Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School Oxford University

Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow and AHRC Theme Leader Fellow for Digital Transformations, gives the closing keynote for the 2017 DHOXSS. We think of digital humanities as being chiefly concerned with abstract data, tagging and quantitative techniques, but it also has roots in a long tradition of using a variety of technological aids to examine the physical characteristics of objects such as manuscripts, paintings or pots. As new materials and technologies such as conductive ink or ultra-thin transistors develop, they offer humanities scholars different perspectives in exploring and presenting primary materials.

This lecture will discuss some projects (mostly by other people) which illustrate some of the emerging possibilities of the Internet of Things for the humanities. These include paper headphones, a guitar that documents its performance history, tattoos that control your smartphone, and a book cover that speaks.

Martin Poulter, Oxford's Wikimedian in Reseidence, gives a masterclass in using Wikimedia for digital research. The Wikimedia family of projects includes some projects that are less well-known than the flagship Wikipedia, but highly relevant to the Humanities. Wikidata has facts and figures about tens of millions of items, Wikimedia Commons has tens of millions of freely reusable images, many from cultural heritage organisations, and Wikisource has hundreds of thousands of historical texts.

These platforms are not just for sharing text, images and data, but giving them context in the form of metadata and links. They also allow many kinds of query and visualisation. This session reports on progress with using these platforms with research projects in Oxford University.

Kevin Page, Iain Emsley and David Weigl talk about using The HathiTrust Digital Library to conduct research in this interstice workshop. Within the Andrew W. Mellon funded ‘Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA)’ project, the University of Oxford e-Research Centre have developed new tools and approaches to facilitate study of the HathiTrust Digital Library. This workshop will inform participants of the latest developments from the project, and provide attendees with the opportunity to work with project researchers to explore how they might undertake their own investigations.

The HathiTrust Digital Library comprises the digitized representations of 14.7 million volumes, 7.44 million book titles, 405,345 serial titles, and 5.2 billion pages, best described as “a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future”. For many scholars the size of the HT corpus is both attractive and daunting.

The first half of this workshop introduces the concept of ‘worksets’, showing how they can be used to effectively investigate large corpora such as the HathiTrust, and demonstrating digital methods to refine and interrogate the data within them. These will be illustrated through existing worksets, including examples focussed on early English printed texts.

In the second, interactive, half of the workshop, attendees will work with project researchers to ‘paper prototype’ potential worksets relating to their own fields of study. Participants will be apprised of existing methods by which they can create HathiTrust worksets for their context; discovery of new workset creation motivations and strategies is welcomed and inform the next generation of HathiTrust workset tooling.

Pip Willcox and David De Roure give a presentation on Ada Lovelace, one of the early pioneers in computing. In the 200 years since Ada Lovelace’s birth, she has been celebrated, neglected, and taken up as a symbol for any number of causes and ideas. A symposium to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth narrated many of these, including accounts of her generative relationship with Charles Babbage and his Difference and Analytical Engines.

This talk traces some of the paths the idea of Lovelace has taken, what basis they have in her life, and what her reception tells us about our own scholarship and society. It goes on to describe our experimental work responding to Lovelace and Babbage, and to the operatic ‘Ada sketches’ of composer Emily Howard.

We created a Web application to produce music from maths through programming a digital simulation of the Analytical Engine, after Lovelace’s idea that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Professor Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute and Laird Barrett, Senior Digital Product Manager for the Taylor and Francis Group, give a talk for DHOXSS 2017. Digital research, computational techniques and big data are often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways forward. Several areas of digital research will be dealt with in depth, such as the large-scale analysis of text in literature, the visualization of intellectual and creative networks, and use of the Web to document historical patterns.

The course will also examine transformations in scholarly practices, including crowdsourcing and creating data infrastructures and digital archives. Particular attention will be paid to data sources, and debates about digital research in the humanities. The talk will also cover emerging publishing models, and how they relate to digital research. Finally, it will put digital research into the context of debates about the future of the humanities and about the relations between disciplines.

Dr Nicholas Cole and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman discuss the Quill Project, a software platform developed to aid research and teaching of the history of Parliamentary-style negotiations, and particularuarly the creation of the Constitution of the United States. They will discuss the research problems that the platform was created to address, and the process of building the tools for both data-entry and a diverse readership. We will address the design-choices that we have adopted to encourage a consistent use of the model, and the features that we have built into the platform to facilitate a cooperative relationship with other digital projects.

They will discuss the problems of user-interface design for a potential readership that includes high-school students through to subject-domain experts through an analysis of the user requirements and specifications. This talk is aimed at a non-expert audience.