Digital Humanities, Big Data, and New Research Methods

www.sas.ac.uk

Professor Lorna M. HughesSchool of Advanced Study

University of London@lornamhughes

Digital Humanities, Big Data, and New Research Methods

Digital Music Lab: Analysing Big Music Data, Final workshopBritish Library March 13th 2015

‘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

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

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

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

5

Variants on “Belgian refugees”In Welsh and English, 1914-19cymru1914.org

1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919

Re-using digital newspaper content

Traw: Bedwyr Williams14-18NOW WW1 Centenary Art Commission

www.1418.NOW.org.UK

8

Macroscopic analysis

• Distant reading methodologies to work with datasets

• Kyffin Williams Online

• Lloyd Roderick, Aberystwyth University and National Library of Wales

9

Visualising Data

• Welsh Traditional Music

• Integration of sources to map traditional music and its cultural reception

• Andrew Cusworth: Open University and National Library of Wales

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…

1. Underlying data and metadata

http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk

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 Committeecymru1914.org

W.D. Roberts manuscripts, NLW MS 9982E

3. Rights management and copyright

4. Transparency of Method: ‘Showing our workings’

Debate about sentiment analysis and the SyuzhetPackage: Annie Swafford and Matt Jockers

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

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

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…

Thank you!

• Twitter: @lornamhughes