Author: admin

Posted on

How do we contribute to Europeana?

Kapplöpning, slädparti på Brunnsviken, Stockholm. Original av Martin Rudolf Heland (1765-1814).
https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/2048211/europeana_fashion_NMA_0035032.html?q=

Europeana is the European Commission’s digital platform for cultural heritage. It aims to make Europe’s cultural heritage more accessible and to make the collections digitised by different cultural institutions around Europe findable and searchable in one only access point.

The first Europeana prototype was launched on 20 November 2008, as a result of a letter signed in 2005 by six heads of Member States (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary) and addressed to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, asking the creation of a virtual European library. From the beginning, Europeana was not just a library because museums, archives and galleries joined it. In 2010 the prototype became an operational service and in 2015 Europeana was turned into one of the European Commission’s Digital Service Infrastructures.[1]

Today, Europeana website, called Europeana Collections, gathers more than 58 million digital objects. However, because Europeana doesn’t digitise directly the objects but only brings together the digitised collections of other institutions, it is worth analysing how much the EU Member States contribute to it (I considered the United Kingdom as still as a Member State because I think that its withdraw on 31 January 2020 hasn’t affected its contribution to the platform yet).

The two bar charts compare the percentage of European content per Member State in November 2010 and, nearly ten years later, in February 2020. The 2010 French predominance is exceeded by the Netherlands, whose contents are almost 17% of the whole present Europeana collections. Today France is the third contributor, whereas Germany maintains the second place sliding from 17.1% to 10.02%. Furthermore, during the decade, the United Kingdom, Poland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary and the Czech Republic increase their percentage. In 2013 Croatia decided to join the EU and, later, also the platform. Finally, the right chart shows an increase of the NON-EU States, which are classified as “Others” in the 2010 Report.

The comparison shows some features, like the drop of the Irish contribution from 6.47% to 0.22%, but only the below bar chart race, based on the States’ contribution measured in October 2011, May 2014, January 2016, August 2018 and February 2020, help to understand when it happened.

Until May 2014 Ireland’s number of digital objects had grown up to 1,093,836, then declined to 256,098 in 2016 and to 122,403 in 2018; only in the last two years, the Irish presence in Europeana has slightly increased. The most significant leap is, without doubt, the Netherlands, which rose extremely quickly between 2014 and 2018. In addition, the chart illustrates the notable contribution of Norway, NON-EU Member State, which is in fifth place overall.

Focusing on the current situation of Europeana, the map shows geographically the grade of the contribution of the European States. The core lies in the Netherlands, and this is not surprising because the Europeana Foundation is based in The Hague, housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and its staff works mainly there. Moreover, the most contributing states are close to the Netherlands, whereas the peripherical states, especially those in Eastern Europe, provide less content to the platform.

It could be argued that Germany or France contribute more because they are larger states, therefore they have more collections, more cultural institutions, more staff devoted to the cultural heritage. The following scatter plot provides information on the per capita contribution of the EU Member States to Europeana: although it is based on a simple operation (number of objects/population) and doesn’t take into account other important elements, like the Gross domestic product or the cultural heritage which each state manages, it shows the effort that each country makes to digitise its collections in proportion to its population.

The scatter plot reveals something new. The Netherlands always comes first, but the second and third states are unexpected: Sweden and Estonia, respectively with 0.415094 and 0.412323 digital objects per capita, while major content providers like France and Germany are far below the average. It gives a completely new overview of how the states join Europeana, considering the number of objects not in absolute but in proportion.

Moving to the metadata of the digital objects on Europeana, the media category is one important filter for refining a search and was taken into account also in the 2015-2017 Cultural Heritage: Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation Report. The interactive visualisation below, based on data retrieved in February 2020, helps to understand how the media categories (Image, Text, Video, Sound, 3D) are present in the platform and how much each country contributes to each one.

At first glance, Image is the most represented media category on Europeana, followed by Text. Filtering the view, the major Image contributors are the ones expected: the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, whereas for Text they are Spain, Norway, Poland and France. Otherwise, the largest number of videos is provided by Hungary and the Czech Republic and of 3D content by Austria and Spain. The lack of 3D content from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and many other countries could lead them to develop this media category, trying to bring local projects to Europeana. A similar reflection can be made for sound and video, other poorly represented categories on the platform.

Lastly, it is worth analysing the usability of the digitised material available on Europeana. On its website, Europeana states:

“We bring together the organisations that have great content with the people and sectors that want to research, share and create new things. Creative collaboration and teamwork matter to us, because that’s where the best ideas come from. We’re always pushing each other forward, innovating with technology to make culture part of everyone’s lives.’[2]

To reach this aim, free re-usable digital objects should be the vast majority. Europeana allows users to filter results by rights statements, which are grouped into three categories:

  1. Free Re-use (which includes Public Domain Marked, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA);
  2. Limited Re-use (CC BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, No Copyright-Other Known Legal Restrictions, No Copyright-Non Commercial Use Only, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted, Out of copyright-non commercial re-use);
  3. No Re-use (In Copyright, Copyright Not Evaluated, Right reserved-Free access).

The diagram illustrates the rights statements applied to the digital objects on Europeana per State. Less than half of the contents is free re-usable, but the no re-usable objects overcome the ones under limited re-use rights statements. This visualisation could help to understand which states Europeana should raise awareness to make its collections as open and reusable as possible: for instance, Italy, whose most content is not reusable.

To conclude, these visualizations gave an overview of the development and current status of Europeana, with reference to the contribution of each Member State. Europeana has undoubtedly been a great step forward to collect the digitised European heritage in one place and to offer scholars, students, teachers and above all citizens access to their heritage. The risk that has emerged is that Europeana will become too Dutch-centric: although the headquarters is in The Hague and it is obvious that there are closer ties with this country, it is a European Union’s platform. I believe that the next efforts will have to try to involve more closely countries such as Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Finland because all the European heritage must be represented on Europeana.

We transform the world with culture. We build on Europe’s rich cultural heritage and make it easier for people to use for work, learning or pleasure. Our work contributes to an open, knowledgeable and creative society.[3]

(Europeana’s Mission)

[1] Europeana, ‘History’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission/history

[2] Europeana, ‘About us – the Europeana idea’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission/about-us

[3] Europeana, ‘Our mission’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission

Posted on

Credibility and value of DH projects

In the present academic world peer review is essential: first for scholars and their careers because peer-reviewed articles count for promotion and grants; second for all the interested people, like students, librarians, journalists, and for other scholars, due to the sort of quality that peer review assures to research. However, if this system works well for print scholarship, can it also be applied to digital scholarship? How to validate the quality and credibility of Digital Humanities projects?

In the article Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities[1] Roopika Risam shows the difference between print and digital scholarships. Digital projects, unlike articles and books, are often collaborative, rarely finished and frequently public: these three aspects prevent a total application of the traditional peer review system. However, a kind of review and quality recognition is needed by DH scholars, especially by the junior ones who are asked to produce peer-reviewed works in order to build an academic career. As Sheila Cavanagh states, peer review is a key aspect to achieve reputation, opportunities and grants in academia and often forces graduate students and junior scholars to sacrifice their DH projects to spend more time producing more prestigious and recognised works, like articles and book chapters.[2] Sadly, in many faculties DH projects don’t receive the same consideration of publications, not taking into account the amount of labour behind a single CV line reporting a DH project.

According to Risam, new review standards should be created, different from the traditional ones because of the different nature of the two scholarships. She suggests metrics like tracking citations and usage statistics to evaluate digital projects: even though they are important indicators, in my opinion they don’t fully assure the quality of the content. Looking for new ways to transfer and adapt peer review to DH projects, I would like to analyse two solutions:

  1. The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) Nodes: NINES, 18thConnect, MESA, ModNets, SiRO

    ARC has created a mechanism of scholarly peer review to evaluate digital resources and archives which has been adapted to different studies or periods. MESA is built for scholars and researchers of Medieval studies; 18thConnect focuses on the long 18th-century (1660-1820), British and American; NINES concerns the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American; ModNets embraces the field of modernist literary and cultural studies, whereas SiRO devotes itself to archival resources for the study of radicalism.
    All these sister organisations adopt the same tools and infrastructures, and the same peer review schema. Submitted projects should have integrity, clear conceptual design and a certain amount of content, even if they don’t have to be completed. The peer-review process requires the submission of a document with information about the project’s structure, its technical dependencies, mission and plans for the future, as well as the submission of metadata describing the objects within the resource in the form of RDF. Then the project is evaluated by an editorial board made up of the most respected scholars in the field. The projects are evaluated on the basis of two questions: the first “is the content important and interested to existing scholarship?” analyses the intellectual content and originality of the resource, thus falling back in the traditional concept of peer review; the second one “is the material presented in a clear, accessible, well-organized and well-documented fashion?” aims attention at the technical structure, the adherence to standards developed by the DH community (like TEI), the interface designs and interoperability.
    This kind of peer review benefits a DH project in a number of ways because the editorial board guarantees its intellectual quality and validates it as equivalent to a print publication. This means that the work of a DH scholar can be fairly weighted also by faculty members without any knowledge in Digital Humanities. Furthermore, the peer review gives more credibility to the project, which will thus be more trusted by other scholars and by the general public. Last but not less important, peer-reviewed projects are aggregated in the ARC node’s website of competence and their objects become searchable also there, obtaining greater visibility and more users.

  2. Reviews in Digital Humanities, edited by Jennifer Guiliano (IUPUI) and Roopika Risam (Salem State University)

    It is a forthcoming pilot of a peer-reviewed journal (the deadline for the first call of projects was September 2019) which aims to facilitate the evaluation of DH projects. The journal will bring together both the projects’ descriptions written by their directors and the reviews. Furthermore, all the peer-reviewed projects will be listed in a projects’ registry. With this journal the two editors want to help DH scholars get peer reviews of their projects, considering the importance of peer review for promotion and future funding. I find the idea of this journal extremely interesting both because DH projects of any field can be submitted and because the review process will be transparent, publishing the reviews.

    We look forward to reading it!

[1] R. Risam, ‘Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no.4, 2014, doi:10.7264/N3WQ0220.

[2] S. Cavanagh, ‘Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access’, Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 4, Fall 2012, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/living-in-a-digital-world-by-sheila-cavanagh/, (accessed 08/12/2019).

Posted on

Green, Gold and Bronze… Toward Open Access

The Open Access debate has arisen in the last twenty years in order to make science, researches’ outputs and scholarly knowledge more open and accessible. Thanks to the World Wide Web everybody with an Internet connection gains access to a lot of information, often put online by volunteers (the best example is Wikipedia). But do people know that with their taxes they pay universities and research institutes to do high-level research but that the results are too often locked behind paywalls? In the end, citizens pay research twice: first funding the projects; second purchasing the access to the journal articles if they are not part of an institution paying journal subscriptions instead of them. Science funded by the public should not charge to see its results: this is the core of the Open Access movement, which is also expressed in the last Vienna Principle, “Public Good”. The 12 Vienna Principles, published in 2016, would lay the foundations of the future scholarly communications system, which should not be self-referential (i.e. made by academia and used by academia) but it should be addressed to all the society, especially students, administrators, librarians, journalists, public and private organisations, enterprises and interested citizens.

The 12 Vienna Principles

All the Vienna principles are inspired by the idea that knowledge tends to grow when it is shared, and this goal can be reached only through Open Access. One of the Open Access milestones is the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which clearly states the two conditions that Open Access must satisfy:

  1. “The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works […]”

  2. “A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials […] in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.” [1]

Have we already reached these conditions? Not for the moment. So, how far are we from them?

Focusing on Europe, the European Commission has been promoting Open Access at least since 2007, when the Communication from the Commission on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation [2] depicted the scholarly publishing situation and the organisational, legal, technical and financial issues to reach Open Access. Journal subscriptions’ increase cuts off not well-endowered or small institutions from scientific knowledge and doesn’t make accessible to all the results from research funded by public grants. The Open Access movement has followed different routes to avoid that: the first option is Green Open Access or self-archiving, which means that the authors deposit their peer-reviewed or not yet peer-reviewed articles in a freely accessible online repository. Unfortunately, the publishers often impose an embargo before the articles will be freely available. The second route is Gold Open Access, which gives immediate free access to the readers because the author or the institution, which he/she belongs to, pay the publishing associated costs. The goal (i.e. everybody can read the article for free) is reached but the problem persists: the costs are only shifted from the readers to the author or his/her university, research body or funding agency. In fact, the Commission suggested that publishing costs are included in the research projects funded by the European Union. Then, an intermediate model is hybrid journals, which accept both reader-pay and author-pay solutions.

In the last decade, the European Commission has strongly supported the shift to Open Access publishing, both in the ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ models. For instance, all the projects funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020 must ensure that their scientific publications are openly accessible and free of charge. Furthermore, in 2012 the European Commission recommended to the EU Member States that the publications of publicly funded researches are made available as soon as possible (maximum six months after the publication, which become twelve months for social sciences and humanities) and that researchers ensuring open access to their results would be both rewarded by the academic career system and awarded by research funding institutions.[3]

This award/reward system shifts the attention to another speaker of this discussion: the author. As the global network OA2020 states, “the power to change is in the hands of the academic community”. Although it is not simple, scholars of public institutions should take their role with greater responsibility and give the public investments back to society. It is the universities’ Third-Mission, which can be reached in different ways but choosing Open Access journals has to be the first step.

But, if the award/reward system could be an incentive to Open Access, the publishing system needs to be changed. The already mentioned OA2020 and the international consortium of research funders cOAlition S, two leaders of the current Open Access movement, recognise the previous achievements which however were slow and little and commit to accelerating the transition to Open Access. For instance, cOAlition S supports the initiative Plan S, requiring that from 2021 all the publicly funded scientific publications must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms without embargo.

Then, will we finally reach the 2003 Berlin Declaration conditions? Actually, the first one doesn’t mean only to put online free articles, but it specifies that a real Open Access publication must have “a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works”.

Number of articles (A) and proportion of articles (B) with OA copies, estimated based on a random sample of 100,000 articles with Crossref DOIs. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4375/fig-2 [4]

As the images shows, another big issue is Bronze Open Access, which surpasses the Gold and Green ones. This term indicates articles free-to-read online but which can’t be reused or redistributed, even in presentations or courses, due to the lack of an explicit Open license.[5] Hence, Bronze Open Access doesn’t fall under the Open Access definition of the Berlin Declaration because it doesn’t meet the first condition.

The road to Open Access is still long but it will be worth it.

[1] Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003, https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration, (accessed 06/12/2019).

[2] Commission of the European Communities, Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation, 2007, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52007DC0056&from=EN, (accessed 06/12/2019).

[3] European Commission, Commission Recommendation of 17.7.2012 on access to and preservation of scientific information, 2012, http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/recommendation-access-and-preservation-scientific-information_en.pdf, (accessed 06/12/2019).

[4] H. Piwowar et al., ‘The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles’, PeerJ, 6:e4375, 2018, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375.

[5] J. Brock, ‘ ‘Bronze’ open access supersedes green and gold’, Nature Index, 12 March 2018, https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/bronze-open-access-supersedes-green-and-gold, (accessed 06/12/2019).

Posted on

Top 3 DH Podcasts

Walters Art Museum, Book of Hours, Marginalia, Walters Manuscript W.428, Folio 88r

Podcasts are a useful way to learn new things while walking, driving, tidying up or simply when you are doing mechanical and repetitive operations on your laptop.

Here a list of the top 3 podcasts about Digital Humanities, with links to the speakers and to the projects mentioned.

1. BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas – Episode title: The Digital Humanities

Date: 21 December 2018
Duration: 58 minutes

Interviewees:
Kathryn Sutherland, St Anne’s College, Oxford
Noah Millstone, University of Birmingham
Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow (@Ajprescott on Twitter)

The speakers give a snapshot of Digital Humanities, starting from their DH projects. Kathryn Sutherland speaks about Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, which unified digitally Austen’s manuscripts held by different libraries and private collections disseminated around the world. Transcribing and XML encoding 1100 pages took three years of work: a big commitment, which led to the first project to encode draft manuscripts in different directions! Sutherland explains how the digital can perform a text, but she warns that the Literature can’t be reduced just to data.

Noah Millstone of the University of Birmingham presents the project Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England about the large pamphlet literature developed in England before the outbreak of the Civil War (1642). In this project, collaboration was essential because the enormous labour of transcribing these manuscripts, often full of marginalia with readers’ reactions, was only overcome with the help of volunteers, who made transcriptions, which were then proofread. Moreover, Millstone considers DH projects as a possible starting point for others, saying “We need to be aware and to teach students and new scholars to be aware that there are always going to be new ways of answering the questions”.

Finally, Andrew Prescott, starting from the avant-garde 90s project Electronic Beowulf (the version 4.1 is now also available online), explains how all manuscripts can be considered like palimpsests because they have different layers of information: Digital Humanities help to explore this complexity, always with the awareness that data can be reused in different and new ways. Furthermore, Prescott underlines the role of the digital for exploring special collections and speaks about how the libraries are reinventing themselves in the digital era.

2. University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of the Book – Episode title: Bibliography in Bits

Date: 23 February 2014
Duration: 20 minutes

Interviewee:
Will Noel, Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania (@WillNoel on Twitter; his website: http://www.willnoel.com/)

Will Noel starts the podcast talking about a project directed by him: the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. It is a fascinating project which aims to uncover Archimedes text beneath a medieval prayerbook, which is then defined as a palimpsest. Noel doesn’t speak only about the potentials of digital technology for the study of medieval manuscripts; he also stresses the necessity of creating simple and sustainable datasets under Creative Commons license: only that guarantees that in the future data can be managed in different ways for discovering something new. The Archimedes Palimpsest dataset, first issued in 2006, could appear too plain and non-interactive but it is incredible to think that data are still available and usable after 13 years! Also the Illustrated Manuscript Project for the digitalisation of the invaluable collection of illuminated manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, is under Creative Commons license: the data stored in the machine readable and human readable archive are free to use, as the images made available on Flickr. As Noel states “All sorts of interesting things can arise from that as long as your data is known and as long as it is free and as long as people can do what they want with it”.

3. Indoor Voices Podcast – Episode title: Dissecting the digital humanities with Matthew Gold

Date: 21 October 2019
Duration: 33 minutes

Interviewee:
Matthew K. Gold, City University of New York (@mkgold on Twitter)

Matthew Gold, associate professor of English and Digital Humanities, presents his idea of Digital Humanities as a natural evolution of the academic discipline of the Humanities. He speaks extensively about the M.A. program in Digital Humanities, whose he is the director, at the CUNY Graduate Center and explains the approach of the course, which leads each student to reply to a question through the creation of a digital artefact (I judge this approach really similar to the one proposed at the University College Cork). As an example, he mentions the project Quantifying Kissinger of Micki Kaufmann, who faced the challenge of exploring a corpus too big to be read. At the end of the podcast, Gold answers two difficult questions:

  • How to answer the critics who dismiss DH as quantitate and not intellectual?
  • Is the term Digital Humanities plural or singular?

Listen to the podcast to find the answers out.

Posted on

Digital Humanities Is vs. Digital Humanities Are: more than a grammar issue

Writing the first contents of this website on Digital Humanities, I faced a problem: is “Digital Humanities” singular or plural? In Italian (my mother-tongue) Digital Humanities are plural and are always preceded by the definite article (Le Digital Humanities sono…): is it the same in English?

Thinking that this grammatical uncertainty was caused by not being a native English speaker, I decided to check the articles I had read about the definition of Digital Humanities and follow their habit. I discovered with surprise that some scholars use “Digital Humanities” as singular, some others as plural, and then I found two interesting articles about the topic, the first written by Kathleen Fitzpatrick,[1] the second, born as a blog-post,[2] subsequently revised and expanded in an article,[3] by Alan Liu.

Liu shows clearly how the linguistic problem hides a conceptual one, often avoided by the scholars who use the acronym DH: is/are Digital Humanities a field or fields? The existence of DH departments, conferences, journals, scholarships drives us to consider it as one organised field, and Liu notes that the actual trend is toward singular concord. However, the plural usage of the Humanities and of the Arts curbs this trend, coupled with the community of scholars who don’t make up their mind to adopt a standardised form.[4]

Reading between the lines I get the impression that for Liu the plural better embodies the values of Digital Humanities, i.e. pluralism, inclusiveness, openness, informality and collaboration with other fields.[5]

Fitzpatrick makes a stronger statement:

“Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the digital humanities, are allowed to remain plural.” [6]

In conclusion, after this theoretical brief reflection, for now, I’ve decided to use Digital Humanities as a plural because it better reflects the idea of Digital Humanities which I am knowing. And I feel ready to give my first own definition of Digital Humanities:

Digital Humanities are collaborative digital answers to humanities questions.

[1] K. Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”, in M. K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 12-15. Available in digital edition of the book at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/30.

[2] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field? ‒ An Answer From the Point of View of Language” Alan Liu [web blog], 6 March 2013, https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language/ (acceded 29 October 2019).

[3] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field? An Answer from the Point of View of Language”, Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, n. 7, 2016, pp. 1546–52. https://doi.org/10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-7-1546-1552.

[4] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field?”, 2016, p. 1549.

[5] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field?”, 2016, p. 1550.

[6] K. Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”.

Posted on

Digital Humanities: a lifeboat?

As often it has been said, the Humanities are living a crisis. It can be detected by the lower research funding, the increasingly frequent cuts to the budget of cultural institutions, the loss of social recognition that many careers in this field have had. Or more simply, thinking about how it is hard to get a job with a Humanities degree, compared to economists and engineers.

Could the young Digital Humanities come to the rescue of the tired and traditional Humanities? First of all, a question: what are Digital Humanities? Given a unique definition is not easy, if not impossible. Proof of that is the website What is Digital Humanities?, which contains more than 800 definitions, written by the participants from the Day of DH between 2009-2014. Here there is a visualisation of the most frequent words in these quotes, created thanks to Voyant Tools.

Not taking in consideration the words Humanities (1035 occurrences), Digital (953) and DH (224), the most used are Research (263), New (238), Tools (231), Technology (182), Technologies (155) and Use (143). Can we summarize the Digital Humanities as new research tools using the technology? It is not wrong, but something is missed.

At the 2011 DH Conference, hosted by the Stanford University Library, the discipline was described as a Big Tent but this metaphor was argued both by William Pannapacker[1] and Patrik Svensson[2]. For both, the core of the Digital Humanities is not the extraordinary proliferation of projects included in its boundaries, but the collaboration between multiple experts (computer scientists, engineers, librarians, archivists, historians…) who together build the Digital Humanities. And as a DH beginner, I am particularly fascinated by this collaborative attitude for creating something new and big that would be impossible to build individually.

As Pannapacker states:

“DH is a field that’s difficult to enter without significant support and collaboration. You can’t just read more books and articles—you have to learn to build things.[…]
The most important of those resources is human. We can’t succeed as islands. We have to collaborate with one another and with the larger research centers if the field is going to succeed outside of major universities. More and more, we recognize that the old model of the individual scholar—if it was ever really viable, and not a romantic myth—has become completely dysfunctional.”[3]

Furthermore, Svennson presents the Digital Humanities as a humanities project, which not only values the different experiences and backgrounds but also recognises the important role of junior scholars. They are often agents of change in the DH discussions and the author even quotes a PhD student among four examples of conceptualizations of the digital humanities as a project[4].

The openness of this definition of Digital Humanities encourages students (like me) to think about these topics, express their opinions and take part in the discussion (e.g. through Twitter). Notably, Svennson links the Digital Humanities as a humanities project to the future of all the Humanities. They are not two distinct disciplines because nowadays the Digital Humanities have an unquestionable role in the Humanities, or better, cross it.

Actually, this role is not so unquestionable, and I will give a first-hand example. Chatting with a young colleague, an art historian, a few days ago, he told me that the words ‘Digital’ and ‘Humanities’ were incompatible for him. Many Humanities scholars, more or less young, agree with him, splitting the Theory (the Humanities) from the subordinate Techne (the Digital). However, I am sure that many of them have taken advantage of a DH project at least one, for instance using Google Books or a digitalised archive.

I personally assent to Svennson’s idea of the Digital Humanities as a meeting place, where every discipline is powered maintaining its peculiarities, but I contemporary see the resistance and suspicion of the traditional Humanities. On the other hand, this talk of Elisa Barney, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boise State University, shows how the engineers are excited to collaborate with the Humanities.

How digital technology helps solve mysteries in the humanities | Elisa Barney | TEDxBoise

To conclude, I would like to share a word of advice:

Dear Humanities scholars and students,
appreciate the practical, collaborative work of the Digital Humanities and its tools. Try to take a walk in the meeting place called ‘Digital Humanities’ and ask your unanswered question.
In the end, ask yourself: if the Digital Humanities can revitalise the Humanities, do we want to be rescued? If yes, the way is collaboration.

[1] W. Pannapacker, “‘Big Tent Digital Humanities,’ a View From the Edge, Part 2”, in Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 September 2011, viewed on 23/10/2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities-a/129036

[2] P. Svensson, “The digital humanities as a humanities project”. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 11(1-2), 2012, pp. 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211427367

[3] W. Pannapacker, “‘Big Tent Digital Humanities,’ a View From the Edge, Part 1”, in Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 July 2011, viewed on 23/10/2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities/128434

[4] P. Svensson, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, p. 46.

css.php