Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities

user interfaces; human computer interaction; computers and societ

Documenting resistance, conflict and violence: a scoping review of the role of participatory digital platforms in the mobilisation of resistance

In recent years, grassroots movements have gained traction and significant numbers globally. Against longer histories of resistance and protest movements’ mobilisation of documentation, mechanisation and digital technologies, this scoping literature review seeks to understand how resistance and social movements have drawn upon the participatory and easily accessible nature of social media and digital platforms to mobilise new generations of activists, create new archives, document activities and abuses, call for accountability and overwrite or challenge the narratives put forward by mainstream media outlets and state archives. We identify relevant projects, explore the activist potential and threats of the combination of digital technologies, social movements, and documentary or archival practice, before concluding by identifying open research questions in relation to digital technologies, social movements and archival practice

Exploring the possibilities of Thomson’s fourth paradigm transformation—The case for a multimodal approach to digital oral history?

This article seeks to reorientate ‘digital oral history’ towards a new research paradigm, Multimodal Digital Oral History (MDOH), and in so doing it seeks to build upon Alistair Thomson’s (Thomson, A., 2007, Four paradigm transformations in oral history. Oral History Review, 34(1): 49–70.) characterization of a ‘dizzying digital revolution’ and paradigmatic transformation in oral history (OH). Calling for a recalibration of the current dominance of the textual transcript, and for active engagement with the oral, aural, and sonic affordances of both retro-digitized and born digital OH (DOH) collections, we call for a re-orientation of the digital from passive to generative and self-reflexive in the human–machine study of spoken word recordings. First, we take stock of the field of DOH as it is currently conceived and the ways in which it has or has not answered calls for a return to the orality of the interview by digital means. Secondly, we address the predominant trend of working with transcriptions in digital analysis of spoken word recordings and the tools being used by oral historians. Thirdly, we ask about the emerging possibilities—tools and experimental methodologies—for sonic analysis of spoken word collections within and beyond OH, looking to intersections with digital humanities, sociolinguistics, and sound studies. Lastly, we consider ethical questions and practicalities concomitant with data-driven methods, analyses and technologies like AI for the study of sonic research artefacts, reflections that dovetail with digital hermeneutics and digital tool criticism and point towards a new MDOH departure, a sub-field that has potential to inform the many fields that seek patterns in audio, audio-visual, and post-textual materials, serially and at scale

Gender influences in Digital Humanities co-authorship networks

PURPOSE: This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed. FINDINGS: The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation

Exploring international collaboration and language dynamics in Digital Humanities: insights from co-authorship networks in canonical journals

Purpose: This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH) journals. In particular, it seeks to detect patterns in authors' countries of work and languages in co-authorship networks. // Design/methodology/approach: Through an in-depth co-authorship network analysis, this study analysed bibliometric data from three canonical DH journals over a range of 52 years (1966–2017). The results are presented as visualised networks with centrality calculations. // Findings: The results suggest that while DH scholars may not collaborate as frequently as those in other disciplines, when they do so their collaborations tend to be more international than in many Science and Engineering, and Social Sciences disciplines. DH authors in some countries (e.g. Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, and the UK) have the highest international co-author rates, while others have high national co-author rates but low international rates (e.g. Japan, the USA, and France). // Originality/value: This study is the first DH co-authorship network study that explores the apparent connection between language and collaboration patterns in DH. It contributes to ongoing debates about diversity, representation, and multilingualism in DH and academic publishing more widely

Of global reach yet of situated contexts:An examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers

A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives. The end user is not often emphasised in the wider literature on archival studies and we thus draw attention to the potential merit of this vector in future studies of digital archives

Documenting resistance, conflict and violence: a scoping review of the role of participatory digital platforms in the mobilisation of resistance

In recent years, grassroots movements have gained traction and significant numbers globally. Against longer histories of resistance and protest movements’ mobilisation of documentation, mechanisation and digital technologies, this scoping literature review seeks to understand how resistance and social movements have drawn upon the participatory and easily accessible nature of social media and digital platforms to mobilise new generations of activists, create new archives, document activities and abuses, call for accountability and overwrite or challenge the narratives put forward by mainstream media outlets and state archives. We identify relevant projects, explore the activist potential and threats of the combination of digital technologies, social movements, and documentary or archival practice, before concluding by identifying open research questions in relation to digital technologies, social movements and archival practice

Towards a Network Analysis of Hans Sloane's Collection: A Preliminary Study

“The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections” is a 3-year project funded by the UKRI Towards a National Collection programme. The project aims to re-establish connections between Sloane’s collections and catalogues and to mend the broken links between the past and present of the UK's founding collection in the catalogues of the British Museum (BM), Natural History Museum (NHM) and the British Library (BL). Engaging with interested communities and employing digital technology, the project will integrate a fragmented cultural heritage collection and enable its unification through a participatory lens. The collection was amassed by Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), who gathered and, with his amanuenses, catalogued more than 70,000 disparate objects which formed the initial nucleus of the original British Museum (the collection was then dispersed across the present-day BM, BL, and NHM). The project will integrate disparate data sources, ranging from historical catalogues to contemporary records, and will enable a wide analysis of Sloane’s extensive social network. As shown by James Delbourgo, Sloane’s collection was “not the achievement of a single individual, but rather the result of exchanges involving countless people across the globe” (Collecting the World, 2017, p. 202). Sloane’s historical catalogues contain many references to people and places, but this data has never been studied extensively through network analysis methods. Our goal is to build a graph of Sloane’s social network by analysing mentions of people in the catalogues, to further understand the connections between them. In addition, we hope to devise computational approaches that can focalize the “data absences” that affect the collection, centring the biases that affected heritage description practices, and drawing attention to people who had an important role in the collection, but whose contribution has been historically overlooked or is now lost. At present, we have access to the digital versions of five of Sloane’s historical manuscript catalogues, which have been encoded in TEI-XML format in the Enlightenment Architectures project. We have started our study from the Miscellanea manuscript, which actually contains seven separate catalogues, plus two indices. We have built a parser to extract data about people and places from the catalogues from the XML files, and gathered more information about them through VIAF and Wikidata. We have then analysed the networks of people and places in the whole dataset, visualised the data, and compared the individual catalogues to understand how their social networks are linked, how they differ from each other, and how they relate to the places and to the objects themselves. In this presentation, we will show the results of our initial analysis, which will then be expanded to other historical catalogues and data sources, laying the foundations for a more complete understanding of the social network behind Sloane’s collection