The relationship between computer science and digital humanities and the potential contributions of computer science to digital humanities cannot be reasonably discussed without defining what we mean by “digital humanities.”  With a view to enabling this important discussion, we propose a concise definition of digital humanities centered around the construction of formal models

Piotrowski, Michael

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Serveur académique lausannois

Veröffentlicht durch die Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. 2018 inM. Burghardt & C. Müller-Birn (Hrsg.): INF-DH 2018 – Workshopband, 25. Sept. 2018,BerlinCopyright © 2018 bei den Autoren. https://doi.org/10.18420/infdh2018-07Digital Humanities: An ExplicationMichael PiotrowskiDepartment of Language and Information Sciences, University of LausanneAbstractThe relationship between computer science and digital humanities and the potential contributions ofcomputer science to digital humanities cannot be reasonably discussed without defining what we mean by“digital humanities.” With a view to enabling this important discussion, we propose a concise definition ofdigital humanities centered around the construction of formal models.1 IntroductionWhen discussing the relationship between computer science and digital humanities—or, asthe call for this workshop put it, “where and how computer science can play a part in the fast-growing field of digital humanities”—it is essential to define this field. The definition of digitalhumanities has been discussed at length, in books, articles, blog posts, and on social media.Kirschenbaum (2012) argues that the “network effects” of blogs and Twitter have turned the termdigital humanities into a “free-floating signifier.” The multifariousness of its understandingsis succinctly summarized by Ramsay: “the term can mean anything from media studies toelectronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, whileinviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, freeculture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas” (Ramsay,2013, p. 239f). Some go as far as to claim that “we will never know what digital humanities ‘is’because we don’t want to know nor is it useful for us to know.” (Kirschenbaum, 2014, p. 59)In fact, the question is neither what digital humanities is ontologically, nor how to exhaustivelydescribe “the disparate activities carried on under its banner” (Kirsch, 2014), but rather how wewant to define it—what Carnap called an explication.1 We also contend that it is not only “useful”to explicate, but crucial: the creation of academic positions, departments, and programs requiresa consensus around an explicit definition—otherwise, how would one ensure the relevance andquality of research, the comparability of degree programs (and thus student mobility), or theadequate evaluation of research programs and thus their financing? And clearly no meaningfulcollaboration will be possible if the field refuses to define itself.1“By the procedure of explication we mean the transformation of an inexact, prescientific concept, the explicandum,into a new exact concept, the explicatum. Although the explicandum cannot be given in exact terms, it should bemade as clear as possible by informal explanations and examples.” (Carnap, 1950, p. 3)2 Michael Piotrowski2 ApproachWe think the problem of defining digital humanities is unnecessarily exacerbated by confoundinga number of related, but actually distinct issues. In short, we posit that any field of research(regardless of whether one wants to consider it a discipline or not) is ultimately defined by aunique combination of (1) a research object and (2) a research objective. Research methodsare secondary in that they are contingent on the research object and the research objective, aswell as on technical and scientific progress, which both requires them to adapt and permits themto evolve, whereas the research object and the research objective remain stable. Furthermore,disciplines have always used a variety of methods; for example, while qualitative methods arecertainly “typical” for many humanities disciplines, quantitative methods have always beenused as well. This means that it is not useful to attempt to define digital humanities (or any otherfield or discipline for that matter) by way of the methods it happens to use at some point.Despite the hype currently surrounding the digital humanities, it is neither the first nor the onlyencounter of computer science with other disciplines. In our context, computational linguisticsmay be a particularly relevant example. Linguistics is the study of human language; like any otherfield of research, it studies its research object by creating models of it. Computational linguisticsessentially only differs from “traditional” linguistics by creating computational models oflanguage—which have the important advantages that they (a) are formal and (b) executable,and can thus—among other things—be automatically tested against large amounts of actuallinguistic utterances. Note, however, that the research object and the research objective remainthe same. The construction of computational models of human language poses a number ofspecific challenges that differ from other domains, including related ones, such as formallanguages. We can thus identify two subfields: applied computational linguistics, which createsformal models of particular languages, and theoretical computational linguistics, which servesas a kind of “metascience” for the former, studying the means and methods of constructingcomputational models in linguistics in general and providing the “building materials.” Whileapplied computational linguistics is essentially linguistics, theoretical computational linguisticscan thus (regardless of its disciplinary or institutional status) be considered a part of computerscience rather than linguistics: it does not study human language, but rather computational issuesin modeling human language.2If we apply these considerations to digital humanities, we can define digital humanities in thefollowing precise fashion:1. research on and development of means and methods for constructing formal models inthe humanities (theoretical digital humanities), and2. the application of these means and methods for the construction of concrete formal modelsin the humanities disciplines (applied digital humanities).2This characterization is obviously an abstraction; in practice the boundaries are often less clear, and theoretical andapplied computational linguistics frequently overlap with each other and with natural language processing, theengineering discipline based on computational linguistics.Digital Humanities: An Explication 3From a computer science perspective this definition seems obvious. While others, in particularMcCarty (2014), Thaller (2017), and Meunier (2017) (and to some extent Flanders and Jannidis,2016) have expressed similar views, we are still far from a general consensus. The focus isgenerally on “tools,” reflections on modeling remain relatively rare; Beynon et al. (2006), Stokes(2012), Bradley and Pasin (2013), or Ciula and Eide (2016) are notable exceptions.The construction of models in the humanities is not per se new—all research is based onmodels, and the choice “is not whether to build models; it’s whether to build explicit ones.”(Epstein, 2008) In contrast to much of the natural and engineering sciences, however, models inthe humanities are traditionally not formal (and thus explicit) but rather tend to be expressedinformally in natural language. Consequently, they do not lend themselves to computationalimplementation as directly as mathematical models. Furthermore, research questions in thehumanities are primarily qualitative rather than quantitative, which, too, has held back the fulladoption of the computer as a modeling tool rather than just as a writing tool and a “knowledgejukebox.” (McCarty, 2014, p. 27)Obviously many types and forms of relationships between computer science and digital humani-ties can be envisaged, but from our above definition two basic scenarios—corresponding to thetwo subfields—can be identified.First, applied digital humanities is driven by humanities research questions. In order to studya question computationally, scholars need to construct formal models of their research object.This is a new task for the humanities, but a task that cannot be delegated—the constructionof the model is a central part of the research process. Here computer science can support theformalization by proposing adequate modeling frameworks. Adequacy here concerns two mainaspects: (1) whether the modeling framework is applicable and provides the necessary “buildingmaterials,” and (2) whether the modeling framework is computationally feasible.Second, if no adequate framework exists, wemove to the domain of theoretical digital humanities.Research in theoretical digital humanities (which is as yet rare) is obviously motivated by therequirements of research in the humanities, but has its own research object: the means andmethods for constructing formal models in the humanities. Regardless of its disciplinary orinstitutional status, it is a field close to computer science, operating, by definition, on a higherlevel of abstraction than applied digital humanities, aiming to address classes of problems. Thesecan, in principle, concern all areas of computer science; some likely focus areas are uncertainty,sparse data, qualitative modeling, or graph algorithms—areas in which the requirements of thehumanities differ from those of other fields of application.3 ConclusionIn many disciplines, e.g., physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, and computer science itself,but also in some disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (computational linguistics,computational social science), computational modeling has demonstrated that it can significantlyadvance (and not just accelerate or automate) research.4 Michael PiotrowskiWe believe that the (double) definition of digital humanities centered around formal modelingwe have proposed above offers a foundation for its sustainable development by clarifying itsrelationship to other disciplines, notably computer science. This will help to identify potentialcontributions of computer science but also to identify roles and responsibilities in interdisci-plinary collaborations, some of which we have briefly outlined.ReferencesBeynon, M., Russ, S., & McCarty, W. (2006). Human computing—modelling with meaning.Literary and Linguistic Computing, 21(2), 141–157. doi:10.1093/llc/fql015Bradley, J., & Pasin, M. (2013). Structuring that which cannot be structured: A role for formalmodels in representing aspects of medieval Scotland. In New perspectives on medievalscotland, 1093–1286 (Vol. 32, pp. 203–214). Woodbridge, England: Boydell and Brewer.Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt31nk19.15Carnap, R. (1950). Logical foundations of probability. Chicago, IL, USA: University of ChicagoPress.Ciula, A., & Eide, Ø. (2016). Modelling in digital humanities: Signs in context. Digital Scholar-ship in the Humanities, 32(Supplement 1), i33–i46. doi:10.1093/llc/fqw045Epstein, J. M. (2008). Why model? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(4).Retrieved from http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/4/12.htmlFlanders, J., & Jannidis, F. (2016). Data modeling. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J. Unsworth(Eds.),A new companion to digital humanities (pp. 229–237). doi:10.1002/9781118680605.ch16Kirsch, A. (2014). Technology is taking over English departments. New Republic. Retrievedfrom https://newrepublic.com/article/117428/Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2012). What is digital humanities and what’s it doing in English depart-ments? In M. K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in the digital humanities (pp. 3–11). Minneapolis,MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2014). What is “Digital Humanities,” and why are they saying suchterrible things about it? differences, 25(1), 46–63.McCarty, W. (2014). Humanities computing (Paperback). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Meunier, J.-G. (2017). Humanités numériques et modélisation scientifique. Questions de com-munication, 31(1), 19–48. doi:10.4000/questionsdecommunication.11040Ramsay, S. (2013). Who’s in and who’s out. In M. Terras, J. Nyhan, & E. Vanhoutte (Eds.),Defining digital humanities (Chap. 13, pp. 239–241). Farnham: Ashgate.Stokes, P. (2012). Modeling medieval handwriting: A new approach to digital palaeography.In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital humanities 2012 conference abstracts (pp. 382–385).University of Hamburg. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Retrieved from http ://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/modeling-medieval-handwriting-a-new-approach-to-digital-palaeography/Thaller, M. (2017). Between the chairs: An interdisciplinary career. Historical Social ResearchSupplement, 29, 7–109. doi:10.12759/hsr.suppl.29.2017.7-109

Digital Humanities: An Explication

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Digital Humanities: An Explication

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