1. www.sas.ac.uk
Professor Lorna M. Hughes
School of Advanced Study
University of London
@lornamhughes
Digital Humanities, Big Data, and New
Research Methods
Digital Music Lab: Analysing Big Music Data, Final workshop
British Library March 13th 2015

2. ‘We are all digital humanists now…’
• The content we use is
increasingly ‘digital by
default’
• We produce, curate and
manage vast quantities
of data, and are getting
better at data
management
• We publish digital
resources, and digital
outputs, that
increasingly include data
• Our content is re-used
for unforeseen purposes

3. Core elements of Digital Humanities
Digital Content
• Digital collections, and projects with digital outputs
Methods
• ‘Scholarly primitives’ to gain new knowledge:
Discovering, annotating, comparing, referring,
sampling, illustrating, and representing digital content
Tools
• For processing and analysis
Researchers in the humanities are creating, managing, and using data
• To enable existing research processes to be conducted better and/or faster
• To enable researchers to ask, and answer, completely new research questions

4. Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig /Welsh experience of the
Frirst World War: http://Cymru1914.org
• Unified digital archive of 220,000
pages of text, image; audio, film
• Collaborative development
between Libraries & academics
• Exposing content for widest
harvesting
• Incorporated use and re-use of
content into development
• Fully bilingual and accessible
user interface

5. Production and re-use of data: http://cymru1914.org
5

6. Variants on “Belgian refugees”
InWelsh and English, 1914-19
cymru1914.org
1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919
Re-using digital newspaper content

7. Traw: BedwyrWilliams
14-18NOW WW1 Centenary Art Commission
www.1418.NOW.org.UK

8. 8
Macroscopic analysis
• Distant reading
methodologies to
work with datasets
• KyffinWilliams Online
• Lloyd Roderick, Aberystwyth
University and National Library
ofWales

9. 9
Visualising Data
• WelshTraditional Music
• Integration of sources
to map traditional
music and its cultural
reception
• Andrew Cusworth:
Open University and
National Library of
Wales

10. Digital methods in the humanities highlight
challenges of Big Data
1. The underlying data and metadata
2. Linking datasets from disparate collections
3. The human infrastructure: data sharing, rights management, open data
and open access…
4. Invisibility of digital methods in scholarly outputs: we do not ‘show our
workings’
5. Bringing together research questions, data, methods, and tools…

11. 1. Underlying data and metadata
http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk

12. 2. Better linking of digital content
“We hoped to be able to
send send all these people to
Glasgow at Easter…”
19th April, 1916:War
Refugees Committee
cymru1914.org
W.D. Roberts manuscripts,
NLW MS 9982E

13. 3. Rights management and copyright

14. 4.Transparency of Method: ‘Showing our workings’
Debate about
sentiment analysis
and the Syuzhet
Package: Annie
Swafford and Matt
Jockers

15. 5. Bringing together research questions, data,
methods, and tools…

16. Addressing the challenges
• Better collaborations with the cultural heritage sector
• Better partnerships around data creation and
management
• Pay more attention to the human infrastructure: the
scholarly ecosystem around digital research
• Develop new approaches to documenting and
describing digital methods within traditional
publications

17. Conclusions
• Humanities research questions build an enquiry-led
understanding of the essential elements of data
• The key to big data is its unpredictability and un-
structured nature: moving beyond scaling up, into the
realm of the Known Unknowns
• Understanding the complexity of data is transferrable
across disciplines and genres
• From small things, big things one day come…

18. Thank you!
• Twitter: @lornamhughes