This post is to say ‘hiya’, to explain
who I am and why I write about all kinds of digital stuff, especially in the
Humanities and Libraries (according to my all encompassing bio on Twitter).
Since 2011, I’ve held the most excellent
post of University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections, a five-year post
funded by the University of Wales, where I also hold a research fellowship in
the Centre for Advanced Welsh and
Celtic Studies. I’m based in National Library of Wales,
and the picture is the view from my office, overlooking Cardigan Bay. Not too
shabby.
My job is to carry out research on the use
and impact of the digital collections of the National Library, and to develop
projects in collaboration with academic and other partners to embed this
digital content into teaching, research, and public engagement.
Being located within NLW, and having access
to not only its collections but to the technical and collection expertise
within the organisation, means that the Library is essentially a laboratory for
my digital research. Most of this work is situated within the Research Programme in
Digital Collections, which I set up in 2011 under the direction of the
then-Librarian, Andrew Green. The programme has flourished, and I am now luck
enough to work with a team of talented staff and postgraduates (for more about
the PhD projects, see the Welsh Initiative for Digital Humanities blog, here).
The past few years have been a wonderful
opportunity to explore the reality of actually doing digital
humanities, building a much better understanding of how scholarship
and pedagogy are bound to research infrastructures in “ways that are deeper and
more explicit than we are generally accustomed to in scholarship and depend on
networks of people”, to quote Matt Kirchenbaum’s excellent article on
defining DH.
There are, of course, many
successful Digital Humanities projects and programmes based in Libraries. To
cite just a few examples, Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of
Maryland, and the Digital Scholarship Commons (DISC)
at Emory University are all based in Libraries; at the University of Pennsylvania, staff
of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies are
experimenting with the digital representation and communication of rare and
distinct materials. These examples provide important context, and a model
for thinking about how DH can flourish in a Library setting. My experience has
been that the Library is a place where we can not only do ‘good’ digital humanities,
but foster ‘good’ scholarship, and develop a model from which there can be
lessons learned about fostering Digital Humanities elsewhere.
I’ve long held that digital humanities is
essentially a means of combining digital content with tools and methods analysis and interpretation,
and communicating the results of this work to the widest possible audience
using traditional and non-traditional publishing methods, allowing greater
engagement with research and research data than was previously possible.
I like this characterization of digital
humanities as about content,
tools and methods as it creates a working environment with core elements. It sounds
like the kind of thing you’d find in a coal mine – raw materials, tools for
working with the raw material, and expertise in methods of accomplishing
results, both tried and tested and emerging.
The definition is also very inclusive: The
development, discovery and use of digital data, the use of ICT tools and
methods for its discovery and analysis, and digitally enabled communication and
collaboration around this work can be seen across the disciplines now thanks to
the proliferation of digital research content – journals, electronic texts,
social media…
But the definition presupposes more than
just use. What are we doing in our coal mine? What is the impact of this work? As I see it, the use of
digital content, tools and methods are transforming humanities research in two
ways:
- Firstly, by facilitating and enhancing
existing research, by making research processes easier via the use of
computational tools and methods,
- And secondly, by enabling research that
would be impossible to undertake without digital resources and methods, and
asking new research questions that are driven by insights only achievable
through the use of new tools and methods.
Greg Crane, Humbolt Professor of the
University of Leipzig has referred to this work as e-Wissenschaft reflecting
that the best examples of digital humanities are a new intellectual practice
with elements that distinguish qualitatively the practices of intellectual life
in this emergent digital environment from print-based practices. One of the key
elements of diversion from traditional scholarly practice is that the digital
humanities is collaborative: as the field matures, it is becoming recognized as
one in which the best research is created through partnerships between
different aspects of research, and indeed, between researchers from multiple
disciplines and stakeholder communities – researchers across the arts and
humanities and scientific disciplines, librarians, archivists, cultural
heritage staff, funders, technical experts, data scientists….
At the core of all of this activity is
digital content – the digital ‘stuff’, the source materials for scholarship and
pedagogy that have been created through large scale digitisation initiatives in
libraries, archives, museums and universities, as well as by commercial
entities: large corpora in literary, linguistic, musicological, and television
and film studies domains, the digitization and digital-encoded representation
of materials in classics, history, literature and history of art, and the
creation of databases in archaeology and the performing arts. Scholarship is
already dependent on access to digitized and born digital material in all forms.
The National Library of Wales has
contributed to this mass of digital content, engaging in digitization since 1998.
The Library now offers a large amount of free digital content: newspapers, journals, photographs, and
artworks.
So my job is very much characterized by one
theme: What do we do with all this digital stuff? How do we integrate it into
scholarship? How do we make its use more seamless for researchers across the
disciplines? How do we address its re-use for purposes that are currently
unforeseen?
We’ve now developed a large number of
projects around this theme. We have a large digital archive over 200,000 items
relating to the Welsh Experience of the First
World War. We developed a
project that explored archives relating to extreme
climate, and community and artistic engagement with this material.
We are collaborating on a number of projects that will enable researchers to
create manuscript editions, and work
with new technologies for manuscript analysis. We’re collaborating with Europeana Cloud to look
at exposing collections at the API level.
I’ll be
blogging about these (and other initiatives) over the next few months.
