digital humanities in estonia: digital divide or linguistic isolation?
TRANSCRIPT
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Digital Humanities in Estonia: Digital Divide or Linguistic Isolation?
Mari Sarv, Kaisa KulasaluEstonian Folklore Archives - Estonian Literary Museum
DH2014 Lausanne, 11.07.2014
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What are the reasons of underdevelopement of digital humanities in Estonia?
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• Population: 1,31 million• Official language: Estonian
(finno-ugric language)• Speakers of Estonian (in Estonia
and abroad): 1,29 million• Area: 45,227 km2
• Independence declared: 1918• Foreign occupation: 1940–1991 • Independence restored: 1991• Joined the EU: 2004• Currency: Euro
Estonia 101
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Wired country• Electronic elections• E-Tax Board• E-School• E-Census• E-Estonia…http://www.egov-estonia.eu/
Home of:• Skype• TransferWise• European IT Agency• NATO Cooperative Cyber
Defence Centre of Excellence
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Linguistic divide within Estonia30% of the population speaks Russian as their first language.Two (more or less) separate communities (for historical reasons).
1. Russian speakers use the state e-services (and internet in general) far less than Estonians (TNS Emor 2012).2. Russian-speaking group has lower scores in computer skills and in information processing tests (PIAAC Study 2013).
... as a digital divide
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Implications of IT-boom for humanities
• development of language technology, computational linguistics• need to preserve digital governmental documents: digital
preservation department in Estonian National Archives founded in 1999
• large-scale digitization of cultural heritage collections from mid-nineties onwards
• collection and preservation of digital-born cultural heritage• creation of digital infrastructures to manage evergrowing digital
collections and make them available for public
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DH seminar in 2013• first introduction of the concept of DH to Estonian humanities
community• linguistics, folkloristics, archeology, literary studies, arts & cultural
heritage studies• DH evolves where the collections are (memory institutions rather than
universities)• initiative to create an informal network and a will to further
collaboration
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Two waves of digital humanities(Schnapp & Presner 2009)
- digitisation projects and creating the infrastructure- database search and retrieval- text analysis
- interpretation and research methodologies for digitised and born-digital materials- digital toolkits - new disciplinary paradigms
Firs
t, Q
uanti
tativ
e w
ave
Second, Qualitative w
ave
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Using digital methods for researchLinguistics
- co-operation of the linguists and computer-scientists since the 1950s;- curriculum of computational linguistics since 1997;- language technology and digital language resources.
The other fields of humanities- sporadic interest, depends of the interests and skills of individual researchers;- tools tailored for a single researcher.
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Linguistic divide• size of the language community is very small and the
community of researchers even smaller• materials to work with are often in Estonian and
unintelligible for international audience• the tools are language-specific
• collections and education are separated• lack of systematic technological knowledge base
among the humanities researchers
DH divide
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How to bridge the DH divide?
• to build an efficient local DH community/network• to establish more connections with the
international DH community• to spread the information on the new
developements, solutions, possibilities ...• to promote changes in the educational strategies• to localize software developed in/for other
languages
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To sum up:
• wired country doesn’t necessarily have booming digital humanities
• linguistic divide easily turns into a digital one• the size of the language community sets its
limits to the human resources and possibilities
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Supported by:
Kaisa Kulasalu, [email protected] Sarv, [email protected], @kaskekanke
Estonian Folklore Archives of Estonian Literary Museum