataviz.  From textometrica to social network analysis, from geometrically accurate cultural heritage datasets to augmented mapmaking in educational settings, every conceivable way of representing, remediating and analysing research and research processes across the EU and beyond was integrated into the workshop series.  Humanities projects from Scandinavian Rock Art to WW2 resistance networks were presented, from traditional cultural heritage modelling in 3D to phenomenological approaches to understanding how historically people lived in buildings accurately extrapolated from archaeological remains - we considered how visualisation impacts on perception, delivers new understanding and new knowledge, and affords an interactivity through new, immersive modes that allow "presence" as a method for an engaged research awareness via Rift, and other technologies.

There is a huge threat to the innovation and meaningful development of a new generation of scholars now immersed in interactive datasets and 3D to 4D representation of the results of research.  They are stymied and limited by the flattening effect of traditional academic 2D publication.  They imagine a world beyond the bar chart - where the dataset is organic - and its accurate representation is limited only by the imagination of the researcher/developer.A key finding was that transnational cooperation is vital in ensuring that this innovation drives development forward, ensuring agreement and delivering standards for multidimensional interactive representation and remediation of results. This research goes beyond borders. 

Fredrik Palm, Umeå University, Orla Murphy, University College Cork, Ireland

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Textometrica, Project 1657

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/ DIGITAL ANALYSIS OF SPACE AND TIME

The NeDiMAH Space Time Working Group has been dedicated to theorizing the multiple ways in which Space and Time are tackled by digital methods in the Humanities. These dimensions underlie almost everything humanists do, but often in non-trivial ways: to what extent can methods developed for representing real-world geography and chronology be applied to fictional spaces or narratives, for instance? The use of tools like GIS have been commonplace in fields such as archaeology, but only more recently begun to find traction in disciplines like English and History, even as dynamically evolving Web-based technologies change both underlying formats and the possibilities for collaborative contribution.

Over the course of NeDiMAH we have sought to consider Space in Time in varying contexts – in particular the use of conceptual schemes, the use of networks, and how space and time are visualised. This has demonstrated that humanists are applying an extremely diverse range of methods, and an even broader range of perspectives as to what they are doing when they use them. While this unquestionably a positive sign it raises important challenges: How can we facilitate the meaningful (not merely digital) integration of outputs produced by practitioners? How do we ensure robust peer-review? And what are the essential areas of theory we need to pass on to the newest generation of humanists, both digital and mainstream?

Real answers have emerged. We now have mature methods for defining semantic relationships between texts, maps and databases, and a clearer understanding of diverse range of graph-based methodologies colloquially referred to as ‘network analysis’. Nonetheless, the field continues to grow apace and the networks of practice catalysed by NeDiMAH must likewise continue to identify spatio-temporal trends in the humanities as they emerge.

Here and There, Then and Now - Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities, NeDiMAH activities

clustered around the Digital Humanities 2012, 17 July 2012, Hamburg, Germany

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Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, Shawn Day, University College Cork, Ireland

GapVis: Visual Interface for Reading Ancient Texts

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/ Large scale data analysis

The Working Group ‘Using Large Scale Text Collections for research’ organised activities addressing the availability of text corpora for different languages and the ways such corpora can be used for research. Huge differences were found in the level of digital infrastructure for each language. An important theme was the need to share knowledge about corpus building and about issues such as putting together a representative corpus, the lack of digitized sources, the handling of historical variation using natural language processing tools, or intellectual property rights. This exchange of information proved to be very helpful for researchers working in language areas where corpus building is still in its early stages. For those languages where huge corpora already exist, other issues were identified. Here, only a small amount of scholars have the technical background or the technical support to make optimal use of all that a large corpus can offer. Also, a lack of exemplary scholarly work was noted. There is a need for convincing case studies that clearly describe the methodological approach of a large-scale text corpus from a relevant humanities research question. The workshops helped to identify useful open source software. Scholars already using some of the new analysis tools (for example machine learning or topic modeling) sketched the problems and the benefits of their methodology. Two notable advantages of working with large text collection were pointed out: looking beyond the canonical texts allows researchers to discover new, yet unchartered areas of the literary landscape. And it allows researchers to test historical hypotheses with an empirical approach. The need for example case studies will be dealt with in the concluding publication of the Working Group, which will sketch the ways in which computational stylistic analysis of text corpora in different languages and time periods will be a significant new way to visualise cultural patterns through space and time in European (literary) history.

NeDiMAH workshop: Exploring Historical Sources with Language Technology: Results and Perspectives, 8-9 December 2014, Huygens ING, the Hague

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Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Huygens Institute, Netherlands

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/ Linked data

A Working Group on Linked Data and Ontologies has investigated this emerging field. Linked Data is a means by which large numbers of varied data sources can be more easily integrated in open, collaborative and accessible environments, and in particular on the World Web Web. It works by asserting a very simple data model which ensures technical compatibility between heterogeneous data sets, but which also provides the ability to incorporate rich semantics. Contextualised Linked Data provides the basis for establishing a new epistemological framework combining micro and macro approaches, enabling a better integration of data from source materials from disparate collections, making patterns and connections more visible.

Humanities scholars hold a pivotal role in transforming the Web of Data into a Web of Knowledge by incorporating research questions about people, places, and dates into representations of Linked Data, transforming it from a technical format into something that can reveal new insights into past.

A Semantically enriched Linked Data network requires an inter-disciplinary approach and a need for researchers and data experts across universities and cultural heritage institutions to collaborate in order to create representations of historic, literary, and or cultural knowledge in a structured data format.

Organisations like the British Museum release Linked Data in this contextualised form using the CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) to provide research data that retains institutional perspectives and language, and which can also transform education and engagement. This form of Linked Data can both harmonise and, at the same time, preserve different perspectives. It can therefore expose similarities, overlaps and differences in cultural history and identity both within and across national borders. Such initiatives, whether from museums, archives or libraries, can be the basis of important collaborations with the humanities research community.

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Christian-Emil Smith Ore, University of Oslo, Norway, Senastian Rahtz, Oxford University, UK

Mapping documentation

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The artist Fabio Lattanzi Antinori introduces his interactive sound sculpture ‘Contours’ at the Cheltenham Science Festival, June 2014. The tapestries in ‘Contours’ are made with conductive ink and enable interaction with a constantly changing data-driven soundscape.

/ digital humanities

and scholarly publishing

The application of digital methods may lead to new insights, but it also leads to new forms of output and new modes of communication with audiences, both scholarly and not. These new interfaces are sources of tension, however, for they challenge established pathways for the production and evaluation of scholarship. The resulting friction is easily managed at certain phases of research: according to the principles of academic freedom, the scholar chooses her field of enquiry and can (within reason) define the appropriate methods for addressing her research questions. But the creation of knowledge is only half of the scholarly process: the sharing of knowledge is the other half, and it is here where the ripples and eddies in the system sometimes enforce a mismatch between the media and the message of scholarly communications. The NeDiMAH Working Group on Scholarly Communications and Publications has been working to define and build consensus at this fault line, engaging to this end with a broad spectrum of researchers and non-research stakeholders (including publishers, library organisations, funding agencies). Its final publication will present perspectives from across this spectrum, addressing core issues to the publication and communication of digital humanities results, such as copyright, evaluation of scholarship, publication cultures, emerging forms of publication, alternate forms of scholarship and the role of online communities in the new scholarly ecosystem.

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Jennifer Edmond, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, Susan Schreibman, University of Maynooth, Ireland

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There has been a long tradition of the use of scientific aids in the investigation of manuscripts, dating back to the nineteenth century. One of the first applications of digital imaging was in the investigation of damaged and concealed portions of manuscripts. New technologies continue to offer enormous opportunities for enhancing our understanding of the date, localisation, contents and genesis of manuscript sources which are fundamental for many humanities disciplines. An example of such a new approach is RTI imaging, which by replicating angled lighting allows the scholar to see details such as scratched glosses or flaking of pigment which cannot be seen with conventional digital imaging. Some research teams have even explored the use of synchrotron light sources in investigating manuscripts. Researchers now have a multiplicity of tools with which to explore problems in manuscripts, and further exciting new technologies are likely to become available in the near future.

These methods create enormous opportunities for scholars, but also tremendous challenges. While many of the techniques derive from work in conservation science, repeated re-examination of ancient manuscripts using different techniques can raise preservation issues.This means moving far beyond the current provision of manuscripts that have been through ‘mass digitisation’, and moving to a more bespoke, ‘slow digitisation’ provision of images that are outputs of new types of capture.

NeDiMAH workshop: New methods of manuscript imaging and analysis. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Roderic Bowen Library, University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter, Wales. 30 March - 1 April 2015

/ New Methods for Manuscript

Imaging

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Lorna M. Hughes, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK, Claudine Moulin, University of Trier, Germany, Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, UK

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The Future of Historical Network Research:

University of Hamburg, September 13th - 15th

2014

/ Historical Network ANALYSIS

Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods have found their place in historical research. The network concept is no longer a mere metaphor, but has become a research method. Over the last decades, several studies have proven that formal methods derived from Social Network Analysis can be fruitfully applied to selected bodies of historical data

When researchers first began to apply network analysis methods to historic data, there were no suitable points of reference and hardly any previous work which successfully combined Social Network Analysis methods and source-criticism. Over the years, an infrastructure has been developed by researchers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria that enables historians to engage in research on networks, to exchange ideas and to receive training (http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/).

Through NeDiMAH, an international conference was convened to build on this existing infrastructure, to look back at what has been achieved in this field, and to look ahead at developments, opportunities, limitations and future of the method. This event brought together international experts to explore the historical fields in which analysis methods are currently used, organized thematically around ‘Information Conceptualisation and Visualisation’, ‘Space and Time’, ‘Linked Data and Ontological Methods’ and ‘Overlaps between Network Analysis and the Digital Humanities’. The event made clear that a transnational approach is essential, as research on networks in history has yielded different approaches between Europe and the USA. The event also showcased the powerful connections that already exist between historians and computer scientists, and made recommendations for future collaborations.

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Marten Düring, Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe, Luxembourg, Florian Kerschbaumer, University of Klagenfurt, Linda Keyserlingk, Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Germany, Martin Stark, University of Hamburg, Germany

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/ NeMO: The NeDiMAH Methods

Ontology

Research across all Working Groups was undertaken to scope existing taxonomies of digital humanities. Building on this, a research team based at the DigitalCuration Unit (DCU) ATHENA Research Centre, Greece has developed NeMo: the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology, a primary output of the Network.

NeMO is an ontology delivered in both document and machine readable forms. In addition, a related Web service comprises the ontology definition and the appropriate functionality to support access to and evolution of the ontology.The ontology definition includes scope notes for entities and properties, hierarchy links and examples. In machine readable form, the ontology is defined in RDF/S (RDF Schema), in order to support its use in a wide range of applications accessing registries and knowledge bases that contain information about scholarly methods and their context of use. Furthermore the taxonomic parts of the ontology are SKOS-compliant.Maintenance and further development of NeMO will be carried out by DCUwithin DARIAH_GR (DARIAH Greece). Theintellectual content of the ontology will besustained as a collaboration with DARIAH_EU.

NeDiMAH Ontology Navigation - Graph view

Perspectives on scholarly activity

Panos Constantopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business and Digital Curation Unit, "ATHENA" Research Centre, Greece, Agiatis Benardou, Digital Curation Unit, "ATHENA" Research Centre, Greece, Costis Dallas, University of Toronto, Canada, Lorna M. Hughes, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK

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The Post-Digital Humanities

Andrew Prescott Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow

As I enter my seventh decade, I realise that I have spent my entire life hearing promises that a technological revolution is about to transform my existence beyond recognition. When I was a child, the prime minister Harold Wilson prophesied the creation of a new Britain, forged in the white-hot heat of technological revolution. Isaac Asimov declared that in the future everyone would need to understand binary arithmetic, so when I got to secondary school I had to grapple with learning addition and multiplication in binary, a skill I have never since needed and which I suspect fatally wounded my mathematical understanding. When I joined the British Library in 1979, it had just been created from a number of existing library services in order to deal with future technological developments, and much of my time at the library was dominated by discussion about the computerisation of the catalogues and other services. As soon as I saw the World Wide Web, it was evident it was going to profoundly change everything I was interested in, but it was fascinating to observe how the British Library and other institutions found such new developments difficult to engage with.

And so it goes on. Big data promises, in the words of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, ‘a revolution that will transform the way we live’. A rather chilling TED talk by Jeremy Howard, CEO of Enlitic, a machine learning company in San Francisco, and one of the world’s leading experts on machine learning, foresees that over the next few years deep learning will mean that computers become capable of doing about 80% of jobs in the developed world. Howard declares that:

The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different (http://bit.ly/1aFlFqd).

Raspberry Pi weather station from the ‘Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ project.

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NeDiMAH's activities: participants (dot), organisers (dark icon), or speakers (bright icon)

It is difficult not to be doubtful about Howard’s prophecies, as I have spent my whole life being told that in the next few years there will be changes that will make the Industrial Revolution look trivial. Every time one huge technological upheaval fails to arrive, I am promised that another will be along shortly. But on the other hand, there can be no question that computerisation and digital technologies have profoundly changed the world in which I live and have altered everything that is most important to me, from the nature of my workplace to the way I read and listen to music. Which ra ises the quest ion: has the revolution in fact occurred? Is our understanding of what the white heat of technology will do flawed? We tend to assume that major historical change like the Industrial Revolution is disruptive, with whole indust r ies l ike hand-weav ing rendered redundant and the Luddite resistance futile. Yet the process of i n d u s t r i a l i s a t i o n w a s o f t e n spasmodic in character, localised and res t r i c t ed to pa r t i cu l a r industries. Moreover, it was not always disruptive or immediately t rans fo rmat i ve , as I sambard K ingdom Brune l (who sure ly understood change better than most human beings) stated:

I believe that the most useful and novel inventions and improvements of the p resen t day a re mere progressive steps in a highly w r o u g h t a n d h i g h l y a d v a n c e d s y s t e m , s u g g e s t e d b y , a n d d e p e n d e n t o n , o t h e r previous steps, their whole value and means of their a p p l i c a t i o n p r o b a b l y dependent on the success of some or many other inventions, some old, some new…

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What if the digital revolution has already taken place, and what we are doing now is grappling with the aftermath? This is why some cultural commentators now talk about the ‘post-digital’. As a term it undoubtedly, as Bruce Sterling has observed, sucks. It wrongly suggests that digital technologies comprise one single point of change - an upheaval which has taken place - whereas it is clear that we are on a complex continuum of change which, if Jeremy Howard is right, may barely have yet got under way. Moreover, it would be easy to misread ‘post-digital’ as implying that the digital revolution has been and gone, and we can stop worrying about it. That’s wrong; it is rather an attempt to state that the digital has now inescapably and irreversibly changed our lives.

In my view, a good way of thinking about the post-digital is by analogy with the post-modern or post-feminism. This means a rejection or suspicion of grand narratives and sweeping claims. In the case of digital technologies, it means we are immersed in digital technologies, but that we know enough to understand that the digital landscape is not one of gleaming progress but is messy, challenging and sometimes threatening. Post-digital implies that our immersion in digital technologies has reached a critical mass which has profoundly altered many aspects of our lives and that we would find it difficult to cope without it. The post-digital world is suspicious of the promises of utopia held out by Silicon Valley and is busy instead exploring the conflicted and chaotic digital landscape. We know that our engagement with digital technologies is changing our lives, and we want to build things which mean that we can better live the lives we want.

Affective Digital Histories Launch, November 2014

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What does this mean for the humanities? What does a post-digital humanities look like? For a long time, those engaged with the digital humanities have had to act as evangelists for the use of computers and technical methods that many senior humanities scholars have viewed with suspicion. Understanding and experience of the methods to be used for digital research in the arts and humanities was scarce, and it could be difficult to find the right people to undertake a project. Activities like NeDiMAH are predicated on the need for greater sharing and availability of digital skills and experience. The cost of digitising manuscripts, books and museum objects was considerable and it was necessary to develop arguments to secure the additional funding to meet this digital overhead. Humanities academics were unfamiliar with the demands of project funding and management. Of course, none of these problems have vanished overnight, but many humanities academics make use of digital materials and methods in different ways, often without reference to acknowledged digital humanities centres. Libraries and archives create commercial digital packages for academic use without substantial input from the scholarly community. There are vast quantities of ‘born digital’ materials suitable for humanities research which does not require the digitisation overhead. Digital methods are becoming mainstream in the humanities, as digital humanities specialists always predicted they would, but both humanities scholars and digital humanities specialists seem curiously ill-prepared to meet the challenges this presents.

While the arts are increasingly working in different ways in digital environments, and humanities scholars rely more and more on online tools and resources in their research, paradoxically a lot of scholarship looks conservative and unadventurous in its practice. As Tim Hitchcock has remarked in respect of the reaction of academic historians to these developments, ‘…these developments seem to have had little real impact on the kinds of history we write, and have gone largely unmarked by the profession…We continue to produce books and articles that look very much like those written thirty years ago, making almost no concession to the dramatically changing way in which we now work. We continue to publish single-authored hard-copy monographs that silently seek to demonstrate that we have each been on the arduous physical journey into the archive and back again and, even more confusingly, multi-volume collections of ‘primary sources’, many of which are also available online’. Beyond this, the digital landscape of arts and humanities scholarship looks confusing and messily populated. This partly reflects the funding pressures on libraries and archives as government press them to enhance public access to their collections by digitising as much as possible. As a result, part of the historical archive of British newspapers is available to UK academics via the excellent JISC licensing scheme, whereas another portion is only available via an expensive personal subscription service and unavailable in most university libraries.

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A community group scanning a standing stone at at Camus nan Geall on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland as part of the ACCORD (Archaeology Community Co-production of Research Data) at the Glasgow School of Art.

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Nobody would wish to lose these resources, poorly designed, expensive and irritating as some of them might be. As Jerome McGann has put it, ‘one might as well hope for the return of the unity of Christendom or the Holy Roman Empire’. This is the digital landscape we will live in, and the post-digital humanities seeks to contextualise, explain and explore this landscape. Just as this digital world is frequently fragmented and jerry-built, so the post-digital humanities will be eclectic, experimental and sometimes contradictory in its approaches. It will explore the gaps, canonicities and cultural assumptions behind major cultural projects like Google Books, and question the cultural worldview that such projects are imposing on us. It will use the critical tools and framings that are the chief intellectual achievements of the humanities to question the techno-utopia being extolled from Silicon Valley. The post-digital humanities will seek to build new tools which t r a n s c e n d t h e c o m m e r c i a l i s a t i o n a n d commodification of our shared cultural heritage. As the post-digital humanities becomes increasingly visual, haptic and interested in crafted technology, it builds new alliances with artists and makers. For the post-digital humanities, making will be a means of questioning and theorising. In the post-digital humanities, the intellectual qualities associated with the arts and the humanities come to forefront in investigating the the ever-changing and ever-deceptive digital world. This isn’t a rejection or denial of the digital, but rather a recognition that the challenges and changes presented by our engagement with digital technology are so profound that we need to draw on the immense intellectual resources of the arts and humanities.

A post-digital world is one in which digital technologies suffuse everyday life. We want to use the excitement and fun that these technologies bring into our lives to invigorate and revitalise the academic studies that we love. But we also know that the arts and humanities has a lot to offer in helping us to analyse and develop critical understanding of the born-digital world. It is for these reasons that the post-digital humanities also has to actively embrace policy issues associated with the rise of the creative and digital economies which may perhaps seem remote from some of the historic concerns of humanities disciplines. These include the importance of design and such policy areas as future cities or creativity. Issues like these form part of the post-digital landscape, and the humanities would be denying its potential to transform society if it did not engage with themes like these. How post-digital humanities builds bridges between humanities scholarship and such policy issues are among the most pressing issues it faces.

How has the work of NeDiMAH contributed to our engagement with these challenges over the last five years? What new approaches will be required as we move into a post-digital world? As digital methods become fundamental across many different aspects of policy and engagement, does it make sense to have ‘the digital’ in separate institutional networks, with the assumption that only particular groups can instigate and approve the methods used? These are some of the questions we want to consider today.

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Finished model of the Camus nan Geall standing stone from the ACCORD project

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Jon Rogers Professor of Creative Technology, University of Dundee

I am writing this 300-word thought grab on the key digital developments for the next five years. As I’m doing so, I’m looking out of my window over the North Sea to the Isle of May, the largest puffin colony in the North Sea. I know what they will be doing in five years – the same as they are doing now, because, unless there is some catastrophic natural disaster, Puffins will do as Puffins does.

Do humans not do the same? Would a Puffin on the Isle of May not just say the same thing – that humans do as humans does? That we arrive on the Isle every spring in groups of 30, take photos, eat cold sandwiches and leave. Will we not be doing the same in five years? Yes, I suspect we will, but the experience of how we visit and interact with the Puffins will be very different.

The rise in crafted technology has meant that people are able to physically make the digital technologies they want. They have been able to build bespoke digital products that fit the life they want to live. The Puffins’ lives are now connected to a group of school kids in Gujarat that are following their every move, sound and smell from devices that they made with the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. An elderly couple in a care home in Dundee are logging the movements of the puffins based on an internet connected camera trap they co-designed as part of their residency at the V&A Dundee in 2018. And in the back reaches of the Met Office, someone has just cried Eureka as they have picked up the first video recording from an Atlantic Sperm whale that filmed the puffins in depths of winter.

All of this while a group of windswept tourists eat cold sandwiches and look forward to a steaming hot plate of fish and chips at the Dreel Tavern. I’ll be there on the 19th April 2020 and the first pint is on me.

Catherine Moriarty

How arts and humanities researchers manage and understand hybrid research experiences that cross the analogue and the digital is an issue that will stay with us. All of us need to increase our comprehension of the context of things that are positioned at increasing removes from their place of

origin, and we need to understand better the coding and information architectures that store and present surrogates and renderings to us. Both within and beyond the academy, how we visualise the complex relationships and structures of digital environments will be increasingly important so that we can detect and remain mindful of that which is omitted, obscured or resistant to digital forms and environments. Data visualisation literacy and increased interest and understanding of digital structures among students and scholars, for both the production and construction of research, needs to move to the top of the agenda. Knowing how things are made and remaining alert to the forces that shape what we have access to will allow us to better understand and interpret both data and scholarship and to recognise limitations alongside possibilities.

Mapping research pathways with students and researchers. From a workshop held as part of the Exploring British Design Project, University of Brighton/Jisc Archives Hub, Manchester, November 2014.

We asked some of the speakers today and some of our other favourite collaborators for their thoughts on the key themes and developments that they thought would be important over the next five years. Here is what they said:

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Patrik Svensson

Development/challenge: How do we best recruit as much of the interpretative, methodological and technological capacity of the humanities (and partners) as possible?

I suggest that this involves (or even requires):

- Seeing the digital humanities as a contact zone. The digital humanities as a liminal place is much more than a platform for digital studies and implementations, it is a means to articulate, further and revitalize the humanities. Not as digital humanities by itself, but as a vision of the human sciences where the digital humanities can contribute to taking on the intellectual, social and technological challenges of our time.

- Making sure that there is strong integration of critical and technological engagement. For example, humanists need to look critically at big data as a phenomenon at the same time as also considering how big data methodology may or may not be useful to humanities research and education. This may prompt the humanities to redefine what big data is and even develop new methodologies. More generally, there is need for a humanities-based idea of academic infrastructure that combines these perspectives and modes of engagement.

- Inflecting our own knowledge production and emerging practices with the critical sensibility that we typically recruit when engaging with other domains, knowledge communities and historical strata in our work. I suggest that we need to pay more attention to the ways tools structure our arguments and express thinking through the conditioning provided by the platform, which can inform us in our own knowledge production and the creation of interpretative tools.

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HUMlab, photographer: Elin Berge

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Alessio Assonitis

The Medici Archive Project believes that in the future digital humanities will draft new pandects of scholarly engagement and frustrate the stagnant tenets of traditional academia.

The Medici Archive Project believes that in the future digital humanities will incentivize scholars and students to return to archives and to explore untrodden territories, exploiting technology to introduce this content into intellectual discourse.

The Medici Archive Project believes that in the future digital humanities will organize itself into constellations of individualities rather than clusters of singularities falling into the same orbit.

The Medici Archive Project hopes that in the future digital humanities will cease to be a mere expedient for saving financially and creatively bankrupt historical libraries and archives (particularly in Italy), and that, instead, will emerge as the prime mover to trigger the rampant innovation, digitization, dissemination, discussion, and publication of primary sources.

Teal Triggs

We have seen how design has become increasingly important in shaping how we curate, analyse and translate both big and small data. Data manifestation/information visualisation has broadened the potential for facilitating the ways in which digital data is made visible and, therefore, communicated to a broader audience of users. As we enter the post-digital age, design - methods, processes and thinking - will continue to form the bridge between the physical and digital; material and immaterial; human and digital. I see this as being particularly relevant in terms of the interpretation of our heritage. In the future this will not just be the sole preserve of historians and humanities scholars. Using design methods such as co-creation, a broader public will be empowered to share and interpret more localised histories. Digital tools and platforms will increasingly become catalysts for creating new and reimagined ways of engaging with cultural heritage and, in turn, the production of cultural knowledge. The ways in which design tests and evaluates co-creation needs to be culturally progressive and meaningful. This process has already begun, but the potential is very exciting.

As part of this there are ethical and political questions to consider. Design in the digital humanities will also facilitate greater user-empowerment for the capturing and the telling of stories that employ a range of senses, texts and images. Design will inform ways in which to enable communities who are normally marginalized from digital access to share in a cultural learning experience offered by digital collections. Equally, design will play a key role in moving forward expanding a ‘geography of knowledge’ (e.g. Cloud, vernacular archives, distributed ownership and responsibilities). The process of dematerialization impacts our understanding of the attributes afforded physical objects; the ethical implications of how we understand artefacts and the construction of digital archives will become increasingly important to debate.

‘Marginalia Machine’ by Tom Sutcliffe, an artwork which extracts marginal

notes from an archive document, and

reproduces them in a public performance of

writing on a continuous paper scroll. From the

‘Poetics of the Archive’ project:

bloodaxe.ncl.ac.uk

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Jon Pratty

Will smart cities have smart digital heritage?

We do appear, in metropolitan spaces, to imagine smart cities will run on city-scale content management systems, rather like Fifties-era nuclear power station control panels. Overnight our societal, cultural, environmental and economic problems might be solved in one magic moment of data-driven singularity.

I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen in the digital humanities in London, or anywhere to be honest. To my mind, the funding landscape may be much less reliant on traditional public sector sources, with creative industries probably playing a greater role in many sectors. That might change the way we currently develop and deliver digital projects. Less Prince II practitioners, more Agile Scrum Masters. As culture producers and audiences, we can expect more connectivity, creating the possibility of an instant feedback loop, a live dashboard helping us hone work more effectively. 5G connectivity, soon to be piloted in the South East, means distributed resources of all kinds, like content, archives, multi-media experiences might be all around us wherever we go, rather than stuck in online collections.

What’s the big catch? It’s not a catch. In the digital humanities, and particularly in the heritage and culture space, we’re sitting on hundreds (or even thousands) of years of material, research and collections.

Because we now have much more powerful and data-centric systems, widely-distributed through cloud systems, there’s much more we can now do to re-process culture. With much deeper relational gearing now possible between collections, data, places, contexts, we can begin to weigh new meanings and make new connections. It’s going to need new kinds of academic practice or discipline, and some really interesting research, I think.

Jacqueline Hicks

I look forward to trying new computational tools in the coming years, but I think the key development in the digital humanities will be one of process. As both the computational techniques and how they are combined to answer particular research goals become more sophisticated, they can be thought of as “analytical frameworks” rather than “tools”. This moves away from the idea that the computational techniques are objective and value-free, and subjects them to some of the methodological considerations of the humanities and social sciences. In these disciplines, much attention is paid to the underlying assumptions, conditions and limitations of analytical frameworks in the terms of the larger social or human questions.

The key development in the process of digital humanities will therefore be a deeper methodological exchange, adding more to the guiding questions and data content which the humanities currently brings to digital humanities projects. This will be reflected in the further development of digital humanities courses which foreground humanities and social science methodologies alongside the computational ones. There will also be a concomitant growth in the interest and ability of social science and humanities scholars to engage at this level.

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Helle Porsdam with her colleagues doctoral student Jeppe Eimose Waagstein and postdoc Nanna Bonde Thylstrup from the project The Past's Future: Digital Transformations and Cultural Heritage Institutions, funded by the Velux Foundation (the project website, pf.ku.dk, will be available by the end of the month)

1. The pictorial turn: we will increasingly communicate visually. Images will become more and more important - but at the metadata level, images are harder to handle than text.

2. There will (hopefully) be a second phase of the use of technology in the humanities that is more qualitative than the first, mostly quantitative phase.

3. Cultural heritage will increasingly be popularized via computer games such as e.g. Minecraft: https://aimuseums.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/minecraft-in-museums/. Kids will become used to interacting with knowledge through such games.

Sarah Cook Reader and Dundee Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee

Key developments for the post-digital (or 'after new media' as I prefer to call it)

All avant-gardes are cyclical - forging new ground, coming up with new ways of doing things (which don’t always work), being recuperated or being forgotten - and in this, the always changing, intersecting avant-gardes of technology, science and the arts are no different. Makers, designers, funders, critics, historians (and academics more generally) regularly rename and rebrand methods and practices long in use in other heretofore un-acknowledged spheres of practice (take the rise of so-called 'curation'). With this in mind, in the next five years I hope we will:

In art: - Give equal value to all the different art worlds in operation – moving away from an exclusive centre/

periphery understanding of art activity to one which sees art as a spectrum of often collaborative, interrelated practices;

- Stop reading too much into the biography of the artist, or the technology of the work’s medium, and instead find methods which better describe the intent of the artist(s) and the activity/behaviour of the work of art in its networked encounter with its audience/user/time/place/site (context)

In technology: - Make algorithms work for us not against us, or at least learn more about who is making them and

hold them to account;- Better understand the interrelation of databases, and care more about how their logics determine

our activities and how they constitute us as subjects;

In life: - Acknowledge that we (our collective memory perhaps rather than our institutions) are mostly

preserving the documentation of the thing/event rather than the thing/event itself, and do something about it

- Retrain our brains to remember more and relearn the art of attention (and citation, so we can break the cycle of re-naming necessarily remediated material).

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NeDiMAH PUBLICATIONS

Books based on NeDiMAH research and activities

M. J. Driscoll & E. Pierazzo (eds.) Digital scholarly editing: Theories & practices

E. Champion, C. Dallas, A Bernadou and L. M. Hughes (eds) Cultural Heritage Digital Tools and Infrastructures 

J. Edmond and S. Schreibman (eds) Downstream from the Digital Humanities

F. Kerschbaumer, L. Keyserlingk, M. Stark, M. Düring (eds.) The power of Networks. Prospects of historical network research

D. Alves, S. Day, Ø. Eide, L. Isaksen (eds.) Space and Time in the Digital Humanities

M. Bostenaru Dan, A. Dill, Digital architecture history of the first half of the 20th century in Europe

C.E. Ore, M. Hedges, S. Rahtz, L. M. Hughes (eds.) Linked data in the arts and humanities

A. Prescott, C. Moulin, L. M. Hughes (eds) Manuscript analysis in the digital age: an overview of new methods for research

C. Dallas, P. Constantopoulos, A. Benardou, L. M. Hughes, Understanding scholarly practice in the digital humanities

Publications on the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO)

C. Dallas, P. Constantopoulos, A. Benardou, Digital Archaeology, Practice and Methods: an Ontological Perspective.

L. M. Hughes, C. Dallas, P. Constantopoulos ‘DigitalMethods in the Humanities: Understanding and Describingtheir Use across the Disciplines’, in The New Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. S. Schreibman and R. Siemens

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