Wandering Lonely as a Cloud. Arts and Humani7es, Clouds, Crowds and Seamless Infrastructures Sheila Anderson Centre for e- Research, King s College London ISGC 2011, Taiwan 1
Clouds and Crowds - Wordsworth got there first.. I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, FluRering and dancing in the breeze. 2
Humani7es Research Prac7ces Hermeneu7c rather than experimental Narra7ve, textual, rhetorical Not seeking formal laws and explana7ons Recursive, not linear a constantly ques7oning process Deep reading / reasoning of sources Individualis7c, even when collabora7ng Rooted in disciplinary understandings and approaches 3
Humani7es Data Sources rather than data the human record Texts of all kinds, images of all kinds Objects, artefacts Video, film, audio (speech, music) Publica7ons, grey literature Complex, varied, mul7- faceted mix of digital and analogue Highly distributed in mul7ple loca7ons 4
Digital Humani7es - evolu7on Same prac7ces, different environment A gradual move into the digital Responding to digital content and opportunity to do stuff quicker Understanding scholarly primi7ves Unsworth: discovering, annota7ng, comparing, referring, sampling, illustra7ng, represen7ng DARIAH: discovering, collec7ng, comparing, delivering, collabora7ng 5
Digital Humani7es - transforma7on Changing prac7ces; converging prac7ces Dealing with scale Space, place and 7me Language and understanding Social media, social networking But remember humani7es research context individualis7c, complex, hermeneu7c 6
DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humani7es EU FP7 Infrastructure project Preparatory phase funded from October 2008 to March 2011 Construc7on phase starts now with support from around 10 European countries with more joining Applying for an ERIC soon Building systems and services that support evolu7onary and transforma7ve ac7vi7es 7
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Some examples General purpose VRE: D4Science and gcube for the humani7es, the gman project, King s College London Spa7al Humani7es: GIS in Literary Studies, University of Lancashire, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis FP7 Infrastructure project - European Holocaust Research Infrastructure: collabora7on with archives and researchers Collabora7ve across disciplines and commercial : 1641 Deposi7ons, University of Aberdeen, Trinity College Dublin, IBM Storage clouds go listen to Jens Jensen talk about Kindura.. 9
General Purpose VRE Support research processes using digital content, tools and services Support the whole of the research life- cycle Provide access to collec7ons, resources and tools Researcher centred: allow for interpreta7on, recursive thinking and annota7ons Mechanisms for managed collabora7on and sharing 10
Diligent, D4Science and gcube Funded by FP7 aims to create e- Infrastructure Ecosystems gcube: A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) Management Framework A testbed e- Infrastructure built upon grid middleware. Allows access to heterogeneous, distributed technologies, services and content and guarantees interoperability of these resources Based on shared local computa7on, storage and generic service and from EGI 11
Use Case for Classics HGV, a database of metadata for Greek papyri Project Volterra, a database of Roman legal texts Inscrip7ons of Aphrodisias (InsAph), a corpus of about 2,000 ancient Greek inscrip7ons 12
Plus addi7onal content Supplemented with addi7onal resources with stable URLs: Pleiades catalogue of ancient place names Lexicon of Greek Personal Names American Numisma7c Society s coin collec7on Each URL that resolves to a systema7c representa7on of the corresponding resource. Not imported: used as links from main datasets Mirrors humani7es scholar s use of mul7ple sources 13
Researchers were able to: Assemble virtual collec7ons of documents (research objects) Search across collec7ons (text/date/...) Add annota7ons to (parts of) objects Add (annotated) links between objects Search across annota7ons/links Share material with selected colleagues 14
user s workspace 15 collec7on within workspace
Next steps Improve interface for use by non- experts import par7cularly difficult Explore how access to and use of tools for further processing of content could be included e.g. to normalise spellings Integrate more data resources (including those managed externally to gcube) Extend humani7es VO to other groups of humani7es researchers Publica7on of data from VRE 16
Spa7al Humani7es constructed space on culture and society. Embraces all spa7al technologies but bends them toward the humani7es. (David GIScience. Indianapolis) Bodenhamer, Indiana University. Purdue University, (David Bodenhamer, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis) 17
Spa7al Humani7es 18
Technology and Tradi7on 19
Mul7ple Data Sources 20
Volunteer Informa7on 21
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European Holocaust Research Infrastructure To build an infrastructure that supports next generation Holocaust research A large European consortium including experts from Holocaust research, Archives, Research Infrastructures A domain that is in many ways most advanced in terms of digitisation and online presence How can we enhance traditional archivesbased research in the Humanities using research infrastructures 24
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The 1641 Depositions project aims to explore how a computer environment can be created in which scholars interested in historical and corpus linguistics can work collaboratively with historians and other specialists to interrogate a key historical source, the 1641 Depositions, in ways not currently possible, by exploiting effective language technology developed by IBM LanguageWare. images James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London, 1642) 26
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Summary We are on the way to data- driven Humani7es We have the tradi7on of the Digital Humani7es We need Infrastructures But mainly ways of working with the data We need successful collabora7on between CS and Humani7es, and between humani7es disciplines and others European (ESFRI) and interna7onal collabora7on offers many opportuni7es
Further Informa7on Sheila.anderson@kcl.ac.uk Spa7al Humani7es: Ian Gregory, University of Lancashire David Bodenhammer, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis gcube VRE: tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk Mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk CLRLE 1641 Deposi7ons Project: hrp://kdeg- vm- 15.cs.tcd.ie/omeka- 1.2.1/about 29