digital humanities as innovation: ‘constant revolution’ or ‘moving to the suburbs’?
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea Scharnhorst & Sally Wyatt4 June 2015
Digital Humanities as Innovation: ‘constant revolution’ or ‘moving to
the suburbs’?
…., by the rapid improvement of all instruments of [knowledge] production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most [hermeneutic] into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the [humanists’] intensely obstinate hatred of [numbers/positivism] to capitulate. It compels all [humanists] on pain of extinction, to adopt the [computational] mode of [knowledge] production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, that is, to become [computational] themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image . . .
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. [Disciplinary] one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
Why is the emergence of new fields so attractive a topic?
PRICE, D. J. (1965). NETWORKS OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS. Science (New York, N.Y.), 149, 510–515. doi:10.1126/science.149.3683.510
- Identity and self-perception of science/academia: your field, both your battlefield and your castle
- Education and training – what is the core body of literature in a field?
- New ideas, new fields, scientific progress and economic wealth- Optimization of public spending of (fundamental) research
Analytic frames for a new scientific field
Funding, university faculties, projects, start-upsFunding, university faculties, projects, start-ups
Methods, textbooks, courses, chairsMethods, textbooks, courses, chairs
Self-organized, autonomous academiaNorms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?Who is recognized for valuable contributions?What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?What are the most visible institutions?
Self-organized, autonomous academiaNorms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?Who is recognized for valuable contributions?What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?What are the most visible institutions?
Potential traces: researchers, publications, journals, books, courses,conferences, funding, chairs, …..
The ideal-typical model of the emergence of a new field
"Diffusionofideas" by Tungsten - self-made based on Rogers, E. (1962) Diffusion of innovations. Free Press, London, NY, USA.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG#/media/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG
Bruckner, E., Ebeling, W., & Scharnhorst, A. (1989). Stochastic dynamics of instabilities in evolutionary systems. System Dynamics Review, 5(2), 176–191. doi:10.1002/sdr.4260050206
The ideal-typical case study of the emergence of a new field – Burger/Budjoso’s study of the field of Chemical Oscillations
Maria Burger, Ernö Bujdosó “Oscillating chemical reactions as an example of the development of a subfield of science” In: OSCILLATIONS AND TRAVELLING WAVES IN CHEMICAL SYSTEMS, Ed. By R.J. Field; M. Burger, Wiley, 1984, pp. 565-604
The rise of Digital Humanities – where are we?
"Diffusionofideas" by Tungsten - self-made based on Rogers, E. (1962) Diffusion of innovations. Free Press, London, NY, USA.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG#/media/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG
- Reference system: global/national/local- How are Digital Humanities defined? – Boundaries of the field- Data?
?
The rise of Digital HumanitiesMelissa Terras – Quantifying Digital Humanities
Melissa Terras started a data collection 2011, see her blog http://melissaterras.blogspot.nl/2011/11/stats-and-digital-humanities.html
Part of the Infographic
EINS 1st PLENARY
DH in WorldCat (ArticleFirst)Digital libraries
Science, ComputerScience, ontologies
Many different humanities fieldsProminently language &Literary studies
The rise of Digital Humanities
Akdag, et al., EINS Conf
The rise of Digital Humanities Growth of publications on topic DH OR Humanities computing including articles citing them – Web of Science
The rise of Digital Humanities – own studiesGrowth of DH courses according to the DARIAH course registry
The rise of Digital Humanities – own studiesGrowth of projects belonging to DH in the Netherlands - NARCIS
320 projects
The rise of Digital Humanities – own studiesGrowth of projects belonging to DH in the Netherlands - Crowdsourced
95 projects
The rise of Digital Humanities – own studiesGrowth of projects belonging to DH in the Netherlands – a sample of 152
152 projects
The rise of Digital Humanities – growth curves - lessons
• Different sources indicate growth – this is not that surprising.• To be able to use growth curves to discuss in which stage are DH we
would need many more data points.
• Still, what we measure crucially depends on how we define the boundaries of the field:• Bibliometric measures do not even give definite answers for
journal-based fields. There are many perspectives on what constitutes a field!
• We don’t have one bibliography, or one database. We also see that by creating a database we actually define the field - this is evidence for the power of classifications!
• DH is a field which has fully embraced digital scholarship: blogs, mailing lists play an important role, digital corpora and infrastructures alike. We can monitor some activities, but need to be aware that we never can really ‘measure’ the field.
A growth model for Digital Humanities as thought experiment
Conclusion and discussion (I)
- “Digital Humanities” is an established term, and conferences, journals, centers, courses etc. seem to indicate that there is a new field.
- What constitutes a field? - What kind of data sources could you imagine to trace
the field?- Where do you think we are on the S-curve?- What do you think: will DH remain one field different
from other humanities, or will it be absorbed into humanities, when all humanities become digital?
"Diffusionofideas" by Tungsten - self-made based on Rogers, E. (1962) Diffusion of innovations. Free Press, London, NY, USA.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG#/media/File:Diffusionofideas.PNG
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Where are we?
Conclusion and discussion (II)
- Depending on which phase we perceive the field to be in, what are the implications for science policy?
- Do we still need protected niches ?
- We seem to have larger networks now. What do we need to make full use of them?
- Do we need domain-specific information services and if so which?
- What topics/areas which have not been funded (or underfunded) should be funded?
- What kind of projects should be funded, and what kind of positions?
- Do we need another round of digitization, tooling, education, …?
References and acknowledgements
We would like to thank Almila Akdag, Linda Reijnhoudt, Stef Scagliola, Hendrik Smeer, Barbara Safradin for their contributions to this presentation.
- Wyatt, S., Millen, D., eds.: Meaning and Perspectives in the Digital Humanities. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/files/894428/white_paper_web_1_.pdf
- Koopman, R., Wang, S., Scharnhorst, A., Englebienne, G.: Ariadne's thread: Interactive navigation in a world of networked information. In: CHI'15 Extended Abstracts. (2015) http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.04358
- Akdag Salah, A.A., Scharnhorst, A., Leydesdorff, L.: Mapping the growth of digital humanities. In: Digital Humanities Conference (DH2010), Kings College, London, UK (June 2010)
- Leydesdorff, L., Akdag Salah, A.A.: Maps on the basis of the arts & humanities citation index: The journals Leonardo and Art journal versus digital humanities as a topic. Journal of the American Society for information Science and Technology 61(4) (2010)
- Wyatt, S., Leydesdorf, L.: e-humanities or digital humanities: Is that the question? In: Digital Humanities Workshop. (2013)
- Lucio-Arias, D., & Scharnhorst, A. (2012). Mathematical Approaches to Modeling Science from an Algorithmic-Historiography Perspective. In A. Scharnhorst, K. Börner, & P. van den Besselaar (Eds.), Models of Science Dynamics (pp. 23–66). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23068-4_2
- Bruckner, E., Ebeling, W., & Scharnhorst, A. (1990). The application of evolution models in scientometrics. Scientometrics, 18(1-2), 21–41. doi:10.1007/BF02019160