Keynote lecture on the Cross Country/Faculty Workshop on Digital Humanities: Prospects and Proposals, North-West University Potchefstroomkampus, South-Africa, 13 November 2013

1. The World of Digital Humanities:
Digital Humanities in the world
Edward Vanhoutte
Royal Academy of Dutch Language & Literature
University College London Centre for Digital Humanities
LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (OUP)
edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
@evanhoutte
Digital Humanities: Prospects & Proposals – 13/11/2013 U Potchefstroom

2. OUTLINE
The World of Digital Humanities
What are the/is Digital Humanities?
● History
● Humanities Computing
● Digital Humanities
●
Digital Humanities in the World
Reality check
● Centres | publications | resources
● Research/Projects
●

3. The World of Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities: Prospects & Proposals – 13/11/2013 U Potchefstroom

4. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Willard McCarty [2003]
'This, for the humanities, is a question not to
be answered but continually to be
explored and refined'

5. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Willard McCarty [2003]
'This, for the humanities, is a question not to
be answered but continually to be
explored and refined'
→ Day of Digital Humanities [2009-present]

6. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Day of DH [2009-present]
A social publication project that began with
reflection on what we do as we do it
2014: 8 April 2014 @DayofDH

7. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Day of DH [2009-present]
A social publication project that began with
reflection on what we do as we do it
ca 300 participants worldwide
●
Blogging: Day in the life of a DH
●
Q: What is Digital Humanities?
●
→ Differing & Contradictory views

8. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?

9. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Definitions of DH
1. The application of technology to the humanities
2. Working with digital media or a in a digital environment
3. Digital Humanities = Humanities done digitally
4. Transition moment towards future Humanities
5. Big Tent
6. Method & community
7. Collaboration/Interdisciplinarity
8. Using digital & studying digital
Cf. also Gibbs 2012
<http://fredgibbs.net/digital-humanities-definitionsby-type/>

10. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
The application of technology to
the humanities
The application of computational methods to research and
teaching in the humanities.
—John Unsworth
The theorizing, developing and application of/on computational techniques
to humanities subjects.
—Edward Vanhoutte
Digital ↔ Analog/Traditional Humanities
→ How much / How innovative technology?

11. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Working with digital media or in a
digital environment
Anything a Humanities scholar does that is mediated digitally, especially
when such mediation opens discussion beyond a small circle of academic
specialists.
—David Wacks
The performance of humanities related activities in, through and with
digital media.
—Christopher Long
Digital ↔ Analog/Print communication
→ I made a website / I use Twitter

12. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Digital Humanities = Humanities
done digitally
We don’t distinguish digital sociology or digital astronomy, so why digital
humanities? Just because computers are involved doesn’t mean the basic
nature of the subject area is any different than it has been traditionally.
—Philip R. “Pib” Burns
Digital Humanities is, increasingly, just Humanities—as far as I’m
concerned. New tools lead to new methodologies, new perspectives, and new
questions that all humanists should be aware of and concerned with.
—Benjamin Albritton
→ The computer as a tool

13. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Transition moment towards future
Humanities
Digital Humanities are the first step towards Future Humanities.
—Davor
A name that marks a moment of transition; the current name for
humanities inquiry driven by or dependent on computers or digitally born
objects of study; a temporary epithet for what will eventually be called
merely Humanities.
—Mark/Marino
→ Fleeting nature of difference / Transition

14. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Big Tent
DH is an umbrella term that, depending on who you are
talking to, covers a huge territory: everything from applied text analysis
and corpus stylistics to the more esoteric and theoretical realms of video
game criticism.
—Matthew Jockers
→ The computer as a tool

15. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Methodology & Community
The digital humanities is a name claimed by a community of those
interested in digital methodologies and/or content in the humanities.
—Rebecca Davis
A broad church – but a common hymn sheet.
—Anno Ici
To me, DH is about making connections between people, ideas, and fields; the
creative production of new ideas, questions, analyses, and technology; and
engagement with a community that extends beyond academia.
—Ashley Wiersma

16. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Collaboration/Interdisciplinarity
I think Digital Humanities is a kind of ‘fast-acting glue’ that allows
scholars with different academic backgrounds to collaborate instantly.
—Mitsuyuki Inaba, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
What sets Digital Humanities apart, for me, is its genuine
interdisciplinarity, its permanent emergence, and its open communication.
—Christof Schöch
The great opportunity to burn down academic walls.
—Enrica Salvatori

17. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Using digital & studying digital
I see ‘Digital Humanities’ as an umbrella term for two different but
related developments: 1) Humanities Computing (the specialist use of
computing technology to undertake Humanities research) and 2) the
implications for the Humanities of the social revolution created by
ubiquitous computing and online access. Since the late noughties the latter
seems to have become the driving force in DH with responsibility for much
of the ‘boom’ in public interest and funding.
—Leif Isaksen
→ Humanities Computing ↔ DH

18. DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
Humanities Computing
The practice of using computing
for and in the humanities
from the early 1950s tot 2004
→ Lexical Text Analysis
→ Literary & Linguistic Computing
Digital Humanities
Became prominent name of the field in
2004

19. History
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Again, it [the operating mechanism, EV] might act upon other
things besides number, were objects found whose mutual
fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the
abstract science of operations, and which should be also
susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating
notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for
instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in
the science of harmony and of musical composition were
susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine
might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of
any degree of complexity or extent. (Lovelace, 1961 [1843],
p. 248-249)

20. History
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)
Construction started 1943
● Ballistic research during WWII
● Operational in 1946
●
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer)
First binary stored program computer
● Ballistic research during WWII
● Operational in 1951
●

21. History
Warren Weaver (1894-1978)
Science:
Mathematics
Humanities:
Machine Translation

22. History
Machine Translation
The application of computers to the translation
of texts from one natural language into another

23. History
Machine Translation
The application of computers to the translation
of texts from one natural language into another
Arguments
Pragmatic & social: communication
● Academic & political: collaboration / peace
● Military: knowing what the enemy knows
● Economical: selling a good product
●

24. History
Andrew D. Booth (1918-2009)
A concluding example, of possible application
of electronic computer, is that of translating
from one language into another. We have
considered this problem in some detail, and it
aspires that a machine of the type envisaged
could perform this function without any
modification in its design.
[12 February 1948]

25. History
W. Weaver: 'Translation' (15 July
1949)

26. History
Machine Translation
1946: Discussions Weaver – Booth
1948: Memorandum by Booth
1949: 'Translation' by Weaver
1952: International Conference on MT
1953: 'Automatic Digital Calculators' by Booth & Booth
1954: Demonstration at IBM headquarters
1954: PhD on MT by Anthony Oettinger
1954: Journal 'Mechanical Translation'
1955-1966: Organisation of the field
1962: Association for MT and Computational
Linguistics
1966: ALPAC report

27. History
ALPAC report [1966]
Funding should be provided for:
●
The improvement of translation by developing
machine aids for human translators
●
For Computational Linguistics

28. History
Machine Translation
Concordances
● Frequency lists
● Lemmatizations
●
Lexical Text Analysis
Concordances / Glossaries
● Authorship attribution
● Stylistic studies
● Relative chronology
● Fragment problems – papyri
● Tape library
[Michael Levison, 1967]
●

29. History
Roberto Busa (1913-2011)
Index Thomisticus
Lemmatized concordance of all the words in
the complete works of Thomas Aquinas.
→ Commercial accounting machines (IBM)

30. History
Michael Levison (? - ?)
Computerized Concordance to the Revised
Standard Version of the Bible
→ Magnetic tape technology UNIVAC (RAND)

31. History
Up to the publication of the infamous ALPAC
report in 1966, Computational Linguistics and
Lexical Text Analysis were not separated fields,
and used statistical analysis for the creation of
indexes, concordances, corpora, and dictionaries.
But from then onwards, Computational Linguistics
embraced the symbolic approach and abandoned
statistical analysis which has been at the heart of
Humanities Computing.

32. History
Literary & Linguistic Computing
Computing in/for the Humanities
●
●
1965: Computers for the humanities? [IBM]
1967: Computers in Humanistic Research.
Readings and Perspectives.
→ anthropology, archaeology, history, political
sciences, language, literature, and musicology.

33. History
Literary & Linguistic Computing
Computing in/for the Humanities
1964: Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre
(LLCC) - Cambridge
● 1966: CHum
● 1970: ICLLC
● 1973: ALLC
● 1973: ALLC Bulletin
● 1973: ALLC/ICCH
● 1978: ACH
● 1980: ALLC Journal
● 1986: Literary & Linguistic Computing

34. History
Literary & Linguistic Computing
Computing in/for the Humanities
Europe: focus on literary and linguistic studies of
language in literary form
America: broader interest in computer-based
studies of language in literary and non-literary form

35. History
Literary & Linguistic Computing
Computing in/for the Humanities
1980
Susan Hockey: A Guide to
Computer Applications in the
Humanities
Robert Oakman: Computer Methods
for Literary Research

36. History
'Humanities Computing'
1966: Heller & Logemann: activity
● 1968: 'Humanities Computing Activities in Italy'
● 1974: 'the future of humanities computing'
● 1980's: term was widespread
● 1988 & 1991: Humanities Computing Yearbook
● 1991-1996: Research in Humanities Computing
●

37. Humanities Computing
Humanities Computing – McCarty
Computing for the Humanities
→ lack of modelling
→ Instrumental
●
Computing in the Humanities
→ importance of modelling
→ Methodological
●

38. Humanities Computing
Modelling
The heuristic process of constructing and
manipulationg models
Model
Denotative: a representation of something
● Exemplary: a design for realising something new
●

39. Humanities Computing
Modelling – Purpose
is never to establish the truth directly
but it ‘is to achieve failure so as to raise and point
the question of how we know what we know’
(McCarty, 1999b), ‘what we do not know,’ and ‘to
give us what we do not yet have’ (McCarty 2004,
p. 255).

40. Humanities Computing
Modelling // Computer Science
HC: starts from the modelling of ‘imperfectly
articulated knowledge’ (McCarty, 2005, p. 194),
and works its way up through further steps of
computational modelling till it reaches the stage of
a deeper understanding of the world.
CS (and programming in particular): starts
from a real world problem and travels down to its
implementation in hardware.

41. Humanities Computing
Method of HC
≠ Formalisation
Heuristics: the study of interpretation that
confers value on cultural objects
Text Encoding: use of markup for the
articulation and documentation of different
semiotic systems in text
→ Empirical Modelling

42. Humanities Computing
Text Encoding Initiative [TEI]
Principles:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Platform-independent
Software-independent
Endurability
Re-usability
Accessibility
Language-independent
For all of the Humanities disciplines
→ SGML ISO 8879:1996 → XML

43. Humanities Computing
Text Encoding Initiative [TEI]

45. Digital Humanities
Has definitely but not definitively replaced
Humanities Computing as a name for the
field.

46. Digital Humanities
Popularization
● Socialization
→ Trivialization?
●
The popular qualification ‘digital’ only relates to
the technological (instrumental?) element of
computation without using jargon language such
as ‘computer’, ‘computing’ or ‘computational’.

47. Digital Humanities
Humanities Computing:
●
more hermetic term
●
clearer purview:
●
relates to the crossroads where informatics and
information science meet with the humanities
●
had a history built on LTA & MT
Digital Humanities:
●
does not refer to such a specialized activity,
●
provides a big tent for all digital scholarship in the
humanities.

48. Digital Humanities
Patrik Svensson [DHQ]
Humanities Computing ≠ Digital Humanities
There are many scholars involved in what may be
called digital humanities who have no or little
knowledge of humanities computing, and vice
versa, many humanities computing
representatives who do not engage much with
current 'new media' studies of matters such as
platform studies, transmedia perspectives or
database aesthetics.

49. Digital Humanities
Rafael Alvarado
Instead of a definition, we have a genealogy, a
network of family resemblances among provisional
schools of thought, methodological interests, and
preferred tools, a history of people who have
chosen to call themselves digital humanists and
who in the process of trying to define the term are
creating that definition.
→ Social Category

50. Digital Humanities
Matthew Kirschenbaum
At a moment when the academy in general and the humanities in
particular are the object of massive and wrenching changes, digital
humanities emerges as a rare vector for jujitsu, simultaneously
serving to position the humanities at the very forefront of certain
valueladen agendas—entrepreneurship, openness and public
engagement, future-oriented thinking, collaboration,
interdisciplinarity, big data, industry tie-ins, and distance or
distributed education—while at the same time allowing for various
forms of intra-institutional mobility as new courses are mooted, new
colleagues are hired, new resources are allotted, and old resources
are reallocated.

51. Digital Humanities
Matthew Kirschenbaum
A tactical convenience

52. 2004
Digital Humanities

53. 2004
Digital Humanities

54. 2004
Digital Humanities

55. Digital Humanities
Tries to model the surrounding world in order to
reach at a better understading of humans, their
activities and what they produce.

56. Digital Humanities

57. Digital Humanities in the world
Digital Humanities: Prospects & Proposals – 13/11/2013 U Potchefstroom

58. Geographically
195 DH centres registered on CenterNet

59. Geographically
DH2014: 589 papers from 35 countries

60. Geographically
DH2014: 589 papers from 35 countries

61. Organizations
ADHO: Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organizations <http://www.digitalhumanities.org>
EADH: European Association for Digital Humanities
<http://www.eadh.org – http://www.allc.org>
● ACH: Association for Computers and the Humanities
<http://www.ach.org>
● CSDH/SCHN: Canadian Society for Digital Humanities
<http://csdh-schn.org/>
● AaDH: Australasian Association for Digital Humanities
<http://aa-dh.org/>
● JADH: Japanese Association for Digital Humanities
<http://www.jadh.org/>
● CenterNet
<http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/>
●

62. Geographically
LLC 2012: 107 papers from 30 countries

63. Thematically

64. Thematically

65. Financially

66. Financially

67. Publications – Journals
+ 3,500 Institutional subscribers
+ 560 Individual subscribers
59 published papers
753 pp.
Impact Factor: 0.717
@LLCJournal
Official Journal of ADHO:
● EADH
● ACH
● CSDH/SCHN
● AaDH
● JADH
● CenterNet

68. Publications – Journals
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Open Access
<http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/>

69. Publications – Journals
Digital Studies / Le champ numérique
Open Access
<http://www.digitalstudies.org/>

70. Publications – Journals
JDH: Journal of Digital Humanities
Open Access
<http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/>

71. Publications – Journals
Online refereed journal
<http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/>

72. Publications – Journals
Official journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
Consortium
<http://journal.tei-c.org/journal/index>

73. Publications – Books

74. Online Resources
highlights and distributes informally published
digital humanities scholarship and resources
<http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/>

75. Online Resources
a community-based Q&A board for digital
humanities
<http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/>

76. Online Resources
Free interactive tutorials on TEI
<http://teibyexample.org/>

77. Online communities
International electronic seminar on humanities
computing and the digital humanities.
<http://dhhumanist.org/>

78. Online communities
International web-based community for
medievalists working with digital media.
<http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

79. Online communities
Decentralised and international community interested in the
application of innovative digital methods and technologies to
research on the ancient world.
<http://www.digitalclassicist.org/>

80. Twitter communities
Comprehensive list of scholars in digital humanities
& editors of Digital Humanities Now @dhnow.
@digitalhumanities

81. Twitter communities
@LLCJournal

82. Twitter communities
@eadh_org

83. Twitter communities
@DefiningDH

84. Training
DH undergraduate, masters, and PhD programs
<https://www.zotero.org/groups/digital_humanities_
education/items/collection/2950956>

85. Training
Week of intensive coursework, seminars, & lectures
<http://www.dhsi.org/>

86. Training
Summer Schools
Oxford [UK]
<http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/>
●
Leipzig [Germany]
<http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/>
●
Bern [Switzerland]
<http://www.dhsummerschool.ch/>
●

87. Research & Projects

88. Research & Projects
Male: 70%
Female writers adopting
male style
Female: 80%
Elliot
Kipling / James / Trollope
/ Hardy

89. Research & Projects
Iris Murdoch: died with Alzheimers
Agatha Christie: suspected of
having died with Alzheimers
P.D. James: aged healthily
Signs of dementia can be found in
diachronic analyses of patients'
writings and lead to new
understanding of the work of the
individual authors whom we studied

90. Research & Projects

91. Research & Projects
Not more than two-dozen ancient
individuals living from around
2200 BC to 421 AD authored the
Book of Mormon [1830]
But
Five 19th century authors:
Solomon Spalding
● Sidney Rigdon
● Oliver Cowdery
●

92. Research & Projects
<http://www.oorlogsdagboek.be/>

93. Research & Projects
<http://edities.ctb.kantl.be/daisne/>

94. Research & Projects

95. The World of Digital Humanities:
Digital Humanities in the world
Edward Vanhoutte
Royal Academy of Dutch Language & Literature
University College London Centre for Digital Humanities
LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (OUP)
edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
@evanhoutte
Digital Humanities: Prospects & Proposals – 13/11/2013 U Potchefstroom