digital research in the arts and humanities: some thoughts on what, why, and how you can get...
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Research in the
Arts and Humanities Some thoughts on what, why, and
how you can get involved
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
www.bl.uk 3
Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative
Commons Licensed
www.bl.uk 4
www.bl.uk 7
© UKWA/Conservative
Party
www.bl.uk 10
Digital Humanities is an academic
field concerned with the application of
computing tools to humanities and
arts data or their use in the creation of
these data. It is methodological in
nature and interdisciplinary in scope.
It works at the intersection of
computing with the other disciplines
and focuses both on the pragmatic
issues of how computing assists
scholarship and teaching in these
disciplines, and on the theoretical
problems of shift in perspective
brought about by computing. Willard McCarty 1999 (updated 2013)
www.bl.uk 11
“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk 12
Reading the Riots (LSE, Guardian)
– How misinformation spread on
Twitter during a time of crisis
– 2.6 million tweets analysed
– Volunteers used to help
categorise data
– Images compared
– Sentiment analysis deployed
Interdisciplinary, collaborative effort
– Proctor (Warwick), Vis
(Sheffield), Voss (St Andrews).
– Reading the riots on Twitter :
methodological innovation for the
analysis of big data (2013)
© Guardian
www.bl.uk 13
discipline camp and
camps sentence
Ngram Viewer ©
www.bl.uk 14
‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’ Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)
www.bl.uk 15
© Michael Takeo Magruder
www.bl.uk 16
© Kari Kraus
Kari Kraus (Maryland), Signal & Noise: ENF as part of the sound archivist's
toolkit, Digital Humanities 2014
www.bl.uk 18
Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.
www.bl.uk 20
www.bl.uk 21
“The emergence of the new digital
humanities isn’t an isolated academic
phenomenon. The institutional and
disciplinary changes are part of a
larger cultural shift, inside and outside
the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence
and convergence in technology and
culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital
Humanities (2014)
www.bl.uk 24
© Martin Grandjean
www.bl.uk 25
www.bl.uk 31
Thank you! @j_w_baker
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/