The PROVIDEDH project aims to give Digital Humanities scholars tools to explore research objects and the degree of uncertainty in models applied to data. It is an interdisciplinary project that will analyze and adapt approaches from other fields where computing has been applied more extensively. The goal is to standardize infrastructures, frameworks, models and tools across different humanities disciplines.

1. Managing Uncertainty in the Humanities:
Digital and Analogue Approaches
Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin
PROVIDEDH.eu

2. PROgressive VIsual DEcision-Making in Digital Humanities
The PROVIDEDH project aims to give Digital Humanities scholars a space to explore and assess the
completeness and evolution of digital research objects, the degree of uncertainty that the models applied
to the data incorporate, and to share their perspectives and insights with the project’s broad range of
stakeholders.
PROVIDEDH is an interdisciplinary research project. The experience gained in other scientific areas in
which the intervention of computing has been much deeper and constant will be analysed and adapted to
the case of humanities. Specially, regarding infrastructures, frameworks, models and tools that can be
standardized for the different disciplines in the humanities.
PROVIDEDH.eu

3. Scientific knowledge is “a kind of
discourse.” (F. Lyotard)
PROVIDEDH.eu

4. Humanities scholars “do not seek to establish
unassailable, objective truths” and “instead […]
approach their objects of study from interpretive and
critical perspectives, acting in the assumption that in
doing so they necessarily also preconstitute them”
(Eef Masson)
PROVIDEDH.eu

5. Uncertain…but how?
● Inherent uncertainty
● Partial, missing, perspective-limited or conflicting
Information.
● Errors, especially in cataloguing, but also in
interpretation
● Bias
● Sense of something wrong, without knowing why
PROVIDEDH.eu

6. “…[b]ecause almost anything can be used as
evidence of human activity, it is extremely difficult to
set boundaries on what are and are not potential
sources of data for humanities scholarship.” (C.
Borgman)
PROVIDEDH.eu

7. What can we do?
● provide access to context and provenance.
● don’t focus on an unrealistic ‘single source’ model..
● focus on interoperability and ‘comparative legibility’ in
corroborating sources
● provide a ‘fuzzy search’ that can reduce false negatives
● Interrogability of processing
● enable trust. - explore embodied practices.
● - finally, and most importantly, don’t try to remove uncertainty, but
signal where it is.
PROVIDEDH.eu

8. PROVIDEDH Partners
s
PROVIDEDH Funders
The PROVIDEDH project is a three-year project funded within the CHIST-ERA call 2016 for the topic
“Visual Analytics for Decision Making under Uncertainty - VADMU.”
PROVIDEDH.eu