Disciplined: Using educational studies to analyse 'Humanities Computing'

Humanities Computing is an emergent field. The activities described as 'Humanities Computing' continue to expand in number and sophistication, yet no concrete definition of the field exists, and there are few academic departments that specialize in this area. Most introspection regarding the role, meaning, and focus of "Humanities Computing" has come from a practical and pragmatic perspective from scholars and educators within the field itself. This article provides an alternative, externalized, viewpoint of the focus of Humanities Computing, by analysing the discipline through its community, research, curriculum, teaching programmes, and the message they deliver, either consciously or unconsciously, about the scope of the discipline. It engages with Educational Theory to provide a means to analyse, measure, and define the field, and focuses specifically on the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference to identify and analyse those who are involved with the humanities computing community. © 2006 Oxford University Press

The Palaeographical Method under the Light of a Digital Approach

This paper has the twofold aim of reflecting upon a humanities computing approach to palaeography, and of making such reflections - together with its related experimental results - fruitful at the implementation level. Firstly, the paper explores the methodological issues related to the use of a digital tool to support the palaeographical analysis of medieval handwriting. It claims that humanities computing methods can assist in making explicit those processes of the palaeographical research that encompass detailed analyses, in particular of the handwriting and, more generally, of other idiosyncratic features of written cultural artefacts. Thus, palaeographical tools are to be contextualised and used within a broader methodological framework where their role is to mediate the vision, the comparison, the representation, the analysis and the interpretation of these objects. Secondly, the paper attempts to evaluate the experimentations carried out with a specific software and, in so doing, to test a humanities computing approach to palaeography at a practical level, so as to direct future implementations. Some of these implementations have already been carried out by the current developers of the application in question with whom the author collaborates closely, while others are still in progress and in need of future iterative refinements

Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

The role of humanities computing: experiences and challenges

Dieser Beitrag wurde anlässlich des dreißigjährigen Bestehens der Abteilung Literarische und Dokumentarische Datenverarbeitung an der Universität Tübingen verfasst. Er gibt einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der Datenverarbeitung auf dem Gebiet der Geisteswissenschaften in diesem Zeitraum. Zunächst werden Erfahrungen mit der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften referiert und aktuelle Entwicklungen auf diesem Gebiet vorgestellt. Dann werden Herausforderungen diskutiert, mit denen sich die Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften konfrontiert sieht. Abschließend stellt der Verfasser die Bedeutung der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften in den kommenden Jahren aus seiner Sicht dar. (ICEÜbers)'Due to the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Department for Literary and Documentary Data Processing in Tuebingen this article is written. It gives an overview of humanities computing developments since the formation of this Research-Department. The paper is divided into three parts. First, the experiences in humanities computing are reviewed. For three purposes the author points out various aspects of the development and exploitation of scholarly materials using computers, considering some of the current work to create new tools for research. This chapter is followed by the discussion of some of the key challenges of this century, by that humanities computing and the scholarship, of which it is a part, are faced with. Finally, the author gives a summary of what in his opinion would be the key rotes of humanities computing in the future.' (author's abstract

The Origins of Humanities Computing and the Digital Humanities Turn

At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems

The Humanities Computing Center and Library Collaboration in New Scholarly Communication Processes

This is a postprint of an article published in Advances in Librarianship, vol 26 (2002). Complete citation of published version: Vinopal, Jennifer. 'The Humanities Computing Center and Library Collaboration in New Scholarly Communication Processes.' Advances in Librarianship 26 (2002): 91-126

Debates in the Digital Humanities Formerly Known as Humanities Computing

published_or_final_versio

Appropriate Use Case modeling for humanities documents

This article details a modeling methodology that is appropriate for historical, functional documents that are to be digitally represented and hosted within a software environment for humanities research. The functionality is derived from Use Case modeling that can be undertaken in consultation with the User Group. The Use Cases are an expression of the whole-system model as they embody the interaction of User, with the document, in the software environment. The encoding mechanism largely practiced within the humanities computing community is represented by the TEI, which seeks to provide a set of guidelines for encoding humanities documents. However, TEI offers no guidance in relation to creating an encoding of a document that is supportive of the software environment that will host it, the interaction mechanisms required, or the User. We argue that modeling with recourse to the Logical, the Physical and the Interaction classes enables not just the generation of an appropriate encoding scheme, but also the software to manipulate it. We situate Use Case methodology within Activity Theory and relate this to the humanities computing community. The argument is framed in relation to the creation of a digital edition of an 18th century Spanish Account Book manuscript