It is time to address the Public Communication of DH

This introduction addresses two facets of the communication of Digital Humanities (DH) that have framed this special edition of DHQ. I begin by discussing a number of articles about DH that have relatively recently appeared in mainstream newspapers. I then observe that a number of these articles not only show an impoverished understanding of the field’s frame of reference but also misrepresent various aspects of it, for example, its interrelationship with the Humanities. Given that many academic publications on the question "what is DH?" have appeared in recent years, yet DH is, nonetheless, misrepresented in this way, I propose that the field must look again at the communication of its activities "in the round." Now that DH is arguably moving from the margins to the mainstream I propose that the time has come to address what we might call the "Public Communication of DH" so that we can better communicate to the general public and academics working in other disciplines what it is that we do. As the nature of DH’s relationship to the Humanities is one that is frequently misrepresented in the mainstream media I propose that this would be an important area for endeavours in the "Public Communication of DH" to address and explore as early as possible. The articles included in this special edition enrich and expand ongoing conversations about the nature of this relationship. In doing so they make available a wealth of case studies, arguments and insights that can, in due course, be drawn on to further the "Public Communication of DH.

Does correcting myths about the flu vaccine work? An experimental evaluation of the effects of corrective information

Seasonal influenza is responsible for thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of medical costs per year in the United States, but influenza vaccination coverage remains substantially below public health targets. One possible obstacle to greater immunization rates is the false belief that it is possible to contract the flu from the flu vaccine. A nationally representative survey experiment was conducted to assess the extent of this flu vaccine misperception. We find that a substantial portion of the public (43%) believes that the flu vaccine can give you the flu. We also evaluate how an intervention designed to address this concern affects belief in the myth, concerns about flu vaccine safety, and future intent to vaccinate. Corrective information adapted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website significantly reduced belief in the myth that the flu vaccine can give you the flu as well as concerns about its safety. However, the correction also significantly reduced intent to vaccinate among respondents with high levels of concern about vaccine side effects--a response that was not observed among those with low levels of concern. This result, which is consistent with previous research on misperceptions about the MMR vaccine, suggests that correcting myths about vaccines may not be an effective approach to promoting immunization

Displacing misinformation about events: An experimental test of causal corrections

PublishedMisinformation can be very difficult to correct and may have lasting effects even after it is discredited. One reason for this persistence is the manner in which people make causal inferences based on available information about a given event or outcome. As a result, false information may continue to influence beliefs and attitudes even after being debunked if it is not replaced by an alternate causal explanation. We test this hypothesis using an experimental paradigm adapted from the psychology literature on the continued influence effect and find that a causal explanation for an unexplained event is significantly more effective than a denial even when the denial is backed by unusually strong evidence. This result has significant implications for how to most effectively counter misinformation about controversial political events and outcomes.We are grateful to Democracy Fund and the New America Foundation for funding support and to Rune Slothuus and Dannagal Young for helpful comments

Enlightenment Architectures and the reconstruction of Sir Hans Sloane's Cabinets of Miscellanies

Focusing on Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogue of ‘Miscellanies’, now in the British Museum, this paper asks firstly how Sloane described objects and secondly whether the original contents of the cabinets can be reconstructed from his catalogue. Drawing on a sustained, digitally augmented analysis – the first of its kind – of Sloane’s catalogues, we respond to these questions and offer an initial analysis of the contents of the cabinets that held the miscellaneous objects at Sloane’s manor house in Chelsea. Knowledge of how and why Sloane catalogued this part of his collection has hitherto remained underdeveloped. We argue that his focus on preservation and documentation in his cataloguing did not preclude a research role, but rather was founded on immersive participation. Our work was undertaken as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded research project, Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections (2016–19), a collaboration between the British Museum and University College London

Joint and multi-authored publication patterns in the Digital Humanities

The stereotype of the multi-authored Digital Humanities paper is well known but has not, until now, been empirically investigated. Here we present the results of a statistical analysis of collaborative publishing patterns in Computers and the Humanities (CHum) (1966–2004); Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC) (1986–2011); and, as a control, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAAG) (1966–2013) in order to take a first step towards investigating concepts of ‘collaboration’ in Digital Humanities. We demonstrate that in two core Digital Humanities journals, CHum and LLC, single-authored papers predominate. In AAAG, single-authored papers are also predominant. In regard to multi-authored papers the statistically significant increases are more wide-ranging in AAAG than in either LLC or CHum, with increases in all forms of multi-authorship. The author connectivity scores show that in CHum, LLC, and AAAG, there is a relatively small cohort of authors who co-publish with a wide set of other authors, and a longer tail of authors for whom co-publishing is less common

Museum Mobile Guide Preferences of Different Visitor Personas

Personalising museum mobile guides is widely acknowledged as being important for enhancing the visitor experience. Due to the lack of information about an individual visitor and the relatively limited time of his or her visit, adapting the user interface based on a museum visitor's type is a promising approach to personalisation. This approach first requires a mechanism to identify the visitor type (‘persona’) and, second, knowledge of the preferences and needs of different types to apply personalisation. In this article, we report a face-to-face questionnaire study carried out with 105 visitors to Scitech, a science and technology visitor centre. The study aims to investigate the main facts required to identify a visitor persona and to explore the preferences of different visitor personas for particular mobile guide features. We limited our concern to the user interface features of the guide (e.g., whether it provides recommendations for related items to view) rather than what content and services the guide provides (e.g., what related items are recommended). We found that we can reliably identify the visitor persona using two multiple choice questions about visit motivation and perceived success criteria. In addition, we found that visitors have significant preferences for particular features such as presentation media, venue navigation tool, object suggestions, details level, accessing external links, exhibit information retrieval method and social interaction features such as voice communication, instant messaging, group games and challenges. Some features were found to be preferred differently by different personas such as the challenges feature, some were found to be preferred by personas differently to the overall preference such as in presentation media, and some were found to be preferred by some personas with no particular preference for others such as a venue navigation tool. Instant messaging was found to be significantly not preferred by all personas. The results provide a basis for personalisation of museum guides and services using a personas approach, which is a solution where data about individual users may be limited and where the individual configuration of a user interface may not be practical or warranted

Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue: on the potential of digital technologies to perpetuate or subvert the silence and bias of the early-modern archive

The subjectivities that shape data collection and management have received extensive criticism, especially with regards to the digitisation projects and digital archives of GLAM institutions. The role of digital methods for recovering data absences is increasingly receiving attention too. Conceptualising the absence of non-hegemonic individuals from the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane as an instance of textual haunting, this paper will ask: to what extent do data-driven approaches further entrench archival absences and silences? Can digital approaches be used to highlight or recover absent data? This paper will give a decisive overview of relevant literature and projects so as to examine how digital tools are being realigned to recover, or more modestly acknowledge, the vast, undocumented network of individuals who have been omitted from canonical histories. Drawing on the example of Sloane, this paper will reiterate the importance of a more rigorous ethics of digital practice, and propose recommendations for the management and representation of historical data, so cultural heritage institutions and digital humanists may better inform users of the absences and subjectivities that shape digital datasets and archives. This article is built on a comprehensive survey of digital humanities’ current algorithmic approaches to absence and bias. It also presents reflections on how we, the authors, grappled with unforeseen questions of absence and bias during a Leverhulme-funded collaboration between the British Museum and UCL, entitled ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his collections’

Reflections on Infrastructures for Mining Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Data

In this study we compare and contrast our experiences (as historians and as digital humanities and information studies researchers) of seeking to mine large-scale historical datasets via university-based, high-performance computing infrastructures versus our experiences of using external, cloud-hosted platforms and tools to mine the same data. In particular, we reflect on our recent experiences in two large transnational digital humanities projects: Asymmetrical Encounters: E-Humanity Approaches to Reference Cultures in Europe, 1815–1992, which was funded by a Humanities in the European Research Area grant (2013–2016) and Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories 1840–1914, which was funded through the Transatlantic Partnership for Social Sciences and Humanities 2016 Digging into Data Challenge (2017–2019). As part of the research for both these projects we sought to mine the OCR text of nineteenth-century historical newspapers that had been mounted on UCL’s HighPerformance Computing Infrastructures from Gale’s TDM drives. We compare and contrast our experiences of this with our subsequent experiences of performing comparable tasks via Gale Digital Scholar Lab. We contextualise our experiences and observations within wider discourses and recommendations about infrastructural support for humanities-led analyses of large datasets and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of both approaches. We situate our discussions in the aforementioned infrastructural scenarios with reflections on the human experiences of undertaking this research, which represents a step change for many of those who work in the (digital) humanities. Finally, we conclude by discussing the public and private sector research investments that are needed to support further developments and to facilitate access to and critical interrogation of large-scale digital archive