International Symposium on Digital Humanities: Book of Abstracts

The ‘Rise of the Eurosceptics’ in 2014

Michael Bossetta, Anamaria Dutceac Segesten — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

2014 can be considered a ’breakout year’ for Euroscepticism. Largely on account of the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections, where over one quarter of the available seats went to members of Eurosceptic parties (Treib, 2014), national media outlets in many Member States reported about the ‘earthquake’, ‘virus’, or ‘rising tide’ of Euroscepticism sweeping across the continent. Although Eurosceptics tend to oppose European integration, the media discourse about them may – rather paradoxically – drive a process of Europeanization that grants saliency to European issues and actors across different national cases. The present study investigates whether national media discourses about Euroscepticism can be considered Europeanized, that is, when an issue involving non- national or EU level actors is discussed in a similar fashion across different Member States. We ask:

To what extent are national media discourses about Euroscepticism Europeanized?

What factors explain the presence of a Europeanized media discourse about Euroscepticism?

To answer the first question, we use LDA topic modelling in R to expound the main topics associated with the word ‘Euroscepticism’ in 2014 national print media articles (N=1545) across six countries: Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. LDA topic modelling is a digital method suitable for digital humanities (Blei, 2014), since it identifies recurring themes across a large corpus of texts. However, topic modelling is rarely applied to cross-national (and thus cross-language) data corpora. We create six LDA models and represent the results in a Gephi visualization. The findings demonstrate a strong convergence of European topics associated with Euroscepticism in five of the six cases, with the United Kingdom as the exception, and we conclude the media discourse about Euroscepticism is Europeanized.

In the second phase, we test which factors explain this Europeanization through using bivariate logistical regressions. We find that the type of newspaper (tabloid or broadsheet), the existence of a successful Eurosceptic party, and the country’s relationship to the EU budget each can predict whether Euroscepticism is discussed in a national or European scope.

While our study focuses on print media articles, we know that contemporary media systems are of a ‘hybrid’ nature (Chadwick, 2013). Thus, the print media articles in this study have also been disseminated via online channels like mainstream news websites and social media. Our poster will focus on the digital methods employed to operationalize our research questions across disparate national cases. The methodology, and aim of the study, connect to the themes of the workshop by using digital methods, via computational tools, to address a pan-European societal challenge through an interdisciplinary approach at the nexus of media studies and political communication.

References

Blei, David M. "Topic modeling and digital humanities." Journal of Digital Humanities 2.1 (2012): 8-11.

Chadwick, Andrew. The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Treib, O. (2014). The voter says no, but nobody listens: causes and consequences of the Eurosceptic vote in the 2014 European elections. Journal of European Public Policy, 21(10), 1541-1554.

Digital (hi)storytelling

Ylva Grufstedt, Cecilia Trenter — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Digital (hi)storytelling – counterfactuals and fiction in popular culture

Complex and heterogeneous storyworlds are mediated through various media by means of several aesthetic expressions, and digital storytelling is a relevant aspect of mediation. This abstract gives an overview of two research projects on digital storytelling that are closely related and focus on the same category of questions, using different methods and materials. The purpose is to highlight one of many current international research alliances on the topics of social memory, adaptation, movie and game studies within the context of digital storytelling.

Counterfactuals in game design and models of historical change

As part of her ongoing PhD project, Ylva Grufstedt has taken an interest in game design and models of causality and historical change in strategy games like Europa Universalis and Civilization. In this type of simulatory games, players may change history by manipulating various factors based on the rule set and framework created by the developers. Her research focuses on the way these games engineer and facilitate models of historical change by enabling alternative, i.e. counterfactual, (hi)storytelling through gameplay, by way of mapping the specificities of video games as an interactive form of historical modelling, world building and storytelling. The expressed aim is to better understand the interplay of agency, counterfactuals and historical consciousness by analyzing gameplay videos of counterfactual play.

Gameplay and social memory

In Cecilia Trenter’s part of the project Medeltidens form- och tankevärld i Dragon Age: Origins (Medievalism in Dragon Age: Origins), she examined the use of fictitious history by studying Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II (2009-2011 BioWare) within the fantasy-medieval context. By reflecting the present in the past, people are not only creating images of who we are but also what it takes to reach our goals. Since the identity-process mobilizes action, it is of interest to investigate how gameplay employs social memory in the creation of an epical action-plot. The project is based on the assumption that understanding the projective identity through a PC as a part of a flow of time with a past, a present and a future in the game, is a crucial part of the gameplay.¹

1 Gameplay and historical consciousness in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II (Bioware) (published at Meaningful Play 2012 at State University of East Lansing http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/proceedings2012/).

Methodology and Applications of Visual Stance Analysis

Kostiantyn Kucher, Andreas Kerren, Carita Paradis, Magnus Sahlgren — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Växjö Go!

Alexandra Stiernspetz-Nylén, Susanna Nordmark, Mathias Boström — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

PEAR 4 VXO

Aris Alissandrakis, Nico Reski — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Digital Humanities

Soniya Billore, Koraljka Golub — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

INTRODUCTION

Today we live in a rapidly evolving environment supported by high-quality technology and fast communication, which has impacted professional, commercial and academic aspects of the society. In higher education there is a constant need to keep respective fields up-to-date with the changing needs of the society. A comprehensive approach to address this challenge is the creation of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary programmes. The field of Digital Humanities (DH), lying at the intersection of humanities and computing is such an example which may be instrumental in creating the change by serving as a platform for novel interdisciplinary connections to address societal challenges. DH has been identified as a tool that assists in furthering research, studies and collaboration between distantly related fields which have not been connected conventionally in the discipline of humanities (e.g., Kirshenbaum, 2010).

Further, higher education and its array of offerings is influenced by market economies. For example, Newman, Couturier and Scurry (2010) study the dynamics of market influences on higher education and point to the inevitable transformations due to agendas of political parties, public policies, corporate goals and market structures. Recent EU political discussions emphasize the need for addressing societal needs through fields like DH, where Humanities and Social Sciences are viewed as “essential to maximise the returns to society from investment in science and technology” (European Commission, 2016).

Higher education is viewed as central to the objectives of public and private institutions and related economic development, employment, skills development and talent acquisitions. The development of new courses with a unique course offering helps to position the universities and higher education institutions differently from the others and helps counter global competition. The local community stakeholders can provide assistance in identifying the required set of skills for the job market. They can guide on how interdisciplinary connections can be built up so as to expand the possibilities. Not the least, courses and programmes informed by actual needs will enable the highly skilled professionals, whose education has been markedly enhanced by practice-informed education and joint, cross-sector innovation, to address future societal challenges. All this is applicable to the field of humanities and the newly evolved Digital Humanities.

METHODOLOGY

The paper reports on a pilot study undertaken with the purpose of informing the developments of DH courses at Linnaeus University (LNU) in the way that reflects actual societal needs, based on input from the relevant stakeholders in the LNU region encompassing south-eastern Sweden. To this purpose, a focus group interview of representatives from relevant public institutions and organizations was conducted. While the invitation was sent out to 9 representatives from the LNU’s DH Initiative network (https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/digital-humanities/), 4 were able to attend the focus group interview, and 1 provided his views via an email interview. The five participants represented:

Kulturparken Småland (encompassing the biggest group of local cultural venues, http://www.kulturparkensmaland.se/1.0.1.0/108/1/) in Växjö,
Kalmar Castle (http://www.kalmarslott.se) in Kalmar,
Det fria ordets hus (The House of Free Speech, http://www.vaxjo.se/-Det-fria-ordetshus-/Om-Det-fria-ordet-hus/) in Växjö, and
AV Media Region Kronoberg (publically financed institution for media and IT in schools, http://avmedia.kronoberg.se).

The focus group interview and the email interview were of a structured type and comprised 11 questions, grouped around the following 4 subsections:

Views about DH as a general topic and as the specific LNU initiative;
Relevance of DH to the Linnaeus University region;
The skills and talent pool in the market in relation to DH; and,
Points of attention for the DH project to aid needs of the society and local industry.

RESULTS

The participants largely agreed that DH is a very broad topic that needs concrete references to applications in order to relate it to various industries. DH can be both a method and a way of thinking and can be used in optimal ways to engage people and customers in their work and social engagement; for the latter, it is important to devise new modes of participation of end users in order to collect their ideas and interests, and create new content. The LNU DH Initiative was hailed as an excellent idea allowing for cross-sector collaboration, and for humanities to connect to computing and business disciplines more substantially.

The overall perception was that the Linnaeus University region needed to be developed in many sectors, ranging from business, culture, education, innovation etc. The project could contribute to and engage with society through schools, museums and other public platforms. Sustainability of the DH Initiative would need to be addressed. The respondents had a consensus that strategic thinking, though very important, was largely lacking in the overall societal development and in the related plans in the local municipal bodies. The DH programme was therefore recommended to include education related to strategy and strategic thinking. The DH programme is also expected to include communication skills building and working in multidisciplinary teams. Finally, the respondents pointed out that as a higher education provider in Sweden it was important to remember that the DH programme needs to keep the three pillars of Education, Research and Engagement with Society as primary in their course development.

REFERENCES

European Commission. (2016). Horizon 2020: Social sciences & humanities. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/area/social-sciences-humanities.

Kirschenbaum, M., 2010. What is digital humanities and what’s it doing in English departments? Debates in the digital humanities, ADE Bulletin, 150, pp.1-7.

Newman, F., Couturier, L., & Scurry, J. (2010). The future of higher education: Rhetoric, reality, and the risks of the market. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons

A Cross-cultural Study of Attitudes to Digital Tools Among Students and Teachers in the European Language Classroom

Soniya Billore, Christina Rosén — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Swe-Clarin

Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi, Elena Volodina, Stefan Ekman, Caspar Jordan — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

CLARIN AND SWE-CLARIN

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), an ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) initiative which aims at (a) making extensive language-based materials available as primary research data to the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) research communities; and (b) offering state-of-the-art language technology (LT) as an e- research tool for this purpose, positioning CLARIN centrally in what is often referred to as the digital humanities (DH).

Swe-Clarin as the Swedish CLARIN node was established in 2015 with funding from the Swedish Research Council by a consortium consisting of 9 members – so-called Swe-Clarin centers – representing the Swedish academic community as well as public memory institutions. The academic members are well balanced over the LT field, covering existing and possible research areas and user groups, and the memory institutions provide access to many of the language-based materials of interest to the users. Swe-Clarin is coordinated by Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg.

From the start, Swe-Clarin has aimed to establish good relations to the HSS fields and open the door for all researchers who wish to work with DH research using text and speech as primary research data. To avoid being a project by language technologists for linguists, we strive to include the HSS researchers in the process as early as possible. Our preferred way of doing this has been to establish small pilot projects with at least one member from the HSS field and at least one Swe-Clarin consortium member, together formulating a research question the addressing of which requires working with large language-based materials. Ideally, the collaboration should additionally always include a data owner, a person or persons representing the institution where the text or speech data is kept – typically a memory institution.

The pilot projects aim to spread the word of Swe-Clarin, show the potential of using language technology in DH research, create a user base for the tools and resources developed and maintained by Swe-Clarin, and last but not least, having this development being informed by input from users in the earliest possible stages of the project. Some pilot projects are already underway (see below).

In addition to the pilot projects, we have arranged workshops and user days and published newsletters and a blog. The workshops held so far have been on topics such as: general introduction to Swe-Clarin, our tools and resources; historical resources and tools; making cultural heritage text data available for research; and HSS research on digitized speech data, such as those of the Swedish Media Archive. We have started a series of workshops called Swe-Clarin on tour where Språkbanken’s widely used Korp corpus infrastructure (Borin et al. 2012) is used to explore previously unexplored materials in a hands-on manner, giving researchers of LT and HSS the opportunity to meet and discuss research questions and the potentials of using LT for DH. The experience from working with HSS researchers will help reveal the limitations of existing tools and hopefully also engender general methodological discussion, thus setting the stage for future development of tools more appropriate for DH research. The first such workshop was held at Stockholm University in the spring of 2016. It featured the ethnographic questionnaires collected by the Nordic Museum since the late 1920s and now digitized by them, and it was attended mainly by ethnologists. The next workshop in the series will be held in Umeå in conjunction with the Swedish Language Technology Conference in November 2016. There the material in focus will be the Swedish Government Official Reports (Statens offentliga utredningar, SOU), in the version digitized by the National Library of Sweden, comprising more than 400 million words covering the years 1922–1998.

SOME SWE-CLARIN PILOT PROJECTS

Attitudes Toward Rhetoric Over Time
In this pilot project, a historian of rhetoric at Uppsala University together with the Swe-Clarin center Språkbanken explored how Språkbanken’s Korp infrastructure could be applied to the research question of how the attitudes to rhetoric expressed in Swedish public discourse have changed over the last 200 years. The focus in the pilot project was on a large (almost 1 billion words) digitized historical newspaper material provided by the National Library, but some preliminary studies of modern social media were also included for comparison. (Viklund and Borin 2016)

A Text Analysis Toolbox for Learner Language
The Swe-Clarin center at Uppsala University has developed SWEGRAM, a web service that provides automatic linguistic annotation at word and sentence level, which can subsequently be used to derive statistics on different linguistic characteristics of the texts, for example, the number of words and sentences in a text, the average length of a word, the distribution of word classes or different measures of readability. In a collaboration with researchers at the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University, SWEGRAM has been made the basis for a web-based tool for annotation and quantitative analysis of student essays for the national exam in Swedish and Swedish as a second language for different grades (3rd, 6th, 9th grade). (Megyesi et al. 2016)

The Annotated Strindberg Corpus
The Swe-Clarin center at Stockholm University in collaboration with the Swedish Literature Bank (Litteraturbanken) and the editorial team of the National Edition of August Strindberg’s Collected Works aim to construct a linguistically annotated corpus of Strindberg’s collected works. The National Edition consists of 72 volumes with about 6 million words published between 1981 and 2012. The annotated version of the corpus will enable new kinds of research to be conducted on this material, as well as pave the way for even deeper annotation in the future. (Nilsson Björkenstam et al. 2014)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

We strongly encourage you to contact us if you are interested in any of our resources, in conducting a pilot study with us or if you have any ideas or questions regarding digital humanities research with respect to language technology and resources: <info@sweclarin.se>. See also <https://sweclarin.se>.

REFERENCES

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Roxendal, J. (2012). Korp – the corpus infrastructure of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of LREC 2012 (pp. 474–478). Istanbul: ELRA.

Megyesi, B., Näsman, J., & Palmér, A. (2016). The uppsala corpus of student writings: Corpus creation, annotation, and analysis. In Proceedings of LREC 2016 (pp. 3192–3199). Portorož: ELRA.

Nilsson Björkenstam, K., Gustafson Capková, S., & Wirén, M. (2014). The Stockholm University Strindberg Corpus: Content and possibilities. In R. Lysell (Ed.), Strindberg on international stages/Strindberg in translation. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Viklund, J., & Borin, L. (2016). How can big data help us study rhetorical history? In Selected Papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2015 (pp. 79–93). Linköping: LiU EP.

Using Enkapsis Theory for Unravelling Societal Complexities

Christine Boshuijzen-van Burken, Darek M. Haftor — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

INTRODUCTION

Societal challenges may be evoked by novel digital technologies that connect different stakeholders in society. An example of a societal challenge is the arrival of smartphone applications that create peer-to-peer businesses, such as the transportation networking application Uber or accommodation network application Airbnb. In particular Uber has caused unrest in the traditional taxi sector, it has evoked legal debates and numerous newspaper articles have been devoted to this so-called ‘disruptive technology’ (see for example Weisse and Guynn 2014; Suster 2014; Adhikari 2015). Uber directly or indirectly connects drivers to passengers, credit card companies to developers of geographical maps, mobile network providers to car manufacturers, legal authorities to international investors, etcetera.

A way of understanding the complex relationships between the entities and stakeholders in digitally enabled constellations such as Uber, is in terms of enkaptic interlacements. The theory of enkapsis is a philosophical tool, based on a specific view of reality, which may guide a novel understanding of the relationship between artefacts and entities and between social structures that exist in reality. We contribute to interdisciplinary research by using insights from philosophy to understand societal complexities caused by digital technologies. It falls in the Digital Humanities project, since it connects both the academic and public and private sectors in interdisciplinary research and innovation to tackle societal challenges.

ENKAPSIS THEORY

The theory of enkapsis is unique to Dooyeweerd, a Dutch philosopher, who introduced his theory in his book “A New Critique of Theoretical Thought” (1953). It is part of a larger philosophical framework of individuality structures and modal structures which we will not address in detail. In short, the theory of individuality structures (and modal structures) is a project to understand the nature of specific things and events in reality as well as grasp the identity of entities in a non-reductionist manner. It takes as a basis that reality presents itself according to a number of irreducible yet closely interrelated aspects (Dooyeweerd distinguished 15 aspects in total, such as numerical, spatial, psychological, ethical, juridical, etc). The theory of enkapsis is only a small part of this project.

Furthermore, Dooyeweerd distinguishes between enkaptic interlacements and part-whole relationships in order to explain how individuality structures cohere amidst their differences (Chaplin, 2011). We have added a third relationship, namely juxtapositional relationships. An enkaptic interlacement pre-supposes that the structures of things and events, or those of societal relationships functioning in it, have an independent internal leading function and an internal structural principle of their own. (Dooyeweerd, 1953, Vol. III, 637).

A part-whole relationship can be defined as follows: “In all those things whose structure is not that of a homogeneous aggregate, a part is essentially qualified by the structure of the whole. In this case the structure of a whole can never be construed by means of its parts, because the parts, as such, are entirely dependent on the whole. The question what is a part of a non-homogeneous whole cannot be decided by a functional mathematical-physical analysis, but only by an inquiry into the internal individuality-structure of this whole. This fact has always been lost sight of on the functionalist standpoint.” (Dooyeweerd 1953, Vol III p. 638-639). We call a constellation a juxtapositional relationship when two wholes function independent of each other and cooperate on a temporary, non-necessary basis. Two wholes can be taken apart without disrupting or intervening their respective qualifying functions.

ANALYSIS

If we apply this rather abstract theory to the complex case of Uber, our initial findings are that firstly Uber has a part-whole relationship with the information technology infrastructure: without digital technologies, Uber loses its meaning and will not function according to its leading function, namely to connect drivers to passengers. Secondly, Uber has an enkaptic interlacement with the credit card company that takes care of the automatic payments, since Uber can exist independent of the credit card company system (it can handle payments in different ways, even in cash, as it does in some countries where credit cards are a rarity) and the credit card payment system does not depend on Uber for its existence. Thirdly, Uber has a juxtapositional relationship with regular taxi companies and legal authorities (although there are cases where legal authorities have entered in an enkaptic interlacement with Uber, such as in the Philippines). In this paper we will further explore how the theory of enkapsis can explain a multiplicity of complex relationships and furthermore, how these relationships relate to different responses to Uber in different countries, cultural settings and legal systems.

REFERENCES

Adhikari, S. (2015) (16 February 2015). Taxi industry slams uber's 20,000 jobs stunt. Technology Spectator.

Chaplin, J. (2011) Herman Dooyeweerd. Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame.

Dooyeweerd, H. (1953) A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co, Phillipsburg, NJ.

Suster, M. (22 November 2014). In defense of Uber: An objective opinion. Retrieved from http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/11/22/in-defense-of-uber-an-unbiased-opinion/

Weisse, E., & Guynn, J. (2014) (19 November 2014). Uber tracking raises privacy concerns. USA Today.

Walking in My Shoes

Emmanuela Carbé — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Social media, cultural heritage and migrant communities in a globalized world

Laia Colomer, Nuno Otero, Julia Schmidt — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

THIRD CULTURE KIDS (TCKs) AND THEIR USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The open nature of social media enables the potential of new decentralized and less hierarchical social structures and promotes new dynamics of social and cultural practices. These new technologies can foster the perception among people that they belong to a larger community by virtue of the identity they share online rather than to where they physically lived or culturally belong. In this sense, social media is increasingly playing a key role in enabling collective identity, a sense of community, and supporting collective cultural creation among citizens across the globe.

The potential for online community creativity is relevant for migrant communities to whom social media is actually becoming a distinctive arena of social life. Accordingly, we argue that it serves as sources of community building among people with social and cultural affinities but with restricted possibilities of offline meetings. Considering this framing, we are exploring these circumstances among one of the most globalized migrant community: the Third Cultural Kids (TCKs), a migrant community spread globally who are not culturally defined by their passport, family background, origin and nationality, or their cultural affiliations, but by their multicultural rootless and restlessness regarding personal traditional personal identity issues (Pollock and Reken, 2009; Bell-Villada and Sichel, 2011). As a global nomad community, they take fully advantage of Web 2.0 media, not only to “feel connected to the world” and to “be connected between them”, but basically to acknowledge and build their sense of community.

The material posted in social media is thus a source of information on TCK’s personal and social self- perceptions, interesting enough to be analyzed by any researcher who wishes to relate their personal and collective experiences into cultural identity issues. Most of these materials are personal narrations/accounts and but by applying qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques we are exploring the possibilities of identifying familiarities, similarities and patterns from which we can create a vivid picture of the on-going construction of this community identity. This initial step seems fundamental to us if one thinks of creating digital tools with features that are in line with the characteristics of this community. More specifically, our current research is framed in accordance with the following research questions:

How can we help reinforce the sense of identity of this group by fostering ways to build a stronger online community using social media? What particular features should the digital networking tools possess in order to support the creation and maintaining of this community?
What public spaces are relevant for this particular community and in what ways can these be enhanced with digital technologies to promote communication? Are location-based services a possible technological solution? How can location based services be designed in order to connect TCKs and their meaningful places?

We expect that our understanding of this community identity can extend the notions of meaningful public spaces and consequently cultural heritage.

INITIAL EXPLORATORY INVESTIGATIONS

In order to start exploring the problem space suggested by the research questions referred to above we have conducted two pilot studies. In the first study, a discourse analysis of an unique Twitter chat on “global citizens” was run to explore how cross-cultural and global identities are constructed among a community of TCKs (Colomer & Schmidt 2015). More specifically, we analysed the twitter feed of #TCKchat for two weeks in 2015. TCKchat is organized by BateConsulting and is a biweekly event with questions aiming to start discussions and experience exchange between TCKs. The topic within our two-week span was “Global Citizenship Explored”.

Our data collection for the initial study consisted of 832 tweets, generated by 51 contributors. Using discourse analysis we explored the contributors opinion on the term “Global Citizen” and how the community works together to create terms to describe themselves. “Global citizen” does not have a positive meaning to most contributors. From the additional hashtags in the posts we can see that “(global) nomad” and “expat” are often used. However, there was no deeper discussion on the terms which might be due to the limitation of 140 characters per tweet on Twitter. It is important to note though, that terms defined by researchers or experts do not always resonate as well as expected with the groups they are meant to describe.

In the second study, a wider analysis (using text categorization software packages NVivo 11¹ and Semantria²) of 24 open Facebook groups dedicated to TCKs was performed to identify what is important for members to share and discuss within the community. The findings show sharing experience, community and identity as the most important topics being addressed within the groups. Words like “moved” and “community” were among the most used in the texts written by TCKs. The main themes (so called nodes) identified by NVivo were Group, TCK, and Community. Semantria identified Identity, Globalization and Passport as the most mentioned categories out of a custom category list. The custom query results show TCK, Terms, and Culture as the main discussed topics, followed by Education, Globalization, and Identity. 225 places and countries from all over the world appear in the texts with France being far in the lead. (Schmidt 2016)

The results suggest that TCKs have a strong interest in building their community identity, sharing their experiences, and discussing the terms used to describe themselves, and that they do use social media in the process of creating community and identity.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Our preliminary research efforts gave us a glimpse of the main topics and points of discussion that TCKs seem to be engaged with when taking advantage of social media channels.

We aim to understand the relevance of social media in the process of both meaning construction and community building for this community of global migrants. We will do it by further analyzing quantitatively and qualitatively the uses of social media among TCKs and other onward migrants. This analysis will be the starting point for our future explorations concerning the design of digital tools that will support this community. More specifically we will:

Explore the design space of digital networking tools to help create and maintain a thriving TCKs online community.
Explore to what extent it is possible to infuse public places with appropriate digital technologies that foster further engagement with this community and between members of the community.

TCKs might help us understand how to create communalities across places and cultures that will foster cultural mutual understanding and multi-cultural practices. In other words, TCKs can teach us something about the value of multiculturalism and how to promote digital technology based activities that support such value.

REFERENCES

Bell-Villada, G.H. and Sichel, N. (Eds.) (2011). Writing out of Limbo. International Childhoods, Global Nomads, and Third Culture Kids. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Newcastle upon Tyne.

Colomer, L. and Schmidt, J. (2015). How Third Culture Kids Build up their Community Identity Through Social Media. Unpublished report, part of the requirements concerning the course "Network Society and Internet Cultures", Social Media and Web Technologies Masters' program. Department of Media Technology. Linnaeus University (for a copy of the report please contact the authors).

Pollock, D.C. and Reken, R.E. (2009). Third Culture Kids. Growing Up Among Worlds. Nicholas Brealey publishing. Boston/London.

Schmidt, J. 2016 Categorization of Facebook Group Messages. Unpublished report, part of the requirements concerning the course "Adaptive and Semantic Web", Social Media and Web Technologies Masters' program. Department of Media Technology. Linnaeus University (for a copy of the report please contact the authors).

1 NVivo 11 by QSR International (www.qsrinternational.com)
2 Semantria Excel Plugin by Lexalytics (www.lexalytics.com/semantria/excel)

Sketch Layer Separation in Multi-Spectral Historical Document Images

Amir Abbas Davari, Armin Häberle, Christian Riess — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Working with Digital Humanities

Isto Huvila — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

As an explicitly transdisciplinary idea, digital humanities provides opportunities to bring together people and interests across the sectors, from a variety of scholarly and practical disciplines, and from the society at large. It may not be crucial that everyone has an identical understanding what digital humanities is if the stakeholders have shared or compatible concerns, and practical respect each others priorities. This applies to research questions and practical interests as well as their projected significance. The compatibility of concerns and mutual understanding of each others priorities is not, however, something that would be given in a collaboration or dependency relation that crosses different disciplines and sectors. To give a few examples, problems may occur when developing and borrowing digital tools from across contexts to address research questions from the humanities disciplines, when the limits of digital approaches to address specific questions are negotiated within and between contexts, and increasingly, when digital humanities researchers are using data provided by and originally produced in other sectors and situations. Even if the digital humanities literature in general and, to a verying degree, individual research projects have emphasised the importance of being critical and sensitive to the implications of using borrowed and newly developed technologies and understanding the data, so far, there is relatively little empirical research on the implications of cross-sectoral collaborations.

The aim of the presentation is to systematise observations on various problems relating to cross-sectoral collaborations in the context of digital humanities. It draws from an empirical study of archaeological documentation practices in Sweden and an analysis of the perspectives the stakeholders of archaeological information. Archaeology is an example of a discipline within which the cross- sectoral collaboration has always been significant and has increased in the post-war years due to the heritage legislation that mandates archaeological investigations before land use [1]. At the present, these investigations are producing unprecedented amounts of digital documentation data with a significant scholarly potential. In a large number of countries the majority of archaeological fieldwork is currently financed by land developers as an obligatory exercise regulated by the law. Even if the priorities and wordings vary from one country to another (e.g. [2]), the principal purpose of archaeological fieldwork is to produce an adequate documentation of an archaeological site for future research. In Sweden, the purpose is three-fold (in this particular order) as to documentan archaeological site, take care of finds, to report and communicate (mediate) the results. Moreover, the documentation material and finds shall be preserved for the future, be scholarly interpreted and placed in a cultural historical con- text [4]. What is crucial, however, is that the fieldwork itself and where it is conducted is not initiated by a scholarly interest but a need or want to develop land. Further, the financing that is coming from the land developers has an inevitable influence on the priorities of conducting fieldwork, and an interest in a part of the results.

According to the analysis of the empirical material, a major question for contemporary archaeological practices is how well the current information process is capable providing meaningful information for the different stakeholders and even more importantly, what are its implications to the usability and usefulness of the information, and collaborations between stakeholders in the different sectors. Are the matters of concern [3] of the other parties understood by the individual stakeholders and what are the consequences of understanding and not understanding them? Even if the principal conclusion of the analysis so far is that there is much to be done to help the different parties to understand each other and each others priorities in cross-sectoral collaborations, it is equally apparent that many of the significant issues are relatively common organisational and collaborative challenges documented in the literature. They are not specific to archaeology or even to digital humanities.

References

[1] Jean-Paul Demoule. Rescue Archaeology: A European View. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41:611–626, 2012.

[2] Kristian Kristiansen. Contract archaeology in Europe: an experiment in diversity. World Archaeology, 41(4):641–648, December 2009.

[3] Bruno Latour. Why has critique run out of steam? from matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2):225–248, 2004.

[4] Riksantikvarieämbetet. Riksantikvarieämbetets föreskrifter och allmänna råd om uppdragsarkeologi. Kulturrådets författningssamling KRFS 2015:1, Stockholm, 2015.

Digital Humanities and Games Research Across the Disciplines

Johan Höglund — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

The effect of violent computer games on individuals and on society has been the object of a great number of studies reaching across different disciplines, including traditional Humanities, International Relations Studies, and Psychology. Unfortunately, studies conducted within one discipline pay very limited attention to research conducted in other fields. Thus, important research data is rarely shared. The reasons for this lack of cross-disciplinary consideration can be attributed to many different factors. Humanities oriented research is often published in journals other than IR studies, or psychological studies. The various fields engaged in this type of research also employ different methodologies that highlight different aspect while obscuring others. Finally, the research is funded by different agencies, with different agendas.

This presentation first describes the current situation through studies belonging to the Humanities, International Relations Studies and Psychology. These studies share an interest in the computer game genre commonly known as the First Person Shooter (FPS), a violent game genre where the gamer controls an armed avatar and observes the game world through a first-person perspective. The presentation discusses how the general research context (funding body, audience, problem formulation), the theoretical framework, and the methodologies of the different studies inform the research. Here, it is noted that Humanities research is often state-sponsored and conducted within Humanities departments or by one of few DH research centres that exist globally. Since the late 1990s, Humanities research has either focussed on discussing how participatory digital games function differently from other forms of culture such as literature or film (see Juul 2005, Malliet 2007), or it has conducted an often Foucauldian or Baudrillardian interrogation of the games, discussing them as deeply ideological spaces (Wark 2007). The methodological tools employed by this research are virtually always qualitative and hermeneutic. International Relations research also comes out of state-sponsored or private universities, but is sometimes connected to organisations such as the Institute of World Politics. Following the cultural turn of IR during the last two decades (Van Veeren 2009), this research has become increasingly attentive to the way that military games engage with global politics and future military conflict. The focus of game studies conducted within the confines of IR studies is thus the way in which the FPS imagines future global conflict. This research is often qualitative and does discuss the narratives and discourses of the games, but it also employs interviews and quantitative methods to investigate how gamers’s ideas about global relations are affected by the games (Zamaróczy 2016). Finally, psychological research into violent games comes from a large number of funding bodies, from state-run universities to private foundations, the health care sector, and the US Department of Defence (DoD) (Höglund 2008). The research produced by these various agencies focuses primarily on to what extent violent games produce violent behaviour or not (Anderson et al., 2002), but it also includes studies on how games can train soldiers before combat or help treat veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (Rizzo et al 2006). The link between violent computer games and aggressive behaviour is notoriously difficult to study in laboratory experiments, and a few alternative ways of assessing the relationship have been suggested (Sauer and Nova 2015). Even so, this research is firmly quantitative and often disregards the qualitative aspect.

The question that the presentation will address in relation to these studies is how these different fields may benefit from cross-disciplinary exchange. The presentation suggests that by considering results gained in psychological studies, and by making some use of the quantitative and laboratory methods common in this discipline, the humanities or IR researcher would be in a considerably better position to discuss the effect that the FPS has on the individual. In other words, broadening the disciplinary perspective would make it possible to consider not only the ideological, political and aesthetic content of the material, but also how gamers actually respond to the material. Similarly, humanities and IR related research could help researchers working in the field of psychology to ask more relevant and precise questions that take into consideration the qualitative content of a particular game before examining its effects in a laboratory setting. In other words, by considering humanities and IR research, the simple question if games encourage aggression in gamers may be rephrased into the more complex question if games encourage aggression against particular groups in society, or support state aggression against certain nationalities. This discussion may be of interest to scholars conducting research on digital games, but it may also be of general interest to Digital Humanities since the formation of games research takes place in the crossroads of several different disciplines.

REFERENCES

Anderson, C. A, B. J. Bushman. (2002) Violent Video Games and Hostile Expectations: A Test of the General Aggression Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28.12): 1679-1686.

Höglund, J. (2008). Electronic Empire: Orientalism Revisited in the Military Shooter. Game Studies. 8.1. http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/hoeglund

Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Cambridge: The MIT Press

Malliet, Steven. (2007). Adapting the Principles of Ludology to the Method of Video Game Content Analysis. Game Studies 7.1. http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/malliet

Rizzo. A, J, et al. (2006). A Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Application for Iraq War Military Personnel with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: From Training to Toy to Treatment. NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Novel Approaches to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. IOS Press, Washington D.C., 235-250

Sauer, J. D, A Drummond, and N. Nova. (2015). Violent video games: The effects of narrative context and reward structure on in-game and postgame aggression. Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied. 21.3. 205-214.

Van Veeren, Es. (2009). The ‘Cultural Turn’ in International Relations: Making Sense of World Politics. E- International Relations. May 10. http://www.e-ir.info/2009/05/10/the-‘cultural-turn’-in-international- relations-making-sense-of-world-politics/.

Wark, M. (2007). Gamer Theory. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Zamaróczy, N de. (2016). Are We What We Play? Global Politics in Historical Strategy Computer Games. International Studies Perspectives. 0.1, 1–20.

Graph Analysis of Word Networks

Lars G. Bagøien Johnsen — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Network Visualization for Digital Humanities

Ilir Jusufi, Andreas Kerren — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Re-approaching new stemmatics

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

AIM

This paper presents preliminary results of my research in the methodological field of computer-assisted stemmatics. It explores the possibilities of applying phylogenetic systematics for textual traditions, as well as discusses the controversies regarding the methodological principles within the field of new stemmatics, such as choice of relationship revealing readings. Additionally, it presents the results of the experiments I have conducted employing the PHYLIP package — a free package of programs for inferring phylogenies, developed by Felsenstein (2005) — aimed to asses an influence of a sample size and types of variants on the results of cladistic analysis. The oldest manuscripts of "Hrómundar saga Gripssonar" — a post-medieval Icelandic saga preserved in 36 manuscripts — served as a case study for the second part of my presentation.

METHODS

Similarities between theoretical assumptions behind cladistics and stemmatology have been explicitly presented by Howe, Barbrook, Mooney and Robinson (2004) in the second volume of "Studies in Stemmatology". An application of computer-assisted methods, originating from phylogenetics, to answer the questions of textual criticism, has been recognized in an academic discourse as a powerful tool in revealing manuscripts’ filiation. Yet, there is a disagreement regarding the fundamental question: what kind of textual variation can, or should, be used for analysis? Salemans (1996) suggested a set of strictly systematized classification of parsimony informative variants, while Robinson (1996) has claimed that all types of variants should be analyzed, including linguistic variants.

Another question that arose recently is a role of small samples in the tree-building process, as discussed by Hall and Parsons (2013). It seems obvious that philologists for centuries used some sort of sampling to reveal manuscript filiation, however they usually did not discuss their sampling procedure, nor publish underlying samples. This attitude does not belong to the age of open scholarship, which requires access to data to allow replication of experiments.

This paper takes an experimental approach towards the mentioned problems, thus a number of tests have been conducted to support the claims made by the author, discussed below in the “Main Findings” section.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The experiments I have conducted sought answers for the following questions:

How does linguistic variation influence the manuscripts' filiation?
How to choose a relationship revealing variants?
Are complete transcriptions of all witnesses necessary to conduct a computer-assisted analysis?
If not, how small can a sample be? Can analysis be based only on loci critici?

MAIN FINDINGS AND UNDERLYING WORK

In my paper I present the results of the experiments I have conducted with use of Pars — a general parsimony program — and DrawTree and Consense — tree-plotting programs, included in the PHYLIP package. The aim of the experiments was to assess the influence of linguistic and minor variants on the results of a cladistics analysis. Additionally I conducted experiments, which aimed to examine an influence of a sample size on the results. For that purpose I employed a sequential analysis for all the characters I collected from the entire saga. The results of each experiment were plotted into Consense software, in order to achieve a consensus tree on which the stemma can be based.

The results of my experiments suggest that cladistics can be employed in traditional textual criticism, and that computer assisted methods improve efficiency of the analysis by decreasing the time necessary for traditional data interpretation. I claim that an input dataset can be based only on traditional loci critici, and the achieved results are as equally valid as the ones based on complete transcriptions, which include all sorts of variants. Moreover, the presence of linguistic variants seemed to introduce noise to the analysis.

RELEVANCE

My paper aims to present possibilities given to a textual critic by an application of tools developed within evolutionary biology. Even though the discussion on applications of cladistics in philological research has been present in the academic discourse for around thirty years now, as presented by Salemans (1987), the computer- assisted methods seem to still face resistance from traditional philologists, most recently expressed by Trovato (2014). The possible reasons for this lack of trust in cladistics will be briefly addressed in this paper.

REFERENCES

Felsenstein, C. (2005) PHYLIP (Phylogeny Inference Package) version 3.6. Distributed by the author. Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle.

Hall, A. Parsons, K. (2013). Making stemmas with small samples, and digital approaches to publishing them: testing the stemma of Konráðs saga keisarasonar. Digital Medievalist, 9. Retrieved from http://digitalmedievalist.org/journal/9/hall/

Howe, C., Barbrook, A., Mooney, L., Robinson, P. (2004). Parallels between stemmatology and phylogenetics. In. P. van Reenen, A. den Hollander, M. van Mulken (Eds). Studies in Stemmatology, vol. II (pp. 3-11). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Robinson, P. (1996). Computer-Assisted Stemmatic Analysis and 'Best-Text' Historical Editing. In P. van Reenen, M. van Mulken, J. Dyk (Eds). Studies in Stemmatology (pp. 71-104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Salemans, B. (1987). Van Lachmann tot Hennig: cladistische tekstkritiek. Gramma, 11. Parts translated in: Salemans B. (1996).

Salemans B. (1996). Cladistics or the Resurrection of the Method of Lachmann: On Building the Stemma of Yvain. In P. van Reenen, M. van Mulken, J. Dyk (Eds). Studies in Stemmatology (pp. 3-70). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Trovato, P. (2014). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann's Method. A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text. Padova: Libreriauniversitaria edizioni.

Folklore Tracks

Ida Storm, Holly Nicol, Georgia Broughton, Timothy R. Tangherlini — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF

Digitization of Material Written in Three Scripts and Three Languages

Marijana Tomić — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

INTRODUCTION

Zadar is a small town situated at the middle of Croatian part of east Adriatic coast. Its convenient geopolitical position, as well as its indented coast contributed to its imposition as an important cultural and political center of Dalmatia throughout the rich history of Croatia. Its university tradition is centuries-old and begins with ecclesiastical education first mentioned in 10th century. In 2002, the University of Zadar was founded and a base of contemporary University is faculty of Philosophy, Teaching College, as well as Dominican university.

Due to its geographical position on the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe, Croatian had a significant role in European history and culture, with a strong influences of Latin as well as Byzantine cultures. The corpus of Croatian Mediaeval literature is therefore written on three scripts – Glagolitic, Latin and Bosnian variant of Cyrillic scripts, called bosanica, and in three languages – Church Slavonic, Croatian redaction of the Church Slavonic language and Latin (Hercigonja, 1999, 2009). Although Glagolitic script was in use in several other countries, it is only in Croatia that it took angular form, used also for the first Croatian printed books, as early as in 1483. The most important Mediaeval written heritage in Croatia is written on Glagolitic and Latin scripts, and an important part of that corpus is nowadays part of collections of heritage institutions in Zadar.

In accordance with current interdisciplinary trends in cataloguing, research and communication of cultural heritage in digital age, the interdisciplinary scientific project Digitization, bibliographic description and research of texts written on Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin scripts until the end of 19th century in Zadar and Šibenik area is being carried out at the University of Zadar in co-operation with Vestigia Manuscript Research Centre of University of Graz, Austria. The goals of the project are: (1) digitization of old and rare books written on Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin scripts, primarily manuscripts (2) Machine readable cataloguing based on existing printed catalogues, making of inventory lists, registration and inclusion of Croatian manuscript and early print, primarily Glagolitic, collections in Croatian and European portals of written heritage. This goal includes the research in the field of information sciences, by focusing on research of standardization of bibliographic description of manuscripts and early prints and their digitization, and in the fields of digital humanities and humanities user needs. In order to achieve this goal, the project connects also to national project Production, publishing and maintaining national cataloguing rules: 2014-2016. This goal became the major goal, as research in semantic web, linked open data and other standards of publication of data, as well as research data are conducted here. FRBR-LRM, CIDOC-CRM and other conceptual models, as well as machine-readable formats are being mapped and researched together with standards for description of manuscripts in different communities, in order to achieve appropriate metadata scheme for the description of manuscripts coming from different institutions. (Varniene-Janssen, Juškys, 2013) (3) Gathering scientists from various scientific fields, especially humanities, interested in research of Croatian written heritage in digital environment, to enable their research of written heritage, to research their needs and to create proper conditions for their research, to digitize the material of their interest, as well as to implement and develop tools for manuscript research in digital environment (tools for transliteration and transcription, visual tagging, etc.) (Holm, Jarrick, Scott, 20015) Some tools are designed specially for palaeographic research of Glagolitic material and will be tested on the project (visual tagging of digitized pictures of Glagolitic and Cyrillic manuscripts) as well as tools for visualization of research data on manuscripts and collections (Essert, et al.); (4) communication of the heritage is an important part of a project, respectively presenting heritage in a contemporary creative and innovative manner to various groups of users, using information technology, web portal, virtual exhibitions, presentations, mapping locations on touristic and other geographic maps as well as in the wider touristic offer. In this goal, inclusion of public is planned, particularly of associations of citizens interested in Glagolitic heritage, the most important segment of Croatian written heritage, following the EU recommendations connected with open science, citizen engagement and citizen researchers in the age of digital culture. As the project supports educational activities at university, it involves students in each project phase and enables conditions for laboratory and field education. In order to achieve those goals, several working groups are formed and workflow with indicated activities and methodology for the activities of each group are designed, and will be presented in this presentation, together with the assumptions for cross-institutional cooperation in the field of digital humanities will be listed on the example of Zadar University and main research goals and expected results will be presented.

REFERENCES

Herciognja, E. (2006) Tropismena i trojezična kultura hrvatskoga srednjovjekovlja. Matica hrvatska, Zagreb.

Hercigonja, E. (1999) Glagolitism and Glagolism. Ivan Supičić (ed.). Croatia in the Early Middle Ages. London: Philip Wilson, pp. 369-400.

Hercigonja, Eduard. 2008. Glagolism in the High Middle Ages. Ivan Supičić (ed.). Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.London: Philip Wilson, 171-226

Essert, M., et al. (2013) XML to visual tags migration: proposed methodologies for the research of digitized Croatian Mediaeval Glagolitic material. Summer School in the Study of Historical Manuscripts: Proceedings. University of Zadar.

Varniene-Janssen, R., Juškys, J. (2013) Strategic, methodological and technical solutions for the creation of seamless content of the digital cultural heritage: Lithuanian approach. Summer School in the Study of Historical Manuscripts: Proceedings. University of Zadar.

Clemens, R., Graham, T. (2007) Introduction to manuscript studies. Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London

Savenije, B., Beunen, A (2012) Cultural Heritage and the Public Domain. // Liber Querterly : the journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 80-97

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Available at: https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

Terras, M., Nyhan, J. Vanhoutte, E. ed. (2013) Defining digital humanities: a reader. Ashgate, Burlington.

Warwich, C. (2012) Studying users in digital humanities. Digital humanities in practice. Facet Publishing, London.

Holm, P., Jarrick, A., Scott, D. (2015) Humanities World Report. Palgrave Macmillan

Warwick, C. (2012) Institutional models for digital humanities Digital humanities in practice. Facet Publishing, London.

When Big(gish) Data Goes Online

Jukka Tyrkkö — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

The last three decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in the number and volume of linguistic corpora available to the research community. Structured corpora comprising hundreds of millions or even billions of words of data are no longer unusual, and unstructured data sets such as Google Books, which are increasingly used in a very corpus-like manner, can encompass over a hundred billion words. Many of these large datasets are also made available online, and server-side query tools such as CQPweb, SketchEngine and the Brigham Young front-end to MySQL make it easy for anyone to use very large corpora both quickly and efficiently. While these corpora may fall short of criteria used to define ‘big data’ in some disciplines, the volume of text available is typically far beyond anything a single researcher or a research team could ever hope to process either manually or with the help of rudimentary search tools. However, while online corpora do open up new worlds of discovery, they also typically impose considerable limits to the types of queries available, provide quantitative data in difficult to process and sometimes misleading manner, and generally do not allow the researcher direct access to the underlying full datasets, more often than not for reasons of copyright and publishing agreements.

Although many of these large text collections and corpora were primarily designed with the linguist in mind, scholars from a wide variety of fields within the humanities and social sciences are also increasingly turning to these data sets for both qualitative and quantitative evidence, such as finding illustrative quotes or indications of diachronic trends that support theoretical arguments. Instead of extrapolating arguments from small and necessarily anecdotal evidence, humanities scholars are increasingly open to the idea of studying cultural, societal and political questions using ‘big data’ and methodologies such as culturomics (Michel et al 2011; Nunberg 2010) and distant reading (Moretti 2005). As the conceptual and methodological worlds of qualitative and quantitative research collide, the new challenge is how to operationalize joint research endeavors in the most beneficial fashion (see, e.g., McEnery and Baker 2016).

In this paper, I will discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that these large data sets and online interfaces can bring about, drawing examples from a collaborative project involving a team of social scientists and a corpus linguist. Using the British Hansard Corpus, a computer-readable, richly annotated edition of British Parliamentary debates (1803-2005), our objective has been to challenge certain claims made in political science about country references in historical political discourse, namely, that references to foreign nation states as examples to be followed only emerged as a major discursive strategy of policy-making around the time of the Second World War (Meyer et al 1997). The 1.6-billion-word dataset, which includes 7.6 million speeches delivered by over 40,000 MPs, is a new kind of historical corpus: not a sample drawn from an amorphous population, but an exhaustive and arguable complete record of a specific well-defined register of language use. Fully annotated both for standard linguistic variables and semantically tagged using data from and the conceptual network developed for the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Samuels semantic tagger (Alexander et al in press), the Hansard corpus has proven extremely useful and informative, but the data has also coughed up various surprises and potential problems, particularly if one were to rely solely on the online interface. In the present paper, the pros and cons of the online version and the standalone corpus are discussed and evaluated with particular reference to their usefulness in cross-disciplinary (digital) humanities projects, where efficient data management and ease of accessibility have to be balanced with the inherent complexity of textual accounts of ideas and concepts.

References

Alexander, Marc and Mark Davies. 2015-. Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. Available online at http://www.hansard-corpus.org.

Alexander, Marc, Fraser Dallachy, Scott Piao, Alistair Baron, Paul Rayson. In Press. Metaphor, Popular Science and Semantic Tagging: Distant reading with the Historical Thesaurus of English’. In Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH).

Alasuutari, Pertti, Marjaana Rautalin and Jukka Tyrkkö. Accepted. The formation of interdependent decision-making: The case of British Parliament, 1803-2005. Presentation to be delivered at The Australian Sociological Association conference. Melbourne. 28.11-1.12.2016.

McEnery, Anthony and Helen Baker. 2016. Corpus Linguistics and 17th-century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History. (Corpus and Discourse). London: Bloomsmury Academic.

Meyer John W, John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O Ramirez. 1997. World Society and the Nation-State. In American Journal of Sociology. 103(1): 144–181.

Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Erez Lieberman Aiden et al. 2011. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. In Science 331, 176-182 (published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010). <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.pdf>.

Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.

Nunberg, Geoff. 2010. Humanties research with the Google Books corpus. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2847.

Keeping the human in the digital

Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

In this presentation, Anderson will share some of the design principles that have informed a data science program that draws on theory and practice straddling the humanities, social science and computational disciplines. The first two years of this program’s operation reveal insights about opportunities for transdisciplinary approaches to tackle ‘wicked’ problems. In the MDSI, students tackle large, complex data challenges within a human-centred data science program. Students are encouraged to develop a critical mind that thinks ethically and systemically about the uses of data and analytics and to embrace the ambiguities and uncertainties (both present and emerging) that working with data “in the wild” entails. Engaging with the analytical, ethical and creative challenges of data science practice foregrounds social concerns about data and technology.

Digital Humanities in DARIAH EU

Marianne Ping Huang — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

How do Digital Humanities and digital research infrastructures fit? How much tech, how many researchers, how many partners does it take to forge a dynamic and scalable network, with a fitting layer of services? Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, DARIAH-EU is built for researchers, by researchers – the presentation will give an impression of mission, scope, dynamics, and challenges of DARIAH-EU. And suggest how to collaborate on European strategies for digital transformation in the arts and humanities.

Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

The particular exploration of new ways of interactions between society and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) with a focus on the Humanities has the potential to become a key success factor for the values and competitiveness of the Nordic region, having in mind recent EU and regional political discussions in the field of Digital Humanities (European Commission, 2016; Vetenskapsrådet’s Rådet för forskningens infrastrukturer, 2014). Digital Humanities (DH) is a diverse and still emerging field that lies at the intersection of ICT and Humanities, which is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners in a range of disciplines (see, for example, Svensson & Goldberg, 2015; Gardiner & Musto, 2015; Schreibman, Siemens, & Unsworth, 2016). The following are examples of current areas of fields and topics: text-analytic techniques, categorization, data mining; Social Network Analysis (SNA) and bibliometrics; metadata and tagging; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); multimedia and interactive games; visualisation; media.

DARIAH-EU (http://dariah.eu), is Europe’s largest initiative on DH, comprising over 300 researchers in 18 countries, thereby opening up opportunities for international collaboration and projects. Of Nordic countries, Denmark is the full partner with four universities, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg and University of Southern Denmark. Danish DARIAH activities are facilitated by the national DH Infrastructure DIGHUMLAB, hosted at the DARIAH-DK coordinating institution, Aarhus University. Sweden’s first university, Linnaeus University, joined in May 2016 as a collaborative partner. Finland (University of Helsinki) and Norway (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) have taken action to join by the end of 2016 also, as collaborative partners.

The idea of forming the Nordic Hub of DARIAH-EU has been recently brought forward by Mike Mertens, the Head of DARIAH-EU. It was met by enthusiasm among the representatives of the listed universities, who would at this panel like to present and discuss possible joint opportunities and challenges in Nordic DH. With its tradition in supporting the Humanities research and development, Nordic countries may serve as a bastion for (Digital) Humanities. The Nordic Hub of DARIAH-EU may pay the way forward towards reaching that aim.

CURRENT EFFORTS (PROJECTS, R&D AND EDUCATION)

Koraljka Golub and Marcelo Milrad will present and analyse the cross-sector and cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities Initiative at Linnaeus University along the axes of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Their long-term vision is to create a leading education in this field and to establish a leading research regional centre that combines in novel ways already existing expertise from different departments and faculties working in close collaboration and co-creation with people and different organizations (both public and private sector) from the surrounding society.

Marianne Ping Huang will present the Danish DIGHUMLAB, with specific focus on the DARIAH-related activities with the national DH research infrastructure, which is now bidding for its second period on the DK road map for research infrastructures. The presentation will include a presentation of the Danish participation for DH and open cross sectorial innovation with DARIAH Humanities at Scale (2015-2017) and how this intersects with Aarhus being European Capital of Culture 2017.

Mikko Tolonen and Inés Matres will present the ongoing development at the University of Helsinki (and in Finland) regarding digital humanities. This includes the recently launched Heldig (digital humanities centre https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/helsinki-digital-humanities) and how it can relate to collaboration in Dariah. Matres will also discuss a survey about Finnish needs about networking within Dariah that she has been mapping before Växjö conference.

Andreas Bergsland will discuss the role of digital humanities (DH) at NTNU, a technology and science university with an explicit mission of public humanities. He will present several ongoing initiatives: the ARTEC interdisciplinary task force, DH projects in linguistics, print and sound cultures, digital storytelling and performance, archives, and pedagogy. Bergsland will conclude by reflecting on the opportunities and challenges of promoting critical, sustainable, ethical, and interdisciplinary DH at NTNU in partnership with academic and nonacademic actors and local and global networks such as DARIAH.

PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES

Major opportunities in DH in Nordic countries lie in the collaborative democratic tradition that supports re- combining already existing expertise and resources encompassing 1) different universities, 2) various disciplines, and 3) the wider community through input from related public and private sectors. These points serve to unite and consolidate already existing expertise in order to create new constellations for collaboration leading to new knowledge and products (expertise, education, research, public and relevant commercial services). Possibilities to collaborate across Nordic countries can take place at a number of levels, including joint research and innovation, education efforts, expertise and experience exchange, bringing in international views to address more regional challenges. Ensuing important value for the general public could be a (re)-affirmation of the value of humanities in particular, and academic practices in general.

Challenges would be discussed in terms of the emerging job market, the low number of students pursuing carriers in humanities at the Master level (e.g., in Sweden), and the fact that DH as a field is still in its infancy, leading to it being quite difficult to get funding and grants to carry out long-term research that sustain our efforts over time. Not the least, epistemological, conceptual and terminological differences in approaches by the different disciplines and sectors may present further challenges and therefore may require additional resources to reach an understanding. Further, while there is a strong collaborative spirit across Nordic countries, there will certainly be administrative issues with cross-university collaboration as the current working structures are based on individual units.

REFERENCES

European Commission. (2016). Horizon 2020: Social Sciences & Humanities. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/area/social-sciences-humanities

Gardiner, E. and Musto, R. G. (2015). The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vetenskapsrådet’s Rådet för forskningens infrastrukturer. (2014). Områdesöverikt för forskningens infrastrukturer. Available at http://www.vr.se/download/18.2302fa711489c4798d4a35fa/1411461229423/Samtliga+områden+infrastruktur.pdf

Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., and Unsworth, J. (2016). A New Companion to Digital Humanities. (2nd ed.). Malden, MA; Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Svensson, P., and Goldberg, D. T. (Eds.). (2015). Between Humanities and the Digital. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.

Preface

Koraljka Golub, Marcelo Milrad — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

See PDF