1.
Digital Humanities in The Netherlands
DARIAH, CLARIN, CLARIAH, … DHx.0
A personal view
Andrea Scharnhorst
Launch of DARIAH-Malta, September 3, 2014
Malta

2.
Based on ….
Almila Akdag Sahal, Andrea Scharnhorst, Sally Wyatt (2015) Digital Humanities as a
Virtual Community - Analysing an academic field through the lenses
of Internet Science. Invited paper given at the 2nd International Conference on Internet
Science, Brussels, May 27-29, 2015. [2] Any chance to delineate DH with metrics?
Andrea Scharnhorst, Sally Wyatt (2015) Digital Humanities as Innovation: ‘constant
revolution’ or ‘moving to the suburbs’? Lecture at the eHumanities group of the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, June 4, 2015 [1] Identity – why
this is important
Stef Scagliola, Barbara Safradin, Almila Akdag, Hendrik Smeer, Linda Reijnhoudt, Sally
Wyatt, Andrea Scharnhorst (2015) Mapping Digital Humanities projects - A pilot of a
DH project registry for The Netherlands. Presentation given at the DH Benelux Antwerp
June 8-9, 2015
https://www.slideshare.net/AndreaScharnhorst/a-pilot-of-a-dh-project-registry-for-the-
netherlands/edit?src=slideview
[3] No data - more data – data collection=data selection

3.
Andrea Scharnhorst – “science located”
• Head of Research&Innovation at DANS and scientific coordinator of the
Computational Humanities programme at the eHumanities group of the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) – DANS=Data Archiving and
Networked Services Institute (DANS)
COST TD1210
Analyzing the dynamics of information and knowledge landscapes

4.
DH in the Netherlands
2004-2014, 9Mio+2.8Mio
2015-2018, 12,6Mio

5.
DH – Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences
•Innovative
Practices in SSH
Virtual Knowledge
Studio
•Demonstrator
projects across
institutes
Alfa Lab
•Computational
humanities
programme
•Cultures of DH
eHumanities
group
•Large scale
investment in RIS
CLARIAH
DH + ….

6.
Flagship of DH in The
Netherlands
http://www.clariah.nl/en/

7.
Andrea Scharnhorst & Sally Wyatt
4 June 2015
Digital Humanities as Innovation:
‘constant revolution’ or ‘moving to
the suburbs’?

8.
A growth model for Digital Humanities as thought
experiment – Wyatt/Scharnhorst - eHumanities group June 4

9.
Start of large scale
digitization projects at
the Royal Library
Start of the "Cultural
memory of The
Netherlands"
Start of Staten-Generaal
Digitaal - Parlamentary
Debates
LifeCoursesInContext
NWO - Mega RIS -
Digital Databank for
Newspapers (DDD)
PoliticalMashup
CEDAR - Dutch Historic
Census
EliteNetworkShifts
DELPHER - Portal to
digital sources of the KB
ExPoSe
Digging into Linked
Parliamentary Data
1-Jan-99 31-Dec-00 31-Dec-02 30-Dec-04 30-Dec-06 29-Dec-08 29-Dec-10 28-Dec-12 28-Dec-14 27-Dec-16
From Digitization to Digital Humanities

10.
The rise of Digital Humanities
Melissa 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

11.
EINS 1st PLENARY
DH in WorldCat (ArticleFirst)
Digital libraries
Science, Computer
Science, ontologies
Many different humanities fields
Prominently language &
Literary studies
What is Digital Humanities?
Akdag, et al., EINS Conf
www.thoth.pica.nl/relate?
ARIADNE
OCLC – Koopman/Wang

12.
The rise of Digital Humanities
Growth of publications on topic DH OR Humanities
computing including articles citing them – Web of Science

13.
EINS Final Conference

14.
EINS Conference, 27-29 May

15.
Forming a community – providing information services
DH course registry – Stef Scagliola, Manfred Thaller, …
Emerged from a local (Dutch) initiative – DARIAH community driven
https://dh-registry.de.dariah.eu/ 160 courses/tagged,
Where can I study? What do teach others?

16.
Forming a community – providing information services
DH project registry – a pilot – Hendrik Schmeer
Pilot for a proposal to CLARIAH, temporarily hosted by CEDAR (eHumanities)
http://www.dh-projectregistry.org/projects BETA

17.
Demo
- Sort by name
- Sort by start date
- No search function yet, but a lot of fields at display already
- Tagging with TaDiRAH – partly
http://www.clariah.nl/en/dodh/project-registry

18.
Visual analytics
1995 2004
Meertens KNAW
2015 2019
Leiden University, LUCAS
Future ideas: add funding

19.
Visual analytics
Future ideas:
- Roles of institutions
- Temporal evolution

20.
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?

21.
"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
XX
Where are we?

22.
Conclusion and discussion – derived from the analysis
of the Dutch situation (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?
- 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, …?
- Do we need domain-specific information services and if so which?
- The course registry (EU), and the project registry (NL) are initiatives to respond
to an information/coordination need of an emerging field.
- On a more general level – we need better science observatories to develop
evidence based science policy. This includes data about research, visualization,
analytics and simulation models (scenarios).
- Special attention for emerging and for small/rare fields

23.
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