Subject
Our Cultural Commonwealth, a report of the American
Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyber Infrastructure for Humanities
and Social Sciences, (ACLS 2006) mentioned the relative "conservative culture of
scholarship" in the humanities and social sciences (as compared to the natural
sciences) as one of the explanations why researchers in these knowledge domains
might be hesitant in using the web and other digital resources for their
research.
Before pointing to these researchers however, we may want to
question first of all the infrastructures and tools offered to those
researchers. Tools and services will only be taken up if they truly
serve researchers in their daily work. Infrastructures
and tools offered to humanities scholars should support concepts and approaches
specific to scholarly practices in humanities research, and, to that end, the
ACLS commission advocates “working in new ways” by “tools that facilitate
collaboration; an infrastructure for authorship that supports remixing, re-contextualization, and commentary—in sum, tools that turn access into
insight and interpretation. [emphasis in original]”
(ACLS, p. 16).
Recently we have seen an increase of virtual laboratories, which use virtual
research environments (VREs) to facilitate collaboration among researchers and
to promote innovative use of tools and sources in humanities research.
Therefore, although traditionally operating as sites of knowledge production in
the natural sciences, laboratories have started to develop into loci of
scholarly practice in the humanities too. This shift has also been reflected in
funding agencies’ support to online laboratory settings; their (re-) allocation
of financial resources is fed by expectations that more researchers will become
involved in digital and computational humanities, and that the use of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) in humanities research will
lead to new research questions, methodologies, and ways of collaborating.
However, it is not evident that the lab analogy can be transmigrated seamlessly
from a science field into the humanities.
Thus far, there has been little critical reflection on such lab initiatives,
although the use of VREs in the humanities certainly requires and merits
scholars’ attention. Now that a number of such large scale initiatives have
developed, there is an opportunity to reflect on what these VREs have achieved
and to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses for humanities research, as well
as to explore ways in which they should further develop. Therefore this panel
addresses theoretical, epistemological, hermeneutical and strategic questions
emerging from the use of VREs in digital and computational humanities in
general, and in humanities research of text and image in particular. It brings
together representatives of scholarly institutions developing virtual labs,
infrastructures, and tools to advance the study of text and image in humanities
research. The panel focuses on humanities labs promoting new scholarly practices
in VREs, and within this broader framework it concentrates on the following
specific themes:
- the benefits, challenges and obstacles of research practices emerging
from humanities research in virtual research environments.
- the specificities of generating, analyzing and sharing linguistic and
visual data in online laboratory settings.
- the advantages and barriers of scholarly collaboration across
disciplinary and geographic spans.
- the main features of institutional and funding policies needed for
further development of digital humanities labs.
- technical models potentially driving future development of local
initiatives.
Organization of the panel
The research and development team of AlfaLab
—a digital humanities
initiative of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)— is the
initiator and organizer of this panel. Panel members include humanities
researchers from KNAW; Digital Research and Scholarship and Scholarly
Communication Institute at the University of Virginia Library; POLIS and Virtual
Center on the Spatial Humanities; TextGRID; DARIAH; and the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR). The panelists are engaged in
the study and development of six different humanities labs dealing with text and
image analyses, which grants this panel a unique opportunity to comparatively
explore various strategies in building and using humanities labs, and to reflect
on both theoretical and practical concerns of that process. In addition, the
panel will critically evaluate —from the researchers' perspective— the focal
themes listed above, and it will address actions that might be taken to improve
the use of VREs in humanities research.
The panel session will be organized in the following way:
- The panel chair will introduce the main topic, discussion questions,
and the panelists; duration: 3 minutes;
- Each of the panelists will give a short presentation (6 minutes),
followed by questions from the audience (4 minutes); duration: 60
minutes;
- The themes and questions raised in the presentations will be further
discussed in an open forum between the panelists and the audience;
duration: 25 minutes;
- The panel chair will briefly reflect on future plans, provide contact
information, and close the panel.
Panelists:
- Dr. Tobias Blanke, King's College London discussing DARIAH
- Dr. David Bodenhamer, Director Polis Center discussing the Virtual Center on the
Spatial Humanities
- Prof. Dr. Fotis Janidis: University of Wuerzburg (Germany) discussing
TextGRID
- Dr. Bethany Nowviskie, Director Digital Research and Scholarship and
Associate Director Scholarly Communication Institute at the University
of Virginia Library - discussing NINES
- Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta TAPoR
- Joris van Zundert (MA): Department of Software R&D at the
Huygens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences -
project leader AlfaLab, discussing AlfaLab