Humanities Research Data – Rate me!

Wolfram Horstmann

Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School, 3 July 2012

The Research Data Question

Data-driven research is called the 4th Paradigm in the Sciences. Where are humanities in the current discussion about research data?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/desconciertos/160752180/

Ratings, Skepticism & Anxiety

Research Excellence Framework is a reality. But it is objected that: “Humanities research threatened by demands for 'economic impact'” Guardian 13 October 2009

http://www.flickr.com/photos/komoda/7187391601/

Outline

The current awareness of the importance of research data provides opportunities for the humanities to

show their value.~

The challenge is to communicate what research data means for the humanities.

~The proposal is to state the obvious more clearly: text

and images as research data of the humanities and libraries as humanities research facilities.

HUMANITIES AND LIBRARIES AS SOULMATES

Texts and Images as Data

Humanities work with texts and images as other subject areas work with matter, wetware, hardware or numbers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorgmorg/9944210/

Libraries as Research Facilities

Humanities have institutionalized their research facilities centuries ago, other subject areas did it much later, with labs and centers like CERN or EMBL.

http://vi.sualize.us/carl_spitzweg_bucherworm_1850_books_library_ladder_reading_picture_2Qp9.html

The Advent of the Digital

Transforming the physical research facilities into digital is a laborious and expensive exercise – and its potential is not yet exploited.

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/librarian/rpc/manchesterpres/slide15.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flex/27334821/

http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Talks/2008-08-kazan/exercise-2.xml

Digital Humanities & Libraries

World Data Centers or the EBI are centralized – can Humanities Data Centers can be at each institution?

http://adamcrymble.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/is-old-bailey-online-film-or-science.html

SOME EXAMPLES

Digital Resources in the Bodleian

~approaching petabyte scale of highly structured storage for texts and images

~2.000.000 digitized images, another Million to come in the next 3 years, plus 350.000 Google Books

~100 virtual machines… and by far most of these are resources of the Humanities.

REFERENCE MISSING

Cultures of Knowledge

An example of highly structured, intellectually curated data: more than unique 12.000 people and 3500 locations identified in 60.000 letters with 25.000 annotations.

http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/cofk/

What’s the Score?

In only a few months over 10.000 scores have been described by the public. http://www.whats-the-score.org/

Broadside Ballads

Collaborative research introduces novel qualities into humanities research data management.

http://ballads.bodley.ox.ac.uk

Google Books at the Bodleian

Approaching one download a minute: 350.000 Google books with estimated 10.000.000 pages and 25.000.000.000 words

 12-18 Mar

19-25 Mar

26 Mar - 1 Apr 2-8 Apr

9-15 Apr

16-22 Apr

23-29 Apr

30 Apr - 6 May

7-13 May

14-20 May

21-27 May

28 May - 2 Jun

Total 5150 3338 7111 3010 3955 4528 6901 4566 6883 5300 5165 2844.uk 1202 2088 5950 1705 2532 3360 5386 3445 3667 2704 3092 1347.ac.uk 1033 1328 5751 1610 1262 2970 4482 3123 2988 2525 2803 1194.ox.ac.uk 991 1296 5636 1559 1249 2938 4435 3111 2973 2498 2737 1186Bodleian Libraries 291 464 516 306 319 524 562 680 552 499 649 224.bodley 0 0 15 3 3 8 14 8 6 21 7 4.bodleian 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0.ouls 106 48 43 26 15 88 89 94 39 50 112 39.sers 79 187 102 63 64 154 105 131 139 181 126 26.library-public 0 4 0 3 3 0 3 3 3 0 2 0.bodley-open 3 9 17 4 7 18 10 14 11 6 17 5.bodley-public 5 14 14 12 19 28 21 32 18 21 30 18.odl 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.ouls-open 98 202 325 195 205 223 313 381 322 212 348 128.saclib 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 14 10 4 3 1.taylor 0 0 0 0 1 5 6 3 4 3 4 3

THE STORY SO FAR

Size matters!

Even though humanities often use qualitative and hermeneutic methodology – rather than quantitative – the size of data is significant.

http://randommization.com/2011/03/08/library-has-giant-books-for-facade/

Structure matters!

Sizable numbers will not give a thorough idea of digital humanities data – structure is evenly important. This can only be understood by example.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/4/81499-the-data-structure-canon/fulltext

011010101001010101010101011000100010101001010001000101010010011010101001010101010101011000100010101001010001000101010010011010101001010101010101011000100010101001010001000101010010011010101001010101010101011000100010101001010001000101010010011010101001010101010101011000100010101001010001000101010

Collaboration matters!

Involvement of colleagues in collaborative research and the public in crowdsourcing makes a difference.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ludovicmauduit/2646525907

RESEARCH DATA CHALLENGES IN THE HUMANITIES

1st Challenge: Diversity

Humanities have a varied typology of research data, often requiring idiographic approaches. Thus, standardization is difficult (cf. citation), and so is finding computational skills.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/studying/undergraduate/courses/ARCL2037

2nd Challenge: Openness

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncene/364730693/

As with all researchers, competition, privacy and exploitation are impediments to data sharing. Do humanities more than others keep the “ivory tower” attitude?

Accessibility of Humanities Texts

From some 30.000.000 bibliographic records it is hard to fill the humanities corpus. This might constrain discoverability of Humanities resources.

Lösch, M., Waltinger, U., Horstmann, W., & Mehler, A. (2011). Building a DDC-annotated Corpus from OAI Metadata. Journal of Digital Information, 12(2)

Waltinger, U., Mehler, A., Lösch, M., & Horstmann, W. (2011). Hierarchical Classification of OAI Metadata Using the DDC Taxonomy. In Chambers et al (Eds.), Advanced Language Technologies for Digital Libraries (Vol. 6699, pp. 29 - 40). Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer.

3rd Challenge: Inherent Obstacles

Humanities research data show some peculiarities. An extreme example is the closure of archaeological data to protect sites against tomb raiders.

Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences : Hogenaar, A. , H. Tjalsma, & M. Priddy. 2011. “Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences” http://dx.doi.org/10.2390/PUB-2011-7

4th Challenge: Implementing Policy

Funders policies are an approach for opening up data – but humanities produce much data outside of the regular project life cycle.

Deposit of resources or datasets Grant Holders in all areas must make any significant electronic resources or datasets created as a result of research funded by the Council available in an accessible and appropriate depository for at least three years after the end of their grant. The choice of depository should be appropriate to the nature of the project and accessible to the targeted audiences for the material produced.

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/Research%20Funding%20Guide.pdf

RESEARCH DATA OPPORTUNITIES IN THE HUMANITIES

1st Opportunity: Public Understanding

Humanities research data are often easier understood by the public than science data. The “Impact Regime” may even be an advantage for the humanities.

http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do

2nd Opportunity: Cultural Heritage

They are more likely to be accessed and preserved than research data in other subject areas.

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

3rd Opportunity: Infrastructure

The requirements of infrastructure for many humanities research data resemble those of digital libraries. No new research facilities have to be built.

National Library of China

4th Opportunity: New Metrics

It is likely that humanities research data have an web impact advantage. High societal interest could result in higher web-o-metric and usage statistics ratings.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/pub/libs/images/usr/9584_h.jpg

CONCLUSION

Another mindset?

…to see text & images as humanities research data.~

…to see the humanities as data intensive.~

…to see a web impact advantage for the humanities.~

…to see libraries as humanities research facilities.

Recommendations

Exploit the good accessibility of humanities research themes through newspapers, exhibitions, crowdsourcing and citizen

science.~

Make as many research outputs web accessible as possible.~

Invest in and support new metrics such as usage statistics and web-impact.

~Strengthen partnership between humanities and other

disciplines and libraries.

Suggestion

Rate your data!

Thank you