2009 3.4
Special Cluster: e-Science for the Arts and Humanities
Editors: Stuart Dunn and Tobias Blanke
Articles
The Potential and Problems in using High Performance Computing in the Arts and Humanities: the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) Project.
Melissa M. Terras, Department of Information Studies, University College London
e-Science and high performance computing (HPC) have the potential to allow large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available large-scale datasets, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) scoping study, an AHRC-funded e-science workshop series, was established to investigate the potential application of grid computing to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records. Consisting of three one-day workshops held at UCL in Summer 2006, the workshop series brought together expertise across different domains to ascertain how useful, possible, or feasible it would be to analyse datasets from Ancestry and The National Archives using the HPC facilities available at UCL. This article details the academic, technical, managerial, and legal issues highlighted in the project when attempting to apply HPC to historical data sets. Additionally, generic issues facing humanities researchers attempting to utilise HPC technologies in their research are presented.
e-Science for Medievalists: Options, Challenges, Solutions and Opportunities
Peter Ainsworth, Dept of French and Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield; Michael Meredith, Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield
Medievalists typically resort to parchment for primary research and when editing their
sources. Not always accurately catalogued, manuscripts copied onto animal skins may have started life in the same workshop but over the centuries have become dispersed, coming to rest in libraries all over the world; bringing these together entails travel, microfilm purchases and reassembly and collation of the data within reach of a microfilm reader. These unwieldy machines afford only moderate scope for exploring single manuscripts at close quarters. High-resolution digitisation yields not just better surrogates in full colour; it allows for the development of additional research tools using image compression and manipulation, and new modes of representation, e.g. juxtaposed display of several related witnesses. This paper outlines research questions underpinning the development of an electronic tool for viewing, transcribing and manipulating manuscripts; it moves on to show how the viewer can be adapted for access from remote sites, to compare and annotation one or more witnesses (interactively and in real time), and for use as an integral part of an online edition. Finally, it explores how it can be deployed for use on projects taking knowledge outside the academy: in museums, galleries and other public spaces.
Service-Oriented Software in the Humanities:
A Software Engineering Perspective
Nicolas Gold, King's College London, Department of Computer Science
Software Engineering, as a sub-discipline of the broader field of computer science, is concerned with the production, use, and maintenance of large, complex software systems. On first inspection, the set of managerial and technical activities involved in software engineering appears to be somewhat orthogonal to core research activity in the humanities, being concerned more with the production of research-enabling software systems than the research itself. However, as the scale of software used in digital humanities has increased, it is becoming clear that there are ways in which software engineering can inform, inspire, and aid in the management of the larger-scale software systems now being constructed in these disciplines. In particular, the development of service technology to aid in the production of flexible software systems for business now offers opportunities, not only for collaborative data sharing, but also the modelling, capture, provenancing, and replay of the research (and possibly creative) process itself.
This paper examines, from the perspective of a software engineer relatively new to the digital humanities, how the recent developments in service-oriented architectures could be used to enable new approaches to digital enquiry in the arts and humanities. The first part of the paper presents a brief history of software engineering, with particular reference to the aspects that have led to service-oriented architectures. In the second part, the paper offers some thoughts on how certain aspects of service-oriented architectures could be used to enable new kinds of computer-based research and practice in the arts and humanities. It also introduces important national initiatives in this area, such as the JISC e-Framework programme for Higher Education.
The Making of Our Cultural Commonwealth
John Unsworth, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Reflections on the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure
The e Prefix: e-Science, e-Art & the New Creativity
Gregory Sporton, Director, Visualisation Research Unit, School of Art, Birmingham City University
What does it mean to put an e ahead of a concept? This essay
discusses the purpose of doing such a thing, arguing there is a distinct
method in the apparent randomness of labelling something e this or
that. Far from simply denoting that it might be done with computers
(and, indeed, what isn't today), Sporton argues that beyond the effect
of explaining this is something to do with technology, there is an
emergent e-culture that reunites the arts and sciences after two
hundred years of separate development within the academy. An
e-Culture emerges that reflects the values, opportunities and
restrictions of Internet as a research environment. The potential of
that environment requires a mindset focussed on collaboration to achieve
anything of creative significance.
Locating Grid Technologies: Performativity, Place, Space: Challenging the Institutionalized Spaces of e-Science
Angela Piccini, University of Bristol
This paper arises out of a brief period in the early- to mid-2000s when the
British funding and research climate facilitated a relationship between the
technical, operational language of e-Science and the creative and
performing arts. It concerns the ways in which live creative practices
produce media traces that are fractured across screens and networks to
produce new spatial relations between live events and their records. The
split and contradictory subjectivities produced in these highly mediatized
environments bring to the fore creative tensions between the live event and
the recorded document. That is, the discourses, technologies and practices
(if we may separate these) of e-Science not only produce new, spatial
connections between events and their archives, they enact the liveness of
archives as they are accessed and recombined to produce new art forms.
Locating Grid Technologies: Performativity, Place, Space, a research
workshop series funded by the A&H e-Science Initiative in its 2006 round,
aimed to investigate how e-Science technologies might inform new
understandings of space and time for distributed, creative research
practices. Arts and technology researchers from the UK, US and Japan met to
generate, analyze and re-use audio-visual documents of distributed
practice-led research. Specifically, the project sought to combine and
repurpose e-Science tools in order to investigate the spatial relationships
produced between time-based, live events and their immediately mediatized
traces. This paper investigates those performative fragmentations of place
and space. It suggests that the potentialities and pitfalls of e-Science
tools and technologies present fertile material for the arts researcher,
particularly within the area of practice-based research: from the politics
of surveillance to the aesthetics of video compression, from the ethics of
multidisciplinary collaboration to the theoretical implications of mixing
video time and space with the time and space of the performance event.
Grid-enabling Humanities Datasets
Mark Hedges, Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
The term grid-enabling is sometimes (or even often) used without a
clear idea of what is meant. In this article we attempt to clarify
some of the possible meanings of grid-enabling data resources. In
particular, we examine how researchers in the humanities may benefit
from using such approaches, and examine some concrete case studies in
which grid technologies have been used to support data-driven research
in the humanities.
Articles
Ontologies and Logic Reasoning as Tools in Humanities?
Amélie Zöllner-Weber, Uni Digital, Bergen, Norway
In this article, we evaluate approaches using logic reasoning applied to an ontology for literary characters. The inference tool Racer and the programming language Prolog were tested and compared to see if they can serve as a computer assisted approach in this scenario.
Both offer options to draw inferences, but the usage requests a good comprehension of logics. Intuitive and individual queries are also difficult to produce with solely logic constructs. Furthermore, information in humanities is often vague, ambiguous, or even contradictory. Solving such problems by logic reasoning which is simply based on true or false conclusions will become challenging and might exceed the limits of logic reasoning.
At the moment, to the author’s knowledge, only few such approaches, especially in literature studies, have been published. Existing approaches show promising results in modelling information in humanities. Therefore, further research should be directed to make ontologies and further approaches like logic reasoning even more popular and applicable in the humanities and literature studies.
Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts
Kari Kraus, College of Information Studies and Department of English, University of Maryland
Broadly conceived, this article re-imagines the role of conjecture in textual
scholarship at a time when computers are increasingly pressed into service as tools of
reconstruction and forecasting. Examples of conjecture include the recovery of lost readings in classical texts, and the computational modeling of the evolution of a literary work or the descent of a natural language. Conjectural criticism is thus concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction. It has ancient parallels in divination and modern parallels in the comparative methods of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology.
The article develops a computational model of textuality, one that better supports conjectural reasoning, as a counterweight to the pictorial model of textuality that now predominates in the field of textual scholarship. Computation is here broadly understood to mean the manipulation of discrete units of information, which, in the case of language, entails the grammatical processing of strings rather than the mathematical calculation of numbers to create puns, anagrams, word ladders, and other word games. The article thus proposes that a textual scholar endeavoring to recover a prior version of a text, a diviner attempting to decipher an oracle by signs, and a poet exploiting the combinatorial play of language collectively draw on the same library of semiotic operations, which are amenable to algorithmic expression.
The intended audience for the article includes textual scholars, specialists in the digital humanities and new media, and others interested in the technology of the written word and the emerging field of biohumanities.
"It May Change My Understanding of the Field": Understanding Reading Tools for Scholars and Professional Readers
Ray Siemens, University of Victoria; Cara Leitch, University of Victoria; Analisa Blake, University of Victoria; Karin Armstrong, University of Victoria; John Willinsky, University of British Columbia/Stanford
As the amount of scholarly material published in digital form increases, there is growing pressure on content producers to identify the needs of expert readers and to create online tools that satisfy their requirements. Based on the results of a study conducted by the Public Knowledge Project and introduced at Digital Humanities 2006 (Siemens, Willinsky and Blake), continued and augmented since, this paper discusses the reactions of Humanities Computing scholars and graduate students to using a set of online reading tools. The results of our study reveal both the potential strengths and perceived weaknesses of online reading environments. Understanding how users read and evaluate research materials, anticipating users’ expectations of the reading tools and resources, and addressing user concerns about the availability of online material will lead to improvements in the design and features of online publishing.
The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities
Christine L. Borgman, Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA
The digital humanities are at a critical moment in the transition from a specialty area to a full-fledged community with a common set of methods, sources of evidence, and infrastructure — all of which are necessary for achieving academic recognition. As budgets are slashed and marginal programs are eliminated in the current economic crisis, only the most articulate and productive will survive. Digital collections are proliferating, but most remain difficult to use, and digital scholarship remains a backwater in most humanities departments with respect to hiring, promotion, and teaching practices. Only the scholars themselves are in a position to move the field forward. Experiences of the sciences in their initiatives for cyberinfrastructure and eScience offer valuable lessons. Information- and data-intensive, distributed, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary research is now the norm in the sciences, while remaining experimental in the humanities. Discussed here are six factors for comparison, selected for their implications for the future of digital scholarship in the humanities: publication practices, data, research methods, collaboration, incentives, and learning. Drawing upon lessons gleaned from these comparisons, humanities scholars are called to action with five questions to address as a community: What are data? What are the infrastructure requirements? Where are the social studies of digital humanities? What is the humanities laboratory of the 21st century? What is the value proposition for digital humanities in an era of declining budgets?
