My first day at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which has been intense but very productive.
This morning’s introductory lecture by Dr Victoria Van Hyning on crowdsourcing initiatives and the rise of ‘citizen humanities’ really emphasised the combination of the digital tools and interfaces and human processing power for large-scale projects that benefit from the human intervention, such as transcription where the optical character recognition is limited or prone to error in manuscript. We were introduced to the global Zooniverse initiative, and the ways in which arts and humanities collections can become part of this work, which not only improves accessibility, but is also about building legacy tools for further research activity and teaching within and beyond the academy.
I am enrolled on the ‘Hands-On Data Curation’ strand of the Summer School, which is led by the brilliant Elizabeth Wickes and Katrina Fenlon from School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Although I have had general introductions to data processing before, as this something that we have been teaching on the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age programme with our Consortium, there has been an advantage to spending longer today considering the workflow implications on dealing with data. At the end of the day produced a short piece of freewriting (7 minutes) to gather our thoughts (there is probably too much content to reiterate in this blog post).
One of the most important issues that struck me was the implications for pedagogy in the digital humanities, particularly around reinforcing the responsibility that comes with data curation. As my role is to support postgraduate research students, I have often noticed that we have become very goal-oriented in our consideration of the PhD (there has to be an impressive output), and for the digital humanities this might also take the form of a dataset or method and tools that others would use.
What I have learnt today, is to look more closely at the different representations that we generate through data, and what these representations means for other communities of users.
The most challenging activity, which in some ways seemed simple, was to examine an Excel spreadsheet of ‘messy’ data and try to come up with a structure in the form of headers that we could agree on that would capture the data most effectively. The fact that it was so difficult to agree on ways of representing an individual’s name, how to treat dates, when the raw data were so varied and incomplete made us realise just how important it is to develop clear questions and purposes for your data - to better understand it before doing anything with it.
For research students entering the world of digital humanities, there is great value in exploring different ways of structuring data - different models - all with different possibilities and limitations. The key is being able to document these and come to a decision without succumbing to a sort of paralysis, always thinking ‘Is this the right approach to take?’
Exploration, experimentation, documentation and reflection may be vital in helping digital humanists to have a more secure footing in the shifting sands of digital academe, and also in maintaining an openness not just in terms of data, but also attitude - a curiosity that is so vital to take work forward, rather than shutting down possibilities.
It is now time to sign off. We are going to the welcome drinks at the Weston Library, and will be treated to the research posters!