Okay, thanks Melissa for that kind introduction.
And thanks for inviting us to this conference and for the opportunity to share our view
on research infrastructures and well, let's start.
Digital humanities in our view is something that is starting to happen almost everywhere.
So not just at this wonderful conference or at your home institutions, but it's also in
the specific disciplines that you might encounter across a local research site, such as a classical
humanities campus.
So I mean classical in that sense, widely accepted, used for a long time, traditional
in style or idea, which is so, sounds quite good actually.
And at such a research site or campus, classical and digital research practitioners, according
to our perception, may in fact, coexist quite peacefully.
So sometimes even within a single person, maybe they're not so peacefully, but still,
so why shouldn't they?
So with the work we present here, we try to survey the state of affairs at our university,
Eustace Lebesch University in Giesen, basically with the goal in mind of estimating and identifying
the need for support in digital research practices.
More investigations and today's presentation can be seen as a reaction to several impulses,
which I would like to trace briefly in order to set the context of this work.
And since Melissa kindly informed us that we could use a few more minutes, I can expand
on that.
So please allow me to do so.
This background lies, as the title suggests, in research infrastructures and the S3 process.
So a number of digital research infrastructure initiatives are currently constructing the
next generation research environments for digital humanities, and I'm quoting the European
initiatives here, while we're all aware that there are also activities ongoing overseas
in the east and west and everywhere.
So during the preparatory phase of the S3 research infrastructure roadmap, we have contributed
to that development in the areas of user training, academic teaching, requirement analysis,
and user support.
So we've noted, as others have done too, that research in digital humanities is often discussed
from a bird's eye perspective.
So people talk about infrastructures, funding schemes, weaving a net of global collaboration,
and so on.
And of course, it is always nicely underpinned by some exemplar cases of very fine research
projects and individual researchers.
So however, we believe that, as others have also done before, this perspective needs to
be complemented by a systematic view on what's going on locally.
That is, at a local scope, say at a single campus or in a local institutional cluster.
And you know, the discussion around research infrastructures are currently manifold, and
some people complain that large-scale research infrastructures don't do it all, basically.
So they do, for instance, they do not do this kind of surveying with sufficient coverage.
And that might be true, but then on the other hand, one could say that it's basically homework
for these single institutions.
Yes, so much about the S3 project process.
So the first time for me that this need for a systematic local investigation became obvious
was in October 2010 in Vienna, when Laurent Romary gave a keynote speech at the Joint
Clarin and Daria conference supporting the digital humanities and the co-located networking
event, where he presented work and report of the European high-level expert group on
scientific data.
So that was the report.
And that's the scheme of a collaborative data infrastructure that they envisioned.
So that implies and promotes a division of labor among researchers, or research communities,
and supporting bodies or support units, organized in three layers.
So at the top, you see, basically, that's all people, I care to take this point.
In the top layer, you see data generators and users.
In the intermediary layer, you see the community support services, such as the areas where
Clarin and Daria are active.
And at the bottom layer, you see common data service that also serve the sciences, natural
sciences and other, basically like the internet.
So I very much enjoyed this presentation in Vienna at that time for the clear view and
the strategic agenda that the experts set forth in their report.
And still at the same time, as I said, it served as a starting point for me for asking
what's going on locally and how are these large strategic goals and needs evolving in
a local scope just around us and our colleagues next door.
So I started to try and get a sort of structured view on digital humanities and this related
support infrastructures.
And luckily, at that time, that fitted perfectly with a project deliverable that was due, so
there are many sources.
And I mean, after these papers, we've heard in the keynote by Clarin Malong their science
policy briefings that there was a reaction by Knowledge Exchange.
They presented a surfboard for riding the wave, so that's all kind of neat.
So basically, when I looked around, I find that I could stick to just two LLC papers
in order to keep things clear.
And because they serve perfectly what we're looking for, a reflection of organizational
development and aspects of division of labor in the field of digital humanities.
So I would like to bring these to the attention.
So basically, what those papers built and my perception was the following scheme.
We have research units, we have support units, and on the atomic unit, basically, there is
the research, a research team and the professional imagery.
That was a paper by Jennifer Edmund in 2005.
So in any portfolio, and I'm quoting now from the project work and that source, in any portfolio
of support services, personal contact plays an important role.
Having someone close at hand when it comes to supporting specialized computing needs
can be both very efficient and comfortable, and in that respect, research infrastructures
may serve to establish such contacts and collaboration.
So accordingly, regarding the relation between social research infrastructures and online
community portals, also the German Council of Science and Humanities states, my own
translation now, that interactive community portals and online platforms for the humanities
and social sciences, serving as virtual spaces for the circulation of expertise, inspiration
and research ideas, may in some sense belong to social research infrastructures too.
So they add to personal communication, but they do not replace it.
So Edmund suggests and discusses a support model where the gap between specialized scientific
computing needs, on the one hand, and general purpose IT support, on the other hand, is
filled by one or more people having, quote, broad knowledge of computing and research
and a mandate to disseminate this information.
Several roles need to be filled here, including consulting, translation between areas of expertise,
contributing expertise to faculty members' application for research funding, dissemination,
as well as communication with marketing and project management.
So Edmund states that it is possible to combine these roles with that of a longer-term project
over fuel management, thereby creating the role of the digital humanities intermediary.
Now the second model is documented in a paper by McCarthy and Kirschenbaum in 2003, so even
earlier.
So the support for computational research in the humanities is frequently institutionalized
in the form of competence centers for humanities computing.
In their consideration of institutional models, McCarthy and Kirschenbaum distinguish between
several types of centers, providing a comprehensive classification of a large number of humanities
computing centers, which I think has now evolved into Centernet.
And in order to develop this classification, the authors have compiled a list of questions
that they use to classify individual centers.
So they consider the center's mission with respect to the four dimensions of research,
training, support, and institutional connection.
So we're basically moving along the scale from atomic to larger constructs.
And it's important to emphasize that the application of the classification by McCarthy and Kirschenbaum
is not meant as an evaluation or intended to introduce any kind of competitive perspective,
rather it merely serves to identify a center's position, approach, and potential.
As the author's state, no judgment is expressed or implied as to the worth of the centers
under consideration.
So I think what complements this scheme quite neatly is the idea of research infrastructures.
So now, basically, since the start of the S3 process, research infrastructures are complementing
this picture, and they are being established as a third pillar of research support also
in the humanities.
RIs are one particular model in support of, in a support portfolio for e-research processes,
besides institutionalized centers and professional intermediaries.
They are large-scale support instruments intended to support research communities as a whole
by providing information and knowledge-sharing services to the community members.
In addition, they, or their partner sites, may provide platforms for which communities
may offer their services, including software tools, data collections, and related services
to peers, potential users, interested researchers, and even to the wider public.
So the relations between all of them are manifold.
It's like an aggregation, you could say.
But in order to keep things simple, I just place them next to each other.
Basically, a network of centers, as we conceive in the S3 project, is the carrier of research
infrastructure initiative.
So coming from this research infrastructure background where I personally started to work,
as I said, I started to wonder what's going on locally.
So that's why we started to implement a local strategy by beginning with a survey, what's
going on.
So part of the digital intermediaries job description and certainly on the agenda of
any competence center would be to survey the local developments and demands in terms of
e-research support and to estimate the potential and demand to identify problems or areas of
friction in the research processes that are taking place next door.
So this is, of course, a continuous task.
And our first observation was the fact that digital humanities research is taking place,
quite close.
So we're asking ourselves the following questions.
What is already happening, maybe without naming it digital humanities, which current and past
research projects have an affinity with digital humanities and who are the experts involved
and which digital humanities support structures are already in place?
So we started this little survey by basically looking at the project lists that the colleagues
in our institution have on their websites, which admittedly introduces some kind of bias.
And so we surveyed them and we found there at this point in time 27 projects that were
being communicated by their web pages and we classified them into four types of projects
according to the following questions.
So type O would be, do they just produce a website for dissemination of otherwise classical
humanities work?
So for instance, by announcing news, events and stuff lists and a project mission or something,
which would then probably not count as a digital humanities project.
So let's look at type A. Do they apply computational methods in data processing or collect digital
data during the research process?
For instance, we found several corpus linguistics projects also in computational linguistics,
but also projects in web usability or projects that use eye tracking.
But basically what they do is they apply these digital humanities methods, we may say so,
to produce classical scientific publications in some sense.
And type B would be, do they publish data or database results in electronic form?
For instance, as an interactive site or do they contribute to a certain data archive?
Like we found projects that contribute to image archives or projects that produce complex
well-teaching materials, but that have some kind of inner complexity that qualify them
for being an interactive site basically.
And then of course there are projects that combine A and B.
So among our 27 projects, these were basically distributed as follows.
So a quarter of them were type O web dissemination, about 10% were type A digital processing to
produce classical scientific publications, a quarter of them produced digital products
and quite large bodies.
So we were surprised by these numbers actually combined both strategies.
And neither of them would call themselves a digital humanities project.
So that was interesting for us to see.
I could go into some of the cases, but I would like to actually come to a result of basically
what would we learn from this?
Well, at first I think it is good that the colleagues don't try to think about whether
they are digital humanities or not, but they are working their disciplines and connected
to their colleagues.
And basically when I was attending a certain selection of sessions this week, I found that
sometimes people are too self-absorbed with this question where they belong.
So maybe it is okay the way it is.
And just for instance looking at the LLC journal, I mean in almost 10 years there were two papers
I quoted that dealt with this process of organizing the division of labor and that basically served
the point.
So there is probably no need to further think much about it.
And yeah, so we could all start doing cool research again now.
Regarding the survey, we were quite surprised to see these pictures and of course since
the survey is also in our case serves as an instrument for contacting the projects
and estimating their demand for support.
Basically the way we approach these projects is probably not what strict social science
method would suggest, but we are trying to go one by one, step by step.
And returning to the research infrastructure, the message would be two terms, coverage and
diversity.
So with coverage, I mean it is important to think about how many people you can serve
or help to serve themselves in a particular time frame because no matter how well you
distribute and organize your work, there is always still a lot of work to do.
So if I had to implement all solutions for these, what I would now call clients myself,
I would not know where to start and I would probably not finish and serve any of them
well.
So what we have to do in this local perspective is to manage expectations carefully and to
sort out which consortium may probably best serve which kind of needs.
And as Peter Wittenberg would probably say, we have to be patient and work hard.
So diversity, the second term means that at a local perspective, things, questions and
approaches are very diverse.
Every researcher is having their own research profile, individual profile.
So locally it is basically about sorting things and trying to make helpful individual recommendations.
And also to involve local infrastructure like libraries and computing centers when this
makes sense or to suggest remote collaborations when this makes sense and to identify common
challenges among all of them and to report them back to the builders of research infrastructures.
Thank you.