Digital humanities impact on Humanities and social sciences

1. The movement of Digital Humanities
and its impact on Social Sciences
Mokhtar BEN HENDA
Bordeaux University
28 October 2019

3. What are DH?
 All the ways that the humanities and digital
technologies intersect
 Humanities are academic disciplines that
study aspects of human society and culture
(H&SS):
– Humanities & Social Sciences:
• Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Communication
studies, Economics, Education, History, Linguistics and
languages, Law and politics, Musicology, Human
geography, Jurisprudence, Literature, Philosophy,
Political science, Psychology, Public health, Religion,
Sociology, Arts, Visual & Performing, etc.

4. What are DH?
 Digital technologies are electronic tools,
systems, devices and resources that
generate, store or process data:
– Application softwares (tools):
• Text editors, text analysis, photo editing, text
encoding, video editing, social media, …
– Processes (actions):
• Document scanning, OCR, encoding, indexing,
referencing, Data formatting, Data analysis, Data
converting, …
– Digital data (contents):
• Digital text, digital audio, digital images, digital
video, web pages and websites, data and
databases, electronic books…

5. Definitions
“Digital Humanities is born of the
encounter between traditional
humanities and computational
methods.” – Anne Burdick
“Digital humanities is work at the
intersection of digital technology and
humanities disciplines.” – Johanna
Drucker

6. Goals of DH
The goal of digital humanities is to:
– “integrate modern information technology into traditional
humanistic research and teaching processes”.
XiaojuanXU, 2018
– “gather, refine, maintain and share cultural resources that
can subsequently be used and refined by scholars and
members of the community”
Marinos Ioannides, 2016

7. World success
 The discipline of DH is
becoming in the center of
academic activity.
 Hundreds of scientific
research centers of digital
humanities worldwide.
 DH are taught at
universities around the
world.
 (non-)Conferences are
held worldwide.
 Scientific journals are
dedicated to DH.

8. Historic milestones
 The emergence of Digital Humanities is closely linked to the development
of the computer. These are some of the milestones:
– 1949: With the help of IBM, Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, embarks on a major
computer-assisted edition project. Indexing the Work of Thomas Aquinas (Priest).
– 1973: Europe’s digital humanists form the Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing, which later becomes the EADH.
– 1986: Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC), the leading specialist journal in the
research field, appears for the first time.
– 1994: Technical standards are set with TEI, a format for encoding and exchanging
texts that is still used today.
– 2004: Google Books is born. Today, this online project is the largest library in the
world with an estimated 25 million titles.
– 2006: The Digital Humanities Initiative is launched in the USA. This funding
programme gives a push to the entire research field =
A worldwide movement !

9. DH organisations

10. DH ThatCamps (un-conferences)
 A user-generated
“unconference” on digital
humanities.
 Open, inexpensive meeting
where humanists and
technologists of all skill levels
learn and build together in
sessions proposed on the
moment.
 The structure and agenda is
decided on-site on the first day
of the un-conference.
 No papers. No panels. But
productive results, networking,
and knowledge sharing

12. DH as a World Movement

13. DH projects
 Digital Humanities projects are interdisciplinary
 Digital humanities projects are labor-intensive and require the work of project
teams, collaborators
 They involve a team or a lab, which may be composed of faculty, staff, graduate or
undergraduate students, information technology specialists, and partners in
galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
 Digital humanities projects allow people to step outside the world of print and enter
a world of interactive maps, digital timelines and archives containing millions of
digital books

14. DH Working Methods
Data Annotation (tagging)
Text Analysis & Data Mining
Digital Exhibitions
Digital Mapping/GIS
Data Visualization
Linked Data
Photogrammetry, Virtual
Worlds, 3-D Modeling

15. Data encoding, annotation
Author : George Orwell
Title : 1984
Type : Fiction-O-1
Author : Agatha Christie
Title : N ou M
Type : Policier-C-15

16. Litterary genres
Different
content
structures
according to
litterary genres

17. Different structure types

18. Different structure types

19. Different structure types

20.  Minimal skills:
HSS specialist
Technician
Data specialist (librarian)
HSS Corpus
A DH project organization

21. A DH corpora
HSS CorpusPoetry
Theatre Tales
Music Manuscrips Speeches
Fabula
All other types
Videos
Paintings
Database of HSS resources
Softwares

22. Text analysis projects:
Text Analysis is a way for researchers to
gather/extract information about authors and their
way of creating sense in their writings
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-
christie-alzheimers-research

24. Mapping and GIS projects
 GIS (Geographic Information
System) is a system designed to
capture, store, manipulate,
analyze, manage, and present all
types of geographical data.
 Example : The Bomb Sight project:
– mapping the London WW2 bomb
census between 7/10/1940 and
06/06/1941
– by scanning original 1940s bomb
census maps (geographical locations
of all the falling bombs recorded on
the original maps)
http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900

25. Mapping and GIS projects
 Example : memory of
migration:
– hosting 365,951 stories
pinned across 27,844
projects and tours – across
2,600 cities. Built by a
community of 80,000+
storytellers, archivists and
citizen historians.
– collecting, curating and
structuring stories
http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900

26. Mapping and GIS projects
Example : An Interactive
Tour through Hillerman's
Novels: The Blessing
Way:
– mapping the US cities
mentioned in every novel
of Hillerman
https://univofnm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=d67
9af73baec47fb945e81510a820195

27. Some DH tools

28. Selected Free Text Analysis Tools
 Wordle (http://wordle.net) Free
 Voyant Tools (https://voyant-
tools.org/) Free
 Mallet (http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/)
Free
 WordStat
(http://www.predictiveanalyticstoday
.com) – Add on for QDA Miner $$$

29. Selected mappings and GIS tools
Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps
History pins: https://www.historypin.org/en/
QGIS: https://www.qgis.org/fr/site/
ArcGIS: https://www.arcgis.com/index.html

30. Let’s do some TEXT practice
 Text Analyzer: https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp
– Use any URL of your choice and let the online tools find the most frequent phrases and frequencies
of words
 Text Statistics Analyser : https://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics/
– More sophisticated statitics
 A lot of Data mining tools at: https://guides.nyu.edu/tdm/tools
– Data mining is a research technique to uncover patterns in large data sets. Data mining techniques
range from machine learning applications, to GIS and mapping, to business intelligence.

31. Let’s do some Graphic/text practice
Voyant tool: https://voyant-tools.org/?lang=en

33. Let’s do some TEXT practice
 Voyant tool: https://voyant-tools.org/?lang=en
– Use the URL of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at URL: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-
human-rights/
 The 3 main parts of the result screen are:
– On the left, the area that shows the clouds Tags (Cirrus), the occurrences of words in the text (Terms) and semantic
links between terms (Links)
– The middle area displays the text that is the subject of analysis. Select a word and it will be highlighted throughout the
text years
– The right area shows the curve of the most frequent words, the number of occurrences of words and their
proportions relative to the entire text

 The lower half of the screen displays:
– Left the summary of the document analyzed, the documents in the case of a body being analyzed, and phrases (group
of words as a unit)
– On the right, the context of each of the words extracted, and a line of bubbles of different sizes depending on the
occurrence of each term.
– Play with the elements of the different areas of the screen to see the interaction between the various modules. A
definite choice implies a dynamic change in the other modules.

34. Let’s practice some Web analysis
 Datawrapper:
https://www.datawr
apper.de/
– Select Map option
– Clic on « Create A
Map »
– Create a map of the
10 largest cities in
Vietnam (locator
map)
– Add Marker (Hanoï,
Ho Chi Minh,
Danang…)

35. Let’s do some GRAPHIC practice
 Google Books Ngram Viewer :
– https://books.google.com/ngrams
– Type in a word or phrase in
one of seven languages
(English, French, German,
Spanish, Hebrew, Russian,
Chinese) and see how its usage
frequency has been changing
throughout the past few
centuries.
– Note: the dataset's quality is
highest for English between
1800 and 2000

36. Let’s practice some Web analysis
 Semrush for digital
marketing
professionals:
https://www.semrush.com/
 Register for free to
SEMrush then choose
Websites to monitor
their audience
 Analyze VASS website

37. Let’s practice some Web analysis
 Google Trends for
Websites:
– Measures and compares
the keywords and search
phrases on the web.
– Analysis by country and
region.
– Compare « Industry
4.0 » and « Artificial
intelligence » in Vietnam

38. Further ressources for practice
More many tools by category
https://library.nyu.edu/