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 Stef Scagliola, Barbara Safradin, Almila Akdag, Hendrik Smeer, Linda Reijnhoudt, Sally Wyatt, Andrea Scharnhorst

1. Mapping Digital Humanities
projects
A pilot of a DH project registry for
The Netherlands
Stef Scagliola, Barbara Safradin, Almila Akdag, Hendrik Smeer, Linda Reijnhoudt,
Sally Wyatt, Andrea Scharnhorst
e-Humanities group
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Credit to Erasmus Studio Rotterdam, UvA, University of Cologne, DANS-KNAW

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

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

4. Digital Humanities as a new field and as a virtual community
Funding, university faculties, projects, start-upsFunding, university faculties, projects, start-ups
Methods, textbooks, courses, chairsMethods, textbooks, courses, chairs
Self-organized, autonomous academia
Norms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?
Who is recognized for valuable contributions?
What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?
What are the most visible institutions?
Self-organized, autonomous academia
Norms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?
Who is recognized for valuable contributions?
What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?
What are the most visible institutions?
Funding
Courses
Centres
Students
PhD’s
….
Input Process Output
Mailing lists
Twitter
Subscriptions
Conference participation
….
Publications
Citations
Impact
……
Different traces, not all at hand.
Different attempts to collect information
and to study the growth of DH.
Problem of defining the boundaries.

5. 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

6. Digital Humanities as a new field and as a virtual community
Funding, university faculties, projects, start-upsFunding, university faculties, projects, start-ups
Methods, textbooks, courses, chairsMethods, textbooks, courses, chairs
Self-organized, autonomous academia
Norms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?
Who is recognized for valuable contributions?
What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?
What are the most visible institutions?
Self-organized, autonomous academia
Norms, values, behavior, institutions
What are legitimate questions and answers?
Who is recognized for valuable contributions?
What are the appropriate places to talk and
publish?
What are the most visible institutions?
Funding
Courses
Centres
Students
PhD’s
….
Input Process Output
Mailing lists
Twitter
Subscriptions
Conference participation
….
Publications
Citations
Impact
……
Different traces, not all at hand.
Problem of defining the boundaries.
Need for Macroscopes:
-As community service
(for students, newcomers)
-As observatory for science policy

7. Forming a community – providing information services
DH course registry – Stef Scagliola
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?

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

9. Demo
- Sort by name
- Sort by start date
- No search function yet, but a lot of fields at display already
- Tagging with TaDiRAH – partly

10. Trajectory to the Pilot I
- Stef/Barbara – identified projects, contacted researchers,
Google Form, Spreadsheet, 95 projects
- Queries in NARCIS – www.narcis.nl
- All projects for staff with an expertise
combination of CS+H 320projects
- ‘eHumanities’, ‘computational hum..’, ‘digital hum…’ +
manual ~30 projects
- Selected 152 projects for exporting information from NARCIS,
use as much as possible Persistent identifiers!
- Added remaining projects from ‘Barbara’s list’ – 211 projects
in the pilot database

11. Trajectory to the Pilot II
• Building a database
scheme (Hendrik+)
• Mapping to
NOD/NARCIS
• Start of
cleaning/tagging
(Barbara)
• Moving to webserver
• First demo interface
• Project Baseline
Statistics and
Visualization (Almila)
Kijkje achter de schermen Visual analytics

12. Kijkje achter de schermen

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

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

15. Could - Should
• Harvest more projects
(NARCIS, NWO, CORDIS,
DiD, …) Seed+Expand,
LOD
• Tagging projects
according to TaDiRAH
• Search interfaces (visual
enhanced)
• Funding-project-study
• Curate the projects in
the pilot – entity
disambiguation
• Find a permanent home
• Organize update
• Organize curation

16. Feedback
http://dh-projectregistry.org/projects
Name/Institution/mail address
Why do we need a DH project registry (Benelux, EU, …)?
What do you think could be the function of such a registry?
If so, what information you would like to be able to search for?
Would you like to be able to curate your own project information?
Andrea.scharnhorst@dans.knaw.nl

17. Why do we need a DH project registry (Benelux, EU, …)?
- useful for a field in the making;
- Project information is too much scattered
What do you think could be the function of such a registry?
- inform about past present projects to avoid redundancy
- find experts and possible collaborators
- get inspired
- information source for students
- support science policy about future funding
If so, what information you would like to be able to search for?
- project names, categories, persons, institutions, time,
funding institutions
Would you like to be able to curate your own project information?
- yes, but I would prefer to have as much information as
possible prefilled for me
Discussion

18. References and acknowledgements
We would like to thank EINS – Network of Excellence in Internet Science for supporting the
setting up of the pilot and NARCIS-DANS-KNAW for providing input.
- Melissa Terras started a data collection 2011, Infographic Digital Humanities
see her blog http://melissaterras.blogspot.nl/2011/11/stats-and-digital-humanities.html
- 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., Leydesdorff, L.: e-humanities or digital humanities: Is that the question? In: Digital Humanities
Workshop. (2013)
- 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., Scharnhorst, A., & Wyatt, S. (2015). Analysing an academic field through the lenses of Internet
Science : Digital Humanities as a Virtual Community. In Conference: 2nd International Conference on Internet
Science Brussels, May 27-29, 2015, At Brussels, Volume: http://internetscienceconference.eu.