Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear friends, it's wonderful to welcome you at
Hamburg University. Thanks for coming to DH 2012. We're absolutely delighted and of course also
somewhat overwhelmed to see so many of you here. There was a time about four months ago when
Katrin and I looked at registration figures and submission figures for proposals and we thought,
uh-uh, when will they come? They did come and many of them came and it's an interesting topic for
further investigation, the behavior of registrants to DH conferences and the odd curve that you could
plot over time when the submissions come in and when the registrations come in.
On this slide there are two gentlemen and in a way they symbolize what this conference is about.
The person on the left is C.P. Snow and I don't have to quote him, you know what he said.
The person on the right is Heinrich von Kleist and what he said you can read below.
Ma'am kunter die menschen in zwei Klassen abteilen in zuulche die zich auf eine Metaffa und in zuulche
die zich auf eine Fallmelferschtehen. Die erwe die zich auf beidesferschtehen sind zu weine,
ges imachnkeine Klasser aus. You can read the English translation below and I think
this event proves Kleist wrong and it proves C.P. Snow wrong. There is more than just a few of us,
we are the people who can read a formula and can understand the metaphor and there is
no real divide between the natural sciences and the humanities. If we put our heads together
there's a lot that we can produce. So once again welcome to Hamburg University. First of all I
would like to introduce you to our student helpers. Could you please stand up from all over the world
the gray t-shirts.
It's wonderful to have you here and this is also was partially made possible with the help of
the ADHO multilingual and multicultural committee who helped us with the selection process and of
course the funding that we received for this. Thanks are also due of course to ADHO. My thanks
are due to the conference committee. My particular thanks are due to the program committee and its
chair Paul Spence. They did a marvelous job in compiling a huge program and this is really an
intellectually very rich conference that Paul and his committee have put together. Thanks again Paul
for doing such a marvelous job. As usual there are some housekeeping announcements which I have
to share with you but let me start off with one that is more than just a housekeeping announcement.
We have just founded the German chapter Digital Humanities Deutschland. It is still called now
but we will change the name to something that is more inclusive to embrace also our colleagues
from Switzerland from Austria and the other German speaking countries. This is the first time that we
have established a regional organization in Germany and we will now discuss how to come
into the fold of ALLC and then of course into the fold of ADHO and that's a wonderful
event for us here today. Thanks to everyone who helped to make this possible.
When I just said that we've proven both of these gentlemen wrong let me give you some figures. We
have 510 registered participants here of which 95 are students and 234 are members so we have
a great contingent of non-members here which is a first as far as I know for these DH conferences.
Half of those who are present are not members in one of the ADHO structures so far. Unfortunately
some slots and some presentations were cancelled at last minute. I will not read the details now
but I would like to urge all of you to check the website tonight to find out what is going to
happen tomorrow morning. It would be too complicated if I went into detail for that right here. Also
there are unfortunately some errors in the printed brochure, the printed program brochure so please
do consult the website to check for last minute changes as well as for errors in your program.
We will update the app as well. Thank you John for pointing that out. Those of you who haven't
done so already there are downloadable versions of the conference app for iPhone and Android
and we will update the information on there as well.
Posters for the poster session tomorrow should please be handed in at the info counter in the
main building until tomorrow noon. If we do not receive your poster by noon it will be very
difficult for us to put it up in time so please make sure that your poster is handed in at the
info desk. Registration is still open for some of the excursions for the Beatles tour on Friday night
as well as for the Harbor tour and the tour to Lübeck and even to the conference banquet there
are some last tickets that you can acquire. Please again go to the information desk if you
want to book into there. Then tomorrow morning there will be the legendary DH Fun Run. I don't
know how many of you will participate at seven o'clock but I do know of one person that will
definitely participate and that's Tomoji and Tomoji can I count on you to lead the faster runners
and I will lead those who want to take it at a bit of a more leisurely pace. We'll meet at
seven o'clock outside the the entrance to this building right in front here and then
Tomoji and I will take you across to the Alster and we will run around the Alster at least once.
It's seven and a half Ks so if you're up to more feel free
and hopefully the weather will hold tomorrow morning. Thanks also due to our sponsors
of course to the Deutsche Forschungskemanschaff the DFG who has supported this event very
generously. Thanks are due also to my university to the University of Hamburg which is represented
today by the Vice President Holger Fischer not by Professor Steele who had to cancel
because he fell ill and I'm very grateful for Holger Fischer to appear here and to address us
here today and will you join us for the fun run tomorrow morning? I think he will he is a runner
Professor Fischer.
But the running is so very early that's the problem. So dear chair of ADHO, the Alliance of
Digital Humanities Organizations Professor Ray Seaman, dear chairs of ADHO member organizations,
dear representatives of the different funding agencies, dear colleagues, dear students from
all continents ladies and gentlemen. First of all as Professor Meister mentioned already I'm not
Vice President Steele but Vice President Holger Fischer. My colleague Mr. Steele
nurses a bad cold and has lost his voice. What is very severe illness for a Vice President.
So he asked me two hours ago to help out and read his welcome address to you. Of course I agreed
and here I am offering his regrets and his best regards to you. On behalf of the Presilium of the
University of Hamburg I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you who have assembled to
attend this year's International Digital Humanities Conference an event which our university is honored
and delighted to host. Those in the know will of course refer to digital humanities only by
shorthand DH but acronyms are deceptive. DH may be only two letters long yet spelling them out
as protocol requires and as I have just done immediately results in a long list of institutions,
associations and stakeholders as for example AADH, Australian Association for Digital Humanities,
ACH, Association for Computers and Humanities, ALRC, Association for Literal and Linguistic
Computing, CSDH, Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, DHD, Digital Humanities, Deutschland
and a JDH, Japanese Association for Digital Humanities. Even more impressive than the scope
of organizations and institutions associated with the digital humanities is the number of individuals
who are actively engaged in the field and so is the scope and variety of research interests
and methodologies with which you the delegates represent. With 450 participants from all over
the world in some 200 presentations, posters, panel discussions and workshops the DH
2012 is one of the most impressive international academic events hosted by our university this year
and the largest organized in our faculty of humanities to date. This conference motto is
Digital Diversity, Cultures, Languages and Methods. The 580 page book of abstracts
proves that the DH community has taken the motto seriously and that is poised to engage in three
days of academic discourse that will span numerous cultural linguistic and methodological topics
and domains. The University of Hamburg prides itself not only as Germany's fifth largest
university but also as one of those which uphold the idea of a truly universal university
comprising the full range of academic disciplines medicine, law, economics, social sciences,
education, psychology and sports, natural sciences, mathematics and informatics, and
the humanities. These are the six faculties in which we conduct research and in which we
teach and study at this institution. As Vice President Research Mr. Steele himself
of the University of Hamburg he is therefore particularly impressed by the pervading sense
of interdisciplinarity that characterize your gathering. This conference represents an
impressive pool of diverse intellectual resources. It is this mingling of conceptual, theoretical
and disciplinary streams that makes DH such a vibrant and engaging intellectual and academic
experience. Interdisciplinarity is easily proclaimed a virtue but let us be realistic.
For many traditional disciplines it does not come as natural as one would hope. Allow me to illustrate
this by way of an anecdote. So when I, so Mr. Steele, now I'm playing his role, when I was a
student of computer science in the late 70s or middle of 70s in an epoch long before PCs and
notebooks became available and at a time when computers could only be accessed via mainframe
terminals or even only punch cards one of the favorite jokes about humanists went like this.
Quotation. Question. How can you tell that an art students set at your terminal? Answer,
correction flute on the screen. So that is his impression as a computer scientist of Mr. Steele.
Computers we thought were something that a humanist would never be able to grasp,
to grasp, at least not at a conceptual level. The best a humanist could do with a computing device
was to emulate his or her traditional practice, be it that of counting by fingers or be it that
of using a mechanical typewriter in correction flute to cover up the typos. In other words,
a humanist would perhaps use a computer but he or she would be unable to think in its terms.
Yet what do we do nowadays? We use a touch screen and wipe across it with our fingers.
That's an even more direct, naive and unreflected way of manipulating objects than using correction
flute on the screen, on a sheet of paper. Have smartphones turned us into the very
caricature of a humanist that we use to make fun of? Modern computing devices and technologies
are living proof that the analog and the digital method of conceptualizing and manipulating our
world can be brought into mutually beneficial contact. And the digital humanities, as I see them,
are founded on that very premise. On the one hand, they contribute to the production of knowledge
through the digitization of cultural data, through the development of new research practices
that are based on networking, distributing and sharing, and through the modeling and analysis
of symbolic artifacts and practices using computational tools and methods. But beyond
this pragmatic aspect, the digital humanities also exemplify a new epistemology, a new way of
looking at the objects and phenomena that are of relevance to the humanities. In no place
could be more appropriate to emphasize this philosophical dimension of our undertaking.
For the lecture hall, we find ourselves in is named after Ernst Kasira, one of Germany's most
esteemed 20th century philosophers. From 1919 to 1933, when the Nazi regime forced Jewish
professors out of office, Kasira taught philosophy at the University of Hamburg.
His Opus magnum is a three-volume philosophy of symbolic forms, published from 1923 to 1929.
In this work, Kasira traces the development of the essential human faculties to symbolize,
to analyze, and to reason about the world from the pre-antiquity to modern day.
According to Kasira, these abilities were developed through distinct stages of human
cultural history and across three dimensions, language, myth and religion, and scientific
thought. Adopting Kasira's perspective and drawing on the genius Loki, it becomes apparent
why the digital humanities is indeed such a fascinating intellectual endeavor.
As a mythology, the digital humanities bridge symbolic thought on the one hand,
which expresses itself through our natural languages, our cultural artifacts, and our human
rituals and practices, and scientific thought on the other, which is based on abstraction,
formalization, the building of models and theories, and on rational discourse.
The latter is what are now about to engage in, rational, critical academic discourse and
deliberation. And yet, this is only half of what will make the following three days a successful
conference. For equally important and stimulating is informal exchange of ideas, the personal
encounter, the banter over a glass of wine, and the laughter. It is my sincere hope that we can
provide you with an environment that will be conducive to all of this. The University of Hamburg
is proud to host this conference, and we wish the digital humanities 2012 international conference
every success with this important double agenda, that of the digital and that of the humanities.
Thank you very much.
No one really doesn't have a sense of just how many people are here until you're up here looking
out, wouldn't you say? Well, fabulous. It's my pleasure on behalf of the Alliance of Digital
Humanities Organizations to welcome you to the beginning of DH 2012. And, you know, as I look
out, I can't help but observe that this really must be the place to be, not only in beautiful
Hamburg, but at the University of Hamburg, a place steeped in tradition, innovation,
in understanding, in enterprise, and to be in the company, not only of all of us, 500 some people,
plus a few, I'm sure, who escaped the registration system, Chris, but also in the company, Chris,
of you and your kind colleagues, who have not only opened the doors a year ago to welcome us
to the prospect of coming to Hamburg, but when our community said that they wanted to come in
even greater numbers than ever before, you opened those doors even wider. Chris, to you and your team,
thank you so much for having us.
And we're equally grateful for the very generous support of the University of Hamburg, and thank
you for your words of welcome. Bang on, and it's clear you understand the pulse of the community
if you're willing to risk a joke about whiteout on a computer screen, but also to the German
Research Foundation, as well as Oxford University Press, and others who've sponsored and come
together to afford us the time and place to meet. Now, some of you will know that the Alliance of
Digital Humanities organizations now represents not three, but five organizations. The ACH,
we've already done the acronym, so if you weren't familiar before, you've got a sense of it now,
the ACH, the ALOC, CSDH, and joining us fully and formally this year, Centernet, and the Australasian
Alliance of Digital Humanities. Soon, I'm very happy to announce, we will be welcoming formally
the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities into our fold, a decision that I believe was
taken roughly at the same time, if you look for parallels like this, as the German DH
Foundation Federation was formed, and I hope you'll join me in congratulating all of our colleagues
in the formation of that wonderful society.
Not only are we making history in these wonderful ways, I think we also have several days of
workshops behind us, for those of you who came early, not only for the unconference,
but for the workshops and the other meetings taking place, but in front of us, several days
of very stimulating talks, and I hope some banter over a glass of wine, as you kindly suggested we
would be more than right to engage in. I'm thinking also of our exemplary plenary speakers,
Claudia Mullen, Masahiro Shimoda, one later today, one later in the week, assembled for us by a very,
very positively engaged program committee, led by Paul Spence, working with Vice Chair Susan Brown.
I think we should thank you again, Paul and Susan.
And as we come together, we're not only here for each other's fellowship, for each other's
intellectual offerings and social offerings, and all those positive ways that we naturally
come together, but we also come together as a community to celebrate the accomplishments
of our community at large and individually. And in this context, I'd like to flag especially
that we will have the pleasure of enjoying the work of a number of our exceptional emerging
scholars in our community that are shortlisted for the Forcier Prize.
Forcier Prize is managed by Oivin. Oivin, could you signal? I'm sorry,
Oivin Eddy, who's right here. If you have thoughts on the prize, please talk to this fine
gentleman here, and he has asked me to announce the shortlist of those who are being considered
for this prize. The prize itself is presented at the closing ceremony, and I'd encourage all
those on the shortlist to consider attending. Mark Alexander, Tom Brugmans, Joel Katelnikov,
Adam James Bradley, Toma Tassivak, Katherine Bohn. Now, if I've done something horrible to
your name, I'll ask you to applaud in a sec. Please remember my last name in Siemens in a
country that speaks only English. And at any rate, please, let's applaud these excellent nominees as
well. And wait, there's more. We have a fantastic group also of those who
have been acknowledged for their own excellence and contributions via a bursary scheme
with Adho and other partners, and Tanya Clement. Where's Tanya? Oh, right in front of me again,
Tanya Clement will be vetting them Thursday evening at our banquet and making the formal
presentation. Then, our banquet's on a boat. How exciting. It's not a boat we have to paddle.
Chris promised us the other evening liquid conviviality, and we ended up paddling ourselves
down to a place where we could have some food. That was the kind of liquid we got then.
But it's okay to be paddling, I think. We're an engaged community. That point's been made
several times already. We're engaged. We build things. We think about things. We come together
and we talk about things. And ultimately, we do stuff, whatever stuff may mean. And I'm being
deliberately informal there. There's a large body of work that our community produces, not only large
but varied, measured not only by the size of a book of abstracts, which I agree is astounding,
a little bit tugging on the shoulder, but you think of the work of our community as it manifests
and repercussions across so many different other sorts of venues. You think about the Adho-sponsored
journals, LLC, DHQ, and DSCN, with more to come from our very energetic and engaged community.
Think of the Adho-affiliated book series like that with Ashgate, University of Illinois Press,
and more affiliations and associations to come. Very positive place for us to be, a very positive
situation for us to be. Coming at a time after several years where we've seen outstanding growth
and understanding in and among those who may or may not choose to understand the world and see the
world the way we do, to adopt our methodological approach, to understand the benefits of that
methodological approach. And after several years of what some characterized at last year's gathering
and the gathering the year before and the year before that of unprecedented growth, which we
shouldn't grow to expect, we've had another unprecedented year. This is very positive.
It speaks volumes to what we and our community can do, are doing, and are doing more of.
I'm glossing over so many, so many very positive things that I could emphasize about our community
and the nature of what it is we do as individuals at an event where we come together to celebrate
what it is we do together, to celebrate what it is we do as individuals in the context of the whole.
I really wish only to underline that there's so much pertinent, interesting, engaging, necessary
work being carried out by our community, a community that's not only growing in numbers,
it's growing in all sorts of directions. Presenting positive challenges I would add to the Alliance of
Digital Humanities organizations to consider as our work scales across things like sectors,
borders, time zones, language, and culture. And even with all these things to consider as our
community grows, we manage to find a time each year to get together, to celebrate ourselves,
spend time with each other across all those various types of things which could very easily
keep us much further apart than we are. A community of ours, like ours, has needs and I'm very happy
to say that the strong support we provide ourselves, our institutions provide us,
and our partners allow us to move forward in very positive ways together. So I really do think it's
the place to be as I look out at people who, well, by the time we say goodbye to each other on Friday
we'll have slightly less energy in some ways, but slightly more engagement and positive
get-to-it-iveness as some say in my part of the world. So I have the great pleasure of welcoming
you then as Adho Steering Committee Chair, on behalf of myself as Chair, but also on behalf
of Bethany Neviski, President of ACH, also on behalf of Lisa Leno Obasaninan, the President
of the Association for Literary Linguistic Computing, Dan O'Donnell and Michael Ebele Sinatra,
the Canadian group formerly known as CITESEMI, Neil Freistat and Kay Walter of Centernet,
and Paul Arthur of AADH. It's my pleasure to welcome you on behalf of all of us to Hamburg
for the seventh joint Adho conference, the 24th of our two largest constituent organizations,
ACH and ALOC. Thank you to all of you. Thank you to the University. Chris, thanks to you and your
wonderful team, volunteers and others, for having us and joining us under what's becoming an
increasingly bigger tent of digital humanities.
Good evening. It's a great pleasure and honor to introduce very briefly Claudine Munna.
She studied German and English philology at Brussels and Bamberg, has written her PhD thesis
there in Bamberg, got a research fellowship by the University of Oxford, where she wrote her second
book, or parts of her second book, got afterwards a Heisenberg grant, which is an honor in Germany,
and since 2003 she held a chair for historical linguistics at the University of Trier.
She's also head of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and has a lot of positions, which one
is to be this is member of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science
Foundation and speaker of the ESF expert group on research infrastructures in the humanities.
And since one hour she's also member of the executive board of the German chapter
within the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.
Beside that she is running a lot of research projects and her main research topics are
the history of autography, graphomatics and claustrophies. Second one is regional languages
and dialects and their history, especially with regard to the Luxembourgish, I don't know
the English expression for that, and the third one is of course digital humanities.
And there are recent research projects, just a selection, they start from the Middle Ages,
cultural history of annotation, which I found very interesting, a virtual reconstruction of
a medieval scriptorium. And in early modern research, she's doing reconstruction of the
language of the cities, of early modern cities, which is based very much on books of account and
grammatical to teases and other things. She's also co-worker at the MPI, Project Evaluation of
Semantic Systems, and part of numerous atlases and lexicographic information systems.
I want just to mention one book, which is a hands-on book on old German and middle high German,
and paper on dialect dictionaries, and one great project is the Digital Atlas of the Luxembourg
language. And the last point I want to make is her paper on research infrastructures in the
Digital Humanities, which is a European Science Foundation paper, and this leads directly to your
talk now. It's called Dynamics and Diversity, Exploring European and Transnational Perspective
on Digital Humanities Research Infrastructures, and the flowers are for you.
Yes, specter, ladies and gentlemen.
And in my mother tongue,
ensuring and documenting cultural and linguistic variety is not only one of the important
challenges linked to the development and future impacts of digital humanities and scholarly work,
it is also one of the key elements to be considered in the field of policymaking
and research funding on a European and international level. In my talk, I would
like thus to reflect on digital humanities and its outcomes against the background of
cultural history, linguistic and interdisciplinary diversity. In the following, I will be especially
referring to experiences made in the past years in the context of my involvement in the European
Science Foundation, and at the Center for Digital Humanities in TRIA. The TRIA center
belongs to the oldest centers of digital humanities in Europe, having been found
more than 15 years ago by my predecessor, Kurt Gertner. The center's research works
focuses, among other things, on the building of digital lexicographic networks.
The digitization and cementing, encoding of literary bodies of works and artifacts of
authors like Heinrich Heine or Arthur Schnitzler. The virtual reconstruction of medieval libraries
such as the outstanding medieval library of Saint Matthias in TRIA, and most recently,
an interdisciplinary project endowed by the German Ministry of Rich Research,
the building study and visualization of epistolary networks across time, space and
languages on the basis of exiled authors under Nazi Germany. My lecture is built up as follows.
Firstly, I will take a look at how a European perspective on digital humanities and research
infrastructures can be articulated, reflecting on the diversity and dynamics of the research
landscape in question. Secondly, and deriving from this point, I would like to consider the issue
of fostering the diversity of languages, research fields and interdisciplinary approaches
in the framework of digital humanities research. Thirdly, I will reflect on the ways that digital
humanities are changing the research landscape in general, especially in terms of research,
evaluation and publication cultures. I will do this by taking into account and referring
to the work done by the expert group on research infrastructures that I chaired at the European
Science Foundation. I will close my talk by taking a glimpse at the place of digitality
in fostering the emergence of new cultural practices that look beyond established academic
circles. Here I would like to use the term digitality in the sense of the condition
of being digital, inspired by Nicolas Nicoponte's conception of the term. In the last part of my
talk, I will consider how digitality and digital humanities meanwhile interact in works of art.
My special thanks go to Chris Meister for inviting me to give this keynote, to Gerhard
Lauer for the kind introduction, and to Julian Niem and Ariana Chula, who cannot be with us,
and Georges Shelbert for the discussion and six suggestions in preparing my talk.
I've been talking a lot today, so...
As long as it's not spot...
Last fall the European Science Foundation published under my direction a so-called
science policy briefing on research infrastructures in the digital humanities.
It is notable that this is the first publication of its kind entirely commissioned by the scientific
governments representing the humanities, a unique body in Europe, the ESF Standing Committee
for the Humanities. The committee includes researchers and academics from 30 European
countries. It encouraged explicitly the exchanges between different currents and tradition of
humanities research in Europe which have contributed to its many linguistically and culturally distinct
identities. The peer-reviewed ESF report on research infrastructures in the humanities
aims both at serving on the one hand a growing research community who is involved in computational
modelling and in need of appropriate recognition and adequate research infrastructures, and on the
other hand policy makers and their domain whose where strategies on research infrastructures for
the humanities have until now been rarely shared at an international level. The research community
and other stakeholders engaged with digital humanities technologies were involved in various
ways in the development of this publication as workshop participants, authors, contributors
of case studies, peer reviewers and commentators. Up to now about 2,000 print copies of the
publication have been distributed across Europe and beyond not to mention downloads from the site.
The report presents the state of the art and it identifies the key needs and the challenges of
doing digital humanities in Europe and beyond today. It reflects on the necessity of a genuine
humanities born conception of what digital research infrastructures are and notes that
they diverge in many ways from the natural sciences approach. It discusses the issues of strategic
directions, partnerships, networking, academic recognition and evaluation,
dissemination and outreach as well as education and training. I cannot go into the details of all
these topics today but will take up some of the key issues of the work done in order to develop
my reflections within the context of my main focus this evening. The elements of digital
diversity, cultures, languages and methods which are the motto of this year's digital humanities
conference in Hamburg. Humanities researchers have long been familiar with research infrastructures
and the objects that populate them. It would be of course interesting to write a cultural history
of research infrastructures in the humanities and this endeavor would probably begin with or at least
include the antique idea of the museum as early as a third century before Christ where this
initiative to collect, organize and conserve knowledge gave birth in Alexandria to the first,
yes let's call it like it is, information center we know of including a university,
a cultural center and a library. Since then archives, museums, galleries and libraries have
always housed collections of physical objects such as archaeological fragments, paintings
and sculptures, inscriptions, manuscripts or books etc. The digital age is compelling us to introduce
such physical collections onto the digital plane and to construct new collections
of digital objects as subjects of research. So with the coming of the digital age humanities
researchers are extending their views on the nature of research objects whether physical or analog
or digital. They are reinterpreting and redefining traditional or physical repositories and
collections of research objects and they are reassessing the very nature and definition
of research infrastructures. Therefore and due to the diversity of what humanities research
includes the overall definition of research infrastructures in the humanities needs to
encompass both physical and digital infrastructures. Accordingly in our theoretical reflection at the
ESF we endeavored to set out a description of the most common forms of research infrastructures
found in the humanities. At an overarching level four primary layers of research infrastructures
can be identified. First physical infrastructures which are collections of physical objects,
installations, instruments, these may be single-sided or hosted by more than one institution or country.
Then digital data infrastructures these compromise single-sided or interconnected
data repositories spread over several institutions and countries.
Third E infrastructures we have to find names for these kinds. These are networks and or computing
facilities spread over various institutions and or countries. These is the technical backbone
of a given research infrastructure and examples include grid computing, cluster computing,
cloud computing etc and at last meta infrastructures which build conglomerates of
independent research infrastructures residing in different institutions and countries with different
data formats and data structures. Yet connected using compatible metadata formats or processes
thus enabling access to different data archives. At this macro level a number of broad categories
of offerings can also be identified. These include access to data and physical analog objects,
access to services, access to expertise and access to laboratory facilities. Within these broad
categories we're trying to work on a map a European map of research infrastructures in the
Meryl project where humanities have their place and with this broad categories the reports sketch
the typological framework of research infrastructures in the humanities from a multi-layered
and multi-dimensional perspective and at the same time documenting its diversity and heterogeneity.
The diagram here presents a set of criteria for defining the idea of research infrastructures in
the humanities. On the vertical axis a distinction can be made between research infrastructures
that offer access to material that could be considered of a primary nature,
nature, original data and documents and those that provide enriched data and metadata.
These distinctions do not indicate that such categories are discrete or opposed.
We have discussed this further in the paper but due to time's limitations today I will not go
into details. Another significant consideration is a distinction between digitized objects and
born digitized digital objects. The first are digital abstractions or remediations of physical
objects or as Segolin once named them digital avatars. The second are objects that are intended,
produced and exist as digital objects only. A third case is the combination,
hybrid combination where the same object is available at the same time in both media.
On the horizontal level different categories can be identified such as subject related research
infrastructures as opposed to institutional infrastructures. At a further level there
exists a range of infrastructures that create dynamic interconnections, networks and bridges
across different types of resources such as Tizauri or co-referencing systems etc.
While physical research infrastructures in the humanities are composed of predominantly static
collections of objects, newly emerging infrastructures may give the community a different
dimension. Research infrastructures may here be composed of collections of objects that are
dynamically identified and aggregated thus enabling the researchers to track changes
in an almost real-time mode if needed. A step even further might include such infrastructures that
are not composed of collections but of services or tools and that allow researchers to track
and manipulate the kind of data of relevance to their research. For example, web as a corpus
approach. In this way research infrastructures can enable research methods that have not been
previously available to the humanities before.
This model is open and dynamic. Overarching this open model of the often intersecting
characteristics of individual research infrastructures there exists, and the word has
been already mentioned this afternoon in our podium, an ecosystem where the following levels
of scale of research of a research infrastructure co-exist and even intersect harmonically.
The global or pan-european level, the national or community driven level and the local institutional
level. It should be noted that some research infrastructures are scaled and targeted to one
or more of these categories from the moment of their design and but most of them you probably
is thinking of your own, were planned on a smaller scale in the beginning but by the usage
have evolved. It's the co-effects of digitality. Users have evolved into larger scale initiatives.
The prerequisite for this evolution is of course open access and usage standards in data repositories
and data services. Within this ecosystem it's funny this should be bamboo and I swear I did not do
something happened to bamboo. With this ecosystem the correspondence service provider structure
caters for the worldwide and European technical infrastructure, for example grid computing,
were at the same time encompassing the European and national competence centers at community level,
so please imagine bamboo here, daria, clarine, etc. Such an ecosystem is conceived as being
regulated by the interaction of components among other the quality of data and tools and services,
the dynamic functioning but beyond a project based support and ethical issues.
Last but not least we must be mindful of hegemony, whether in the research or research founding
domain. While fostering the positive aspect of overarching institutionalized international
initiatives in the digital humanities, one should bear in mind that these should not become
the one and only perspective through which research in the digital humanities should be
seen through and evaluated by. The same observation can be made from a linguistic point of view.
Digital humanities, though many languages have not found an appropriate term for this discipline yet,
are not a monolingual issue. That is an anglophone one. The majority of European researchers are
aware of this and of the possible experiences that visibility and recognition in the digital
humanities today sometimes seems to be linked, at least in a unidirectional way, to the fact
that projects or persons related to them have to be English speaking or writing in order to get
their work noticed in a broader international context. Some initiatives are taking this issue
directly, or tackling this issue directly, making it a set of diversity and multilingualism in Europe
and beyond. For example, Elizabeth Burr's European Summer School of Culture and Technology
in Leipzig, or the ongoing work in UCL by Chris Dillon and others in conjunction with the Internet
Corporation for assigned names and numbers to enable Internet users to create full web addresses
using non-Latin script names, or the initiative launched by Maran de Koss and the Centre for
Open Publishing, Cleo and Open Edition with a survey, Who Are You Digital Humanists? Scoping
at the disciplinary and linguistic diversity of digital humanities in Europe and already having
had more than 700 researchers giving feedback. Maran, thank you for the worder. The worder you
would see first language is used as French and the countries of residence of the people giving
feedback is French and here's UK in the small sea. So please, if you haven't done yet, please,
please fill out this survey so that we can have a good European overview of what all the
digital humanities people are doing. In fact, to put it metaphorically,
metaphors will be a little part of my talk, Chris, digital humanities are not a single window in an
ivory tower, but a multifaceted, one could think of, psychodelic prism reflecting many domains and
approaches. This was the title of the image. A modus vivendi should be found in which individual
approaches, small niches and also discipline and language specific methodologies can prosper
against the background of collaboratively defined interoperable parameters and international
standards. Of course, one could argue that this diversity is how the field has always been,
but exactly these values are being called into question due to the fact that the field is
developing so rapidly and this raises a host of new challenges. As Jeffrey Rockwell put it,
regarding digital infrastructure, this concerns the social dimension of our field of activities.
Quoting Jeffrey, we need to recognize the social dimension of infrastructure. It isn't just stuff
and it's rarely neutral. Larger scale investments almost always have opportunity costs and paths
not taken. It is better, especially in the humanities, where the need for cyber
infrastructures is far from being obvious to our colleagues, to go slow and be inclusive
than imposed from above, end of the quote. Understanding and documenting the diversity
of digital humanities and its research infrastructures in the European and global
international landscape will indeed be one of the positive challenges we will face in the coming
years. To put it metaphorically again, we should think about building a garden where many different
flowers and plants will be able to grow and thrive without being put in the shade of a few
too big and overshading trees, though the latter of course have their place in the ecosystem too.
This brings me to my next point, in which I would like to stress the positive issue of
hybridity. Of course hybridity brings challenges along, but I still remain profoundly optimistic
about them. Europe's cultural and linguistic diversity isn't a set and not a lead ball
around our ankles. European diversity is a genuine component of our culture and history
and research about these topics can be only done with their proper consideration. A key
motivation for a position paper was in fact the belief that diversity and interdisciplinarity
are the two key factors in European research in the humanities. Thus to come back to the issue
of research infrastructures, good research infrastructures are needed as strongly in the
humanities as in the so-called hard sciences, but the word good doesn't have to and in fact
doesn't mean the same in both constellations. In both cases good research infrastructures
allow scholars to access, order, analyze, store and reuse data in ways otherwise impossible.
In many cases however digital research infrastructures were developed earlier in the
hard sciences than in the humanities and currently receive a larger proportion of funding.
One important factor regarding humanities is the fact is is that the objects of our study,
an author, a society, a painting or a group of sculptures are more likely to be culturally bound.
Are you re-studied through the written often handwritten word or a unique non-textual
artifact which calls for time-consuming retrieval, transcription or description?
As a consequence scholars in the humanities tend towards more qualitative than quantitative work
which is analyzed, published and disseminated in specific national languages. It is however obvious
that humanities scholars have an interest in asking questions that are not confined
to specific cultural areas. Theoretically informed comparative and transnational research
gains from access to large data sets that are not all from the same culture and are multilingual.
Being able to access data from various linguistic areas is thus crushing.
As our community knows only too well that creates not only problems of linguistic virality
in itself but also of different ontologies and taxonomies. The world is categorized
and made meaningful in different ways, in different cultures. Conceptual clarity and
as a consequence reliable interpretation and comparison of cultural products presupposes
high awareness of problems of varying taxonomies. Such questions have been tackled by humanities
computing researchers for many years. While some elegant strategies have already been developed
such issues remain important research questions in the field. It is important to combine an
ambitious approach to these matters with a pragmatic one. While the complete digitization
and translation of the cultural heritage is unrealistic for the foreseeable future
this does not mean that we should not endeavor to develop research projects and research infrastructures
in the humanities that reach across linguistic and national borders.
At my institute in Trier we are for example working on the idea of a European lexicographic network.
We started the project a decade ago with a pilot scheme built by the dictionaries
of the southwestern German language area. The dialect landscapes of the Rhineland,
the Palatinate and the transnational Sarlor-Lux Euro region are covered by complete broad-scale
dictionaries and all have been digitized and interlinked in the project. Furthermore the digital
edition of the monumental Grimm Brothers German dictionary and the network of Middelheim German
dictionaries and some others like the Goethe dictionary have also been completed and can thus
be interlinked with the other material. In essence a substantial and diverse lexicographic
information system has been created that allows cross-referencing and researching between the
dictionaries. The network is continuously growing and the project is now moving towards a European
and multi-layered lexicographic information and research infrastructure.
To come back to the general focus on fostering the diversity of languages, methods and also
interdisciplinary approaches as for example illustrated in the graphic by Willard McCarty
on the method.org comments, it is important to stress that the implementation of these objectives
has significant implications for founding agencies in particular. Our paper therefore
included some concrete recommendations for the funding agencies regarding multilingualism.
We might have some representatives in the audience today relying on the fact that we researchers
can provide for the implementation and methodologies.
Funding agencies need to encourage and maintain digitization programs and development of metadata
and tools for translating national language sources and developing respective ontologies.
Second founding agencies need to pay attention to the complexity of language and chronology issues
the same as for private initiatives like Google Books as chronology issues and linguistical
issues when making funding decisions in order to avoid a situation where only data from modern
English language sources is digitized. Funding agencies need to engage in making the linguistic
diversity of the European research output and publication landscape visible, accessible and
recognized. And fourth they need to go beyond national borders by founding multilingual
initiatives and linguistic projects and other multi-dimensioned copra. Research cannot make
halt in front of a political border. To sum up in Europe we need the development of research projects,
research infrastructure as well as publication and communication tools that reach across linguistic
and national borders. One more turn. This turn has been mentioned this afternoon also.
Of all the intellectual and technical turns we have made in the humanities and social sciences
in the last century the digital one seems to be of another other nature and of a broader impact
even not if everybody in academia might be enthusiastic about this. The development of
digitality is not only one of societal relevance in general as it changes our everyday lives and
communication structures it also has a deep impact on the academic world and on the way we do
research and thus our everyday scientific life. Yet we meet doubters and skeptics every day
and all of us know of the topos-like situation of discussions that emerge and all of us have made
more or less funny experiences having to justify the research character of our endeavors.
These experiences all sum up to the words, digitality is changing academia but how much
changing should it be? The changes I'm referring to are not only a content matter and a way of
judging digital driven research it's probably more the subsequent consequences that like a snowball
are hitting the whole academic system and profoundly changing it. In the traditional
humanities pronounced dividing lines have existed between archivist cultural heritage professionals
scholars and library and information professions. In the context of digital humanities such dichotomies
are now being broken down dramatically. In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of
resulting research and the altered composition of the partners involved other fundamental changes
have emerged especially regarding the evaluation cultures in the humanities. These are key issues
and they have arisen regarding research input and the engagement of researchers in the field
of the humanities. Inherent to this matter and this is where the change of cultures gripes
is that the is that of the peer recognition of digital driven scholarly research,
its professional reputation and its equal evaluation in comparison to traditional research.
These issues are vital for our self-understanding and future and they are deeply linked with another
topic undergoing profound changes through digitality. I mean the publication cultures in
humanities and humanistic academia. This point has been tackled by an ESF conference in Budapest in
2009 and by the European Young Researchers Forum chaired last year by Margaret Keller.
The endeavors are summed up in a in a convincing manifesto called changing publication cultures in
the humanities. Copies are here available in Hamburg. Taking into consideration this paper
and also related ones in the field we identified several crucial points of change worth pondering
over and discussing. First the change towards a culture of recognition that accepts the process
oriented character of projects in the digital humanities. We always speak of results but we
should think about the process character of digital humanities research and that of digital
publication. The future of scholarly publication culture being that of open access. Second the
change of publication cultures that involves new formats of publication and recognizes its diversity
across the humanities ranging from the traditional book, the article, the database, the scientific
blog, to micro publications in different forms. Third the changing of evaluation culture taking
into account that humanities cannot be measured with the same instrument than the hard sciences
and that their forms of publications are of a bigger diversity as well as in regard of the
publication formats than the publication languages. Fourth the consideration of language
and multilingualism as a key element of European research and its publications whose impact and
dissemination can be ensured through the instrument of translation and for which means must be provided
for in a national and international level. Fifth the establishment of more comprehensive
clearing mechanisms including peer review to secure scholarly reliability and recognition
of research across international and interdisciplinary collaborations. Six the fostering of interdisciplinary
tools and teams where all contributing specialist roles and competences are recognized
and rewarded. We were speaking about the informatic plebs this afternoon. I would say
all of them should be rewarded and at last the proper recognition credit and career perspectives
to foster and promote a new generation of young researchers who will be able and willing to take
on the challenges raised by digital humanities research. Many of these issues tackled in my talk
are of course true beyond Europe but the European situation in the diversity in languages cultures
and thousand years of history can be seen as a lebund couture with a high density of all these
elements playing a key role. These points concerning interdisciplinarity and the generation
of new researchers also bring me to the last part of my talk.
Digitality defined in the beginning of my talk as the condition of being digital maybe even
la condition eu man de tradigital has become a central issue in private and academic life. It
is always also present in the domain of art of the arts. The interest of modern artists in this
subject is lively not only on the common level of shared digital technologies. Furthermore,
artists can also reflect on digitality by using data created by us researchers in the digital
humanities. In Trier we had a fascinating collaboration a few years ago with a conceptual
artist Eke Bonck. Bonck's works encompasses the issue of the visualization of linguistic
processes and science systems focusing as Bonck put it himself on an interdisciplinary expression
of art, science and philosophy. Bonck presented the installation Bouche d'Averta, Book of Words
Random Reading at the renowned exhibition of modern and contemporary art documenta 11 in
Cassel in 2002 and then later on in 2008 in Karlsruhe. The installation revolves around the German
dictionary of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm begun in 1838. The philosophy of the Grimm's dictionary was
that it should be a dictionary for household requirements as the Grimm brothers put it that
can be the focus of extended often meditative reading. Eke Bonck's installation comes close
to this wish of the authors. For the most comprehensive dictionary of German, Bonck found
a format that accommodates the more than 100 years editorial tradition of this large work
with its word opulence. The installation is composed of three parts, an endless column
projected onto a wall comprising endlessly appearing lists of all the head words,
a hologram showing all editions of the first as well as the current edition series in chronological
rows and placing before the eyes of the observers the long and in no way closed history of this
treasure house of words and random reading visualized the dictionary itself chosen from
the digitized version and projected onto walls. When Chris Meister invited me to give this
keynote today, I was just coming back from a visit to the University of British Columbia
in Vancouver. On campus there I saw by chance an exhibition by students of arts which profoundly
moved and intrigued me. It was called iFormations and explored the interaction between arts and
digitality. The exhibition was curated by senior chain men and was realized with young artists
and students and had been initially inspired by David Nicholas's article the behavior of the
researcher of the future, the Google generation. It presented sets of studies exploring the subtle
links between information, knowledge and meaning. The title of the exhibition highlights a letter
i and the multiple facets that the letter developed in the past decades of digitality.
Information, individuality, internet technologies and also this is what I joined to the
list identities. Through the exhibition each participating artist proposed a different scenario
for reconsidering the ways we engage with and understand digital information. Talking to Chris
about the Hamburg venue, I immediately told him that I had a somewhat crazy idea
or call it a dream, probably no big difference between the two, of bringing the exhibition to
Hamburg because I all wanted you to see and enjoy it. Digitality, arts and digital humanities.
Catherine Schoenert and Xenia did a tremendous job braving all administrative obstacles on this
side and the other one of the ocean. That's bringing to us the exhibition and one of its
artists Kevin Day to Hamburg today. Thank you for making this possible. Catherine and Xenia who
couldn't come and Kevin Day, are you there? He said he would be there somewhere. There he is.
Hi Kevin and because Kevin is here today I would like to say something about his contribution
to the exhibition. Kevin's installation is based on the reading of the Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Cicek and consists as Kevin described it himself for the Vancouver exhibition. I quote him
of a number of UBC, I think this is then Hamburg library books, standing in the linear bookshelves
fashion into two display cases. Here we have one with each book corresponding to a particular page
on Wikipedia that's forming a material verification and visual manifestation of an online Wikipedia
browsing experience. The project intends to effectively demonstrate the inter-textual and
inter-discovered nature of information and knowledge by emphasizing with books the act
of navigating web pages through a progression of clicking from one link to the next. The work seeks
to draw attention to the precarious and ambiguous relation between physical books or physical objects
of the beginning and virtual bodies or virtual bodies of the beginning of the talk of knowledge
as well as to demonstrate the discrepancy between the two, namely the concise,
reasonmatic and accessible nature of Wikipedia just opposed to the detailed, fixed and thorough
nature of books, end of the quote. Please understand this at the closing of my talk today
as an invitation to have a look at this exhibition which is a manifestation of course of serendipity
but it mirrors in many facts the key elements of our conference diversity, cultures and languages
look at the title of the installations and also the methods in which these works of arts were
produced. On the whole all these elements are part of the digital humanities as
Welt and Schawoman in the plural, it's not a grammatical error of mine, as Brietta d'Arrold
formulated a few weeks ago in a conference held at my home university. Welt and Schawoman
cannot really be translated. Philosophies of life eta di sprie and that's why we will leave it
like it is today. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much Claudine for a fascinating talk.
Rich of impulses of intellectual impulses and bringing us back
ingeniously to the west wing second floor where you can look at the installation of Kevin's
and I can only emphasize what Claudine has just said go there have a look speak to Kevin he's
there and willing to answer your questions the exhibition is on show throughout the conference
so tomorrow you can go there before the poster session for example and have a look at the
installation Claudine many thanks once again for a wonderful keynote lecture
and while I have her here which doesn't happen that often these days this is
Claudine the good soul of the conference my conference assistant and please give her a big
hand she deserves it
please join us now in the foyer for a reception and some of you will have heard some obscure
noises in the background and find out what it's all about outside thank you
so