{"id":6106,"date":"2016-06-22T11:05:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T01:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/?p=6106"},"modified":"2022-10-11T13:57:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T02:57:44","slug":"reflections-on-a-day-at-digital-humanities-australasia-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2016\/06\/22\/reflections-on-a-day-at-digital-humanities-australasia-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on a Day at Digital Humanities Australasia 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"
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While we were ensconced in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies building, Australia’s icebreaker, the Aurora Australis,<\/em> was being loaded next door.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The field of Digital Humanities has been a significant influence on the way I work. There are many debates about the nature of\u00a0Digital Humanities is but very broadly it covers the work humanities researchers do when they study the use of digital technology in society, adopt research methods which draw heavily on digital technology and present their findings using digital technology.<\/p>\n

I follow experts in digital humanities on Twitter and read their blog posts. Through this I have deepened my understanding in using technology to explore World War I diaries, mine Trove for information and convert old documents into machine-readable form. You can read more about the technical details of what I am doing on\u00a0Stumbling Through the Future<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>my Digital Humanities blog. What I do is relatively simple but I owe it all from listening to experts on the internet and at conferences.<\/p>\n

I was planning on visiting Hobart sometime for research and to visit family, but that sometime was hastened when I found out that the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities<\/a> were holding their annual conference in Hobart. The Association had secured some thought-provoking digital humanists for their keynote sessions and I wanted to be there. Yesterday I sat in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies\u00a0on the waterfront engrossed in some fascinating sessions.<\/p>\n

\"Me
I was dressed for the wet weather but enjoyed having a look at the Aurora Australis before going into the conference.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Miriam Posner co-ordinates the digital humanities program at University of California Los Angeles. I have been following her for some years on Twitter, that great learning tool for digital humanities. She is a thought-leader and like many I sat up and took notice of her call for us to do more to challenge received categories of gender and race, as well as received models of the world such as Cartesian maps<\/a>. That keynote she delivered last year is what motivated the conference organisers to invite her to Australia.<\/p>\n

I was too absorbed in her keynote this morning to tweet it. Posner\u00a0interrogated the discomfort humanists have with the new field of ‘culturomics’ – the attempt by scientists to draw broad conclusions about\u00a0culture through analysing the frequency of words and word-phrases in huge collections of texts.\u00a0The article in\u00a0Science<\/em>\u00a0(pdf)<\/a>\u00a0which announced this field drew much media attention. Titled, ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, the researchers described how they used the corpus of books which Google had digitised to draw conclusions on English-language culture. Humanists drew a collective shudder at this – what books were digitised (hint – books stored in\u00a0a particular continent in the north part of the rest of the world)? Whose words were represented? Whose words were missing? etc, etc.<\/p>\n

But Posner looked deeper at our discomfort. She looked at the nature of data itself and how humanists reject the nature of many databases such as the neat boundaries, the separation from context and the acceptance of categories are inventions of a small group of people in power. Humanists like to challenge categorisation, to reveal the multiplicity of views of the world held by the wonderful diversity of humanity. I found this keynote very helpful because in examining this issue Posner was encouraging us to understand better the nature of the work we do.<\/p>\n

The second keynote of the morning was by Tim Hitchcock, professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex. He is also a thought leader in digital humanities and together with Professor Robert Shoemaker has brought a suite of digital history projects online such as Old Bailey Online<\/a>, London Lives<\/a>, Locating London’s Past<\/a>, Connected Histories<\/a> and is now part of the Digital Panopticon<\/a> team. He is particularly interested in ‘history from below’ which is the history of those people who were ignored by traditional history books.<\/p>\n

Tim Hitchcock challenged the pre-occupation of digital humanities with written texts. He pointed out that most of the\u00a0digitised material we work with comes from documents copied onto microfilm during the twentieth century. Microfilm is cheaper to digitise than original material. But what did libraries and archives choose to microfilm\u00a0in the midst of the twentieth century? Effectively the material that was chosen for microfilming was done through the sexist, racist and elitist lens of the past. Our digitised data has inherent bias. It was obvious\u00a0from Tim Hitchcock’s remarks that he was certainly not accusing any of today’s companies, libraries or archives of being sexist, racist and elitist. As he said in the comments at the end, this bias in the digitised data that we have to work with is inherited by us from decision-makers of previous generations.<\/p>\n

Hitchcock challenged us “to get out more” and move beyond texts. He wants to recover the experiences of the “voiceless dead” by recreating the spaces they occupied, hearing speeches from their position. He is modelling the buildings of the past such as prisons and the Old Bailey to help us understand the perspective of the accused when they walked into the foreign environment of the law court and were forced to explain themselves. He wants us to understand with empathy the experiences of these people, although as Sydney Shep<\/a> noted in the discussion afterwards, by\u00a0doing these online renderings we are bringing our present day understanding into the past. But this is a caveat for all history – we understand the past through our eyes in the present. The present is always part of us when re delve into history. We cannot know the past like the people living in those times did.<\/p>\n

This overview is a superficial account of their presentations, but unlike other disciplines Digital Humanities has a great culture of open sharing on blogs and Twitter. If you want to learn more about Digital Humanities I recommend you start following Miriam Posner<\/a> and Tim Hitchcock<\/a> on Twitter as well as Tim Sherratt<\/a> from the University of Canberra. They also have great blogs where they often post the presentations that they have given.\u00a0I will add links on this post to their presentations when the presentations are online.<\/p>\n

As with all conferences it is not just the papers that are useful, it is the conversations in the breaks.I received a couple of great ideas for my work from these conversations as well as some from the papers during the day. Digital Humanities covers researchers from a broad range of disciplines which helps people to break out of the sometimes rigid boundaries of traditional disciplines. We heard papers about ancient Sanskrit texts, linguists seeking to capture the meaning of humour and laughter, maritime Buddhism and more. Diversity sparks creativity. It helps us see the same thing with different eyes. This is one of the reasons I find conversations in Digital Humanities so helpful.<\/p>\n

There were many other papers yesterday, but I can’t cover it all. I will end with what I thought were a couple\u00a0of the choice quotes of the day:<\/p>\n

The skip has done more damage to Irish records than the war.<\/p>\n

Aoife O’Connor<\/a><\/p>\n

If you data does not cause you to have an existential crisis then it is not big data.<\/p>\n

Deb Verhoeven<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Digital Humanities Australasia conference continues for the next two days. Follow the informative Twitter stream at #DHA2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The field of Digital Humanities has been a significant influence on the way I work. There are many debates about the nature of\u00a0Digital Humanities is but very broadly it covers the work humanities researchers do when they study the use of digital technology in society, adopt research methods which draw heavily on digital technology and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,14],"tags":[43,81,106],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Yvonne Perkins","author_link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/author\/yvonne\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7513,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106\/revisions\/7513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}