1. Prof. Dave E. Marcial
Dean, College of Computer Studies
VP –Visayas, PSITE
Secretary, Computing Society of the Philippines
Youth for IT 2010
UP Diliman, Quezon City
September 15, 2010
Promoting Digital Humanities
in the Philippines

2. Presentation Outline
What is Digital Humanities?
Goals and Objectives of Digital
Humanities
Research Opportunities in Digital
Humanities
Challenges in Digital Humanities
The Philippine Initiative

3. What is Digital Humanities (DH)?
Study Research Teaching Invention
Computing
Humanities
Investigation
Analysis Synthesis
Implementation
electronic formelectronic form

4. DH’s Goal
Traditional arts &humanities
disciplines
electronic publication and
computational analysis, in project
design and visualisation, in data
archiving and retrieval

5. DH and Its Research Opportunities
as model or
mimicry
as a way of
reasoning
as a set of
ontological
commitments
as shaped by the
need for efficient
computation
Formal
Expression

6. DH as model or mimicry
Example
A catalogue record (vs.full-text
representation)
…it captures and makes explicit certain
attributes of the original object – title,
author, publication date, number of pages,
topical reference. It obviously omits others
– the full text of the book, for example.

7. DH as a way of reasoning
Examples
 A concordance.
…assumes that verbal patterns in a text are a key to the
meaning of that text.
…it would support certain kinds of stylistic analysis,
 A relational database.
…establishes the grounds of rational inference by
establishing fields in records in tables
…actually recommends certain kinds of queries by
establishing relationships between elements of
different tables.

8. DH as a set of ontological
commitments
Examples
 Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects
… content objects nest – paragraphs occur within chapters,
chapters in volumes, and so on.
… that a language that captures ordered hierarchical relationships
and allows content to be carried within its expression of those
relationships can capture what matters about text.
 Deborah Parker's Dante Project:
… has marked up all of the cantos, stanzas, and lines in Dante's
poem, and then all of the proper names and epithets,
distinguishing mythical, historical, biblical, and literary sources,
different types of animals, different types of people, regularizing
forms of proper names, etc.

9. DH as shaped by the need for efficient
computation
Examples
 Markup and computation.
…The reason for requiring that elements nest
properly within a specified hierarchy is to enable
efficient computation.
 Latent semantic indexing.
… Compare the characteristics of the
concordance, and its efficiencies, with those of
latent semantic indexing

10. DH as shaped by the need for human
communication
Example
The difficulty of using markup
languages.

11. DH and Formal Expression
 …it puts DH in the position of having to do two things that
mostly, in the humanities, we don't do: provide
unambiguous expressions of ideas, and provide
them according to stated rules.
 In short, once we begin to express our understanding of, say,
a literary text in a language such as XML, a formal grammar
that requires us to state the rules according to which we will
deploy that grammar in a text or texts, then we find that our
representation of the text is subject to verification – for
internal consistency, and especially for consistency with the
rules we have stated.

12. Challenges in Academic Recognition
 Socially this has to do with the slow pace of institutional
change.
 Intellectually it has to do with the curious, poorly understood
nature of non-verbal knowledge-bearing objects
 Curatorially it raises the serious problem of how such
knowledge-bearing objects are to be preserved for the long
term.
 Culturally it runs afoul of the low status commonly given to
works of popular culture -- multimedia, documentaries,
interactive games and other visual media -- which tend to be
dismissed as entertainment.
 Standards: open vs proprietary

13. The Philippine Initiative
scholarly
works with
emphasis on:
preservation
of local
knowledge
Sharing
culture

14. Summary and Recommendation
Digital Humanities is
methodological by nature
and interdisciplinary in
scope

15. Summary and Recommendation
 It involves experts in both research and
teaching; in all of the
traditional arts and humanities disciplines
(history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art,
archaeology, and music of many cultures, for
example);
specialists in electronic publication and
computational analysis, in project design and
visualisation, in data archiving and retrieval.

16. Summary and Recommendation
begin to integrate DH in any of your
classroom projects,such as the use of
text-analytic techniques; GIS;
commons-based peer collaboration;
interactive games and multimedia in the
research and teaching of history,
philosophy, literature, religious studies
or sociology.

17. Concluding Remark
Let us help preserve our
local knowledge and let us
share our culture through
Digital Humanities