Slides of the paper presented at Digital Humanities 2014 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland 11.07.14

1. Digital Humanities in Estonia:
Digital Divide or Linguistic Isolation?
Mari Sarv, Kaisa Kulasalu
Estonian Folklore Archives - Estonian Literary Museum
DH2014 Lausanne, 11.07.2014

2. What are the reasons of underdevelopement
of digital humanities in Estonia?

3. • 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

4. 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

5. Linguistic divide within Estonia
30% 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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
First,Quantitativewave
Second,Qualitativewave

9. Using digital methods for research
Linguistics
- 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.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. Supported by:
Kaisa Kulasalu, kaisa.kulasalu@gmail.com
Mari Sarv, mari@haldjas.folklore.ee, @kaskekanke
Estonian Folklore Archives of Estonian Literary Museum