Panel discussion

The Summer School will feature a public panel discussion. It will be devoted to the question how the Synergies between the Humanities, Libraries and Computer Science are to be manged in the framework of the Digital Humanities:

Friday 26.07.2013 17:15-19:15 in GWZ HS 2010

"Humanities, Libraries and Computer Science - How to Manage the Synergies and Antagonisms?"

The panelist are:

Elisabeth Burr (Chair for French, Francophone and Italian Linguistics, Institute for Romance Studies, University of Leipzig)

Gregory Crane (Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Professor of Classics and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, as well as Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University)

Stefan Gradmann (Professor in the Arts department of the KU Leuven and Director of the University Library Leuven, Belgium)

Gerhard Heyer (Chair on Automatic Language Processing, Computer Science Department, University of Leipzig)

Christof Schöch (Research Associate, Chair for Computerphilology, University of Würzburg and project DARIAH-DE)

Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Director of Leipzig University Library and Professor of Philosophy in the Institut of Cultural Studies at Leipzig University)

Ray Siemens (Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria)

Manfred Thaller (Professor of "Historisch Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung" (Humanities Computer Science), University of Cologne)

Programme

• Elisabeth Burr "Introduction / Presentation of panelists" (5-7 minutes)
• Short presentation by each panelist on the synergies and antagonisms between Humanities, Libraries and Computer Science (5-7 minutes)
• Discussion among the panelists (ca. 25 minutes)
• Open discussion with the floor (ca. 25 minutes)

State of affairs

Computer Science, Libraries and the Humanities look at cultural artefacts (books, newspapers, films, text, images, sound etc.) in their own way. Furthermore, in the focus of each Humanities discipline there are normally only specific aspects of an artefact. Very often each of these domains is not even conscious that its own approach is only one possible approach and that the other domains follow their own specific approaches. Very often the individual domains or disciplines do not really care about other approaches or do not confront themselves with them.

Libraries digitize sources (texts, images and the like) and make them accessible via Metadata and databases or catalogues.

"In the last few years, collections of digital text have strongly increased in number, especially in the field of humanities. Digital libraries of full-text documents, including digital editions of literary texts, are emerging as environments for the production, the management and the dissemination of complex annotated corpora.
The potential interpretative levels emerging from the analysis of textual phenomena (including bibliographic, linguistic, thematic, structural, rhetorical and prosopographic aspects) converge to produce a stratification of annotations whose complex interactions may give light to new and unexpected potentials for analysis.
Yet, each community in the field of humanities (archives, libraries, museums, literary studies, etc.) have developed independent metadata models and annotation techniques for their corpora. In a shared environment, the possibility to annotate different aspects of a text overlaps with metadata models and ontologies used for annotation (i.e. TEI, EAD/EAC, CIDOC-CRM, DC, FRBR, SKOS, etc.) and related values vocabularies (i.e. DDC, Geonames, LC, VIAF, Wordnet, Dbpedia) but also with techniques for producing annotations, both with embedded or stand-off markup methods based on XML or other formal languages possibly even in a linked data perspective (OWL/RDF). (DH-CASE 2013; extract from Call for Papers, published 6 May 2013)

Bartolini, Ilaria / Condello, Federico / Degli Esposti, Mirco / Garulli, Valentina / Tomasi, Francesca / Viale, Matteo (2013): “Towards a taxonomy of suspected forgery in authorship attribution field. A case: Montale’s Diario Postumo”:

Computer Scientists / quantitative linguists tend to look at text as character strings regardless of their meaning or take a “bag of words” approach;  (text = word sequences that have to be studied statistically), text could be represented also by means of the image of the text itself (pattern analysis and (dis)similarity search techniques)

Philologists usually adopt qualitative and comparative methods.

Digital Humanists have a long tradition in the quantitative analysis of texts. Text analysis reveals the complexity of the concept of text and the potential stratification of interpretative models.

Solution to complex problems

Find an annotation model able to formally represent all the different points of view on the text.

Multidisciplinary approach (quantitative, linguistic, philological, computational, image analysis).

Only constructive interactions between different approaches might help with complex problems.

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 27 “computationalists and humanists “
Martin Mueller 18 Jun 2013: “At a practical and institutional level, it may well be that good solutions will come from renegotiating traditional ways of dividing work among academic departments, libraries, and IT departments.”

Perspective

O’Connor, Alex (7 May 2013): “On Digital Humanities”, in: Medium

"I think that, methodologically, we should be looking for a different thing now: how can we apply humanities research methods to computing (informatics) research? In other words, rather than treating humanities as an application area for computing, can we look at computing from a humanist perspective?"

Should libraries not interact with their user communities when they start digitalization projects and try to add at least one layer of Markup / annotation instead of using the database approach?

Digital Humanities as a space where cross-fertilisation is encouraged, Libraries and Computer Science should work together as equal partners on specific projects, learn from each other, and take their different approaches into account instead of just providing solutions or make available digitized sources.