Today the journal History published the paper State of the Field: Digital History to which I had the pleasure to contribute together with Annemieke Romein, Julie Birkholz, James Baker, Michel de Gruijter, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Thorsten Ries, Ruben Ros, and Stef Scagliola. In this paper we provide an overview of the current state of technologies and practices for data generation, analysis, and reflection for historical research. We hope the paper will provide a valuable introduction to historians and students interested in digital methods for historical research, with plenty of references for further exploration of the topic. The paper is available open access here.
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Book review: Ian Milligan – History in the Age of Abundance?
For the journal of Internet Histories I had the pleasure of reading Ian Milligan’s recent book History in the age of abundance? How the web is transforming historical research (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). In this book, Milligan discusses the necessity of studying the web for historical research, as well as the problem this introduces with respect to abundance. In my review, I focus on how for Milligan this abundance is both a promise as a pitfall for historians. You can read the review in the journal here, or read my self-archived copy below.
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Paper publication: Boundary Practices of Digital Humanities Collaborations
I am really happy that today the first paper based on my PhD research was published in the DH Benelux Journal. This new journal will serve to turn select conference abstracts from the annual conference into full papers. The first volume follows last year’s conference theme Integrating Digital Humanities. My paper critically explores the integration of the humanities and the computational domains, and concludes that the digital humanities may be more heavily oriented towards the humanities than a balancing of the digital and the humanities, limiting the ability of DH to emerge as a ‘third space’ in-between the humanities and computational domains. You can find the volume here, including my paper in HTML and in PDF.
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Abstract: Power Asymmetries of eHumanities Infrastructures
In the final week of October the annual IEEE eScience conference will take place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This will be my first eScience conference, and I look forward to seeing how the eScience community is similar to or different from the digital humanities community. I have submitted a paper applying findings of my PhD research to the development of eScience infrastructures for the humanities. Specifically, my paper discusses the problems of power asymmetry in collaborations, with scholars dependent on infrastructures developers, and of knowledge asymmetry, with scholars lacking the knowledge necessary to influence the practices of infrastructure developers. A first difference between the eScience and DH communities I already observed was in the reviews of my submission, which found my topic of interest but lacking in a (technological) solution to the problem. Unfortunately, I do not have a solution readily available, but I have extended my power relation circle with a possible way out in the development of know-how. Below you can find the abstract for my paper, and the poster I will present at the conference (designed by my wife).
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ECHIC Abstract: Infrastructure As Afterthought
Now that I’m halfway through my third year my supervisors told me it would be better to start focusing on writing chapters rather than conference abstracts. They are of course absolutely right, but then a colleague notified me of the call for papers for ECHIC 2018 (European Conference for the Humanities on behalf of the European Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres). This conference will be in Leuven (Belgium) from 4 to 6 April 2018, and will focus on the role of infrastructures in the humanities. As a conference so close to home, and so close to my topic, I could not resist sending in an abstract. In my presentation, I will argue that infrastructuring is the central practice of digital humanities, even though practitioners of digital humanities themselves do not always give as much attention to infrastructures as needed. This is a result of my thinking of the need for a definition of DH, and the work I’m conducting for my PhD. So the below is a slightly more provocative summary of an argument I intend to make in my thesis. I would love to hear your comments and feedback, both good and bad!
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The Ends of the Humanities Abstract – Interdisciplinary Ignorance
Next week I will be at The Ends of the Humanities, a conference organised by the University of Luxembourg from 10-13 September 2017, in Belval. This conference aims to “investigate the relationship between the humanities on the one hand, and ethics, cultural and social politics, the education system, the law, the economy, new technologies and other sciences, on the other”. As such it also includes a digital humanities track, to which I submitted a paper about knowledge asymmetry in interdisciplinary collaborations, to discuss how this asymmetry creates a power relation in digital humanities. See below the abstract for my paper.
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AIUCD 2017 Panel and Paper abstract
Next week I will be visiting Rome to join the Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e le Culture Digitali (AIUCD) conference which will be held from 26-28 January at Sapienza University. See the entire programme here. The topic of the conference is “Il telescopio inverso: big data e distant reading nelle discipline umanistiche”, and as a result Mark Hill and I have formed a panel on big data, distant reading, concept drift, and digital history. In this blogpost I’ll post the abstract of the panel, and my own abstract; if the full proceedings including the abstracts of the other panel members are online I’ll add it to the presentations page. We are excited to have brought together scholars working on concept detection, ambiguity, and methodology of history, so we hope we will get a very nice discussion going.
DHBenelux 2016 abstract
This week I’m at DHBenelux 2016, right here at the University of Luxembourg. I am part of the local organisation of the conference, and will give a tour of the DH Lab which launched its website www.dhlab.lu this week. Moreover, I will present my PhD research in a short paper, see below the abstract for my presentation. To learn more about DHBenelux, see my previous posts on DHBenelux 2016 submissions and DHBenelux submissions 2014-2016.
User Required? User Research in the Digital Humanities
The development of tools plays an important role in the Digital Humanities. For the recent DHBenelux conference, I found that the word “tool” was used almost a hundred times in all the abstracts, not counting my own. Still, the actual adoption of all these tools by the target audience, the humanities scholars, does not always reach its potential. [1]Claire Warwick, M. Terras, Paul Huntington, & N. Pappa. (2007). If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23(1), 85–102. http://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqm045 
(OA version 
) In a recently published paper by Martijn Kleppe and me, titled User Required? On the Value of User Research in the Digital Humanities, we look into how Digital Humanities scholars might address this problem.[2]Max Kemman, & Martijn Kleppe. (2015). User Required? On the Value of User Research in the Digital Humanities. In Jan Odijk (Ed.), Selected Papers from the CLARIN 2014 Conference, October 24-25, 2014, Soesterberg, The Netherlands (pp. 63–74). Linköping University Electronic Press.
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References
| ↑1 | Claire Warwick, M. Terras, Paul Huntington, & N. Pappa. (2007). If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23(1), 85–102. http://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqm045 (OA version ) |
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| ↑2 | Max Kemman, & Martijn Kleppe. (2015). User Required? On the Value of User Research in the Digital Humanities. In Jan Odijk (Ed.), Selected Papers from the CLARIN 2014 Conference, October 24-25, 2014, Soesterberg, The Netherlands (pp. 63–74). Linköping University Electronic Press. |
Abstracts for DHBenelux 2014
This year the first edition of DHBenelux will be held 12 & 13 June in the Hague, the Netherlands; a conference for Digital Humanities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. I’m glad a local conference is being organized to promote DH (easy travel!). Obviously I didn’t want to miss out this conference, so we’ve submitted two abstracts that were both accepted. Below are the abstracts for presentations on Talk of Europe and Oral History Today that I’ll be presenting.