Digital Humanities Australasia: Building, Mapping, Connecting (2012)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/116793

The Australian National University's Humanities Research Centre hosted the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, on the theme of 'Building, Mapping, Connecting', 27-30 March 2012, at the Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, and the Sir Roland Wilson Building.

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Open Access
As curious an entity: building digital resources from context, records and data
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Lewis, Antonina; Jones, Michael
This paper explores new ways of conceiving and building linked digital resources for researchers and the community which more effectively support the exploration, discovery and reuse of digital objects and research data (qualitative and quantitative). It stems from an examination of our work on the Saulwick Archive (including the Saulwick Age‐Poll, focus group discussions, and more) as well as our ongoing involvement with the Australian Data Archive. As the technical capacity to store and disseminate digital objects grows and as quantitative research data become more discoverable and accessible, two issues are evident: the sometimes limited conception of what is required to ensure quantitative data remain useful and understandable through time, and; (in Australia at least) the general lack of equivalent preservation and dissemination relationships with qualitative research communities, including the Humanities. These are connected – the well documented reluctance of qualitative researchers to deposit research data within archives, based on fears of missing context and the resulting ‘misuse’ or ‘misinterpretation’ of data, is itself partially founded in the specific context of past (primarily quantitative) data archiving practice. Dealing with these challenges is necessarily collaborative. In the case of the Saulwick Archive, the eScholarship Research Centre, The University of Melbourne Archives, and Australian Data Archive are working together. This ensures we can source valuable expertise in the specific (but connected) conceptual and technical requirements for dealing with three interdependent ‘layers’ of information objects: context, records, and data. The paper will also use these concepts more broadly, exploring how the shortcomings in records and context management evident in past approaches to data archiving can be addressed; and how an integrated but modular approach to the collaborative management of interrelated context, records, and data can contribute to the development of richer and more sustainable information infrastructure for researchers.
Open Access
Automatic extraction of topic hierarchies based on WordNet
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Brey, Gerhard; Vieira, Miguel
The aim of the research described here is the automatic generation of a topic hierarchy, using WordNet as the basis for a faceted browser interface, with a collection of 19th-century periodical texts as the test corpus. Our research was motivated by the Castanet algorithm, which was developed and successfully applied to short descriptions of documents. In our research we adapt the algorithm so that it can be applied to the full text of documents. The algorithm for the automatic generation of the topic hierarchy has three main processes: Data preparation, wherein data is prepared so that the information contained within the texts is more easily accessible; Target term extraction, wherein terms that are considered relevant to classify each text are selected, and; Topic tree generation, wherein the tree is built using the target terms. We evaluated samples of the resulting topic tree and found that over 90% of the topics are relevant, i.e. they clearly illustrate what the articles are about and the topic hierarchy adequately relates to the content of the articles. Future work will address problems resulting from mis‐OCRed words, erroneous disambiguation, and language anachronisms. Faceted browsing interfaces based on topic hierarchies are easy and intuitive to navigate, and as our results demonstrate, topic hierarchies form an appropriate basis for this type of data navigation. We are confident that our approach can successfully be applied to other corpora and should yield even better results if there are no OCR issues to contend with. Since WordNet is available in several languages, it should also be possible to apply our approach to corpora in other languages.
Open Access
Beyond the lowest common denominator: designing effective digital resources
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Vetch, Paul
As the web has become the de facto medium of the Digital Humanities, we have seen enormous advances in the ‘functional ambition’ of the online resources that characterise the discipline. Increasingly, digital humanities outputs strive not simply to disseminate primary sources, but to supply a nexus of rich contextual materials and functionality: allowing the user to control editorial perspectives, digitally curate objects, and apply tools for real‐time analysis and visualisation. But, the web, as a medium, is a mutable sand; consider the variety of web browsers and platforms, in regular use today, and the rate at which they change. Web applications are increasingly provisional and ephemeral; the more use we make of exciting, current technology, the more fragile the outputs we produce. All that we can be sure will prevail, in time, are the primary sources (text, images) digitised and stored according to accepted standards. For all the creative work that goes into the delivery of digital editions and archives, it is a disappointing reality that simple democratised access to primary sources often remains the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the Digital Humanities. How do we progress the field, allowing our users to better understand the potential of ubiquitous technologies for display and interaction for their own areas of research? How do we ensure that the effort expended on building delivery environments for digital humanities research outputs will have a lasting impact across subject disciplines? The discussion will address issues of usability, user centred design, and functional design specific to the Digital Humanities, focusing on experimental work carried out across a number of projects at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London (in particular the online version of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson; the Gough Map; and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition).
Open Access
Cloud computing and the humanities: National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Fifield, Tom
The NeCTAR Research Cloud provides free cloud computing for Australian Researchers. This poster describes this important piece of new infrastructure, and why those in the digital humanities might be interested.
Open Access
Creating an ongoing resource through digitisation
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, 2012-03) Kornhauser, Bronia
The Music Archive in the School of Music-Conservatorium at Monash University contains a diverse array of original and often unique sound, visual and bibliographic materials. A large percentage of the sound component represents decades of ethnomusicological field research and comprises reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, a growing number of which are slowly decaying. Some of our sound collections, which include cylinder recordings and 78 rpm records, have also been acquired as donations from a variety of organisations and interested members of the public. Preservation of such a valuable and extensive resource is therefore a top priority. Accordingly, we have successfully completed two digitisation projects (both ARC funded), and are currently undertaking a third in collaboration with Monash University’s ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) team. In fact, collaboration has been a key factor in all three projects because it has facilitated the resolution of a number of issues associated with each particular stage – preparation, process and product – of digitisation. Some of those issues will be discussed in this paper and include observations about the criteria used to determine choice of material for digitisation; the manner of transporting the original media to and from a digitising service provider given the invaluable nature of the material; the metadata elements to describe the digitised sound files; storage of the digitised sound files and whether said storage is for preservation only with very limited access, or for wider public access; and the question of copyright and its impact on access. Our aim is eventually to digitise all analogue sound material in our Archive in order to ensure that music recorded during the last century, music that reflects socio-cultural traditions in different regions and time spans, will remain an ongoing and accessible resource for future scholarly research.
Open Access
Digital technologies & archaeological ethics
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Colley, Sarah
Emerging digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance research, communication, information sharing, interpretation, and conservation in archaeology and cultural heritage management. Digital technologies add extra dimensions to existing ethical questions, including the maintenance of professional standards and how to balance intellectual, cultural property, and other rights against the public ‘right to know’. Digital technologies also raise new issues that have ethical dimensions including technological, organisational and economic sustainability; proprietary interests in producing, promoting, funding and maintaining widely used digital technologies and platforms, and convergence of professional and ‘community’ practices in the digital sphere. The paper will discuss such questions drawing on information collected through recent qualitative research on use of digital communication technologies in archaeology and heritage practice and the presenter’s experiences in developing the New South Wales Archaeology Online sustainable digital archive.
Open Access
Mapping the Australian Twittersphere
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Bruns, Axel; Burgess, Jean; Kirchhoff, Lars; Nicolai, Thomas
This paper presents the first outcomes of a large-scale project to comprehensively map the follower/followee relationships between public accounts in the Australian Twittersphere. Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and map their interconnections. In itself the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, centred largely around shared topics of interest (from politics through arts to sport) and/or sociodemographic factors (geographic location, age groups); additionally, in combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtag discussions on Twitter (from #spill for the 2010 Rudd/Gillard leadership challenge to #qldfloods for the January 2011 floods in southeast Queensland), the map enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower/followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics. Our work, conducted as part of a three-year ARC Discovery project investigating public communication through social media in Australia, demonstrates the possibilities inherent in the current ‘computational turn’ (Berry 2010) in Digital Humanities, as well as adding to the development and critical examination of methodologies for dealing with 'big data' (boyd and Crawford 2011). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network and provides the first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. Our tools and methods for doing Twitter research, released under Creative Commons licences through our project website, provide the basis for replicable and verifiable Digital Humanities research on the processes of public communication which take place through this important social network.
Open Access
Mapping the movies: the Australian cinemas map
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Maltby, Richard; Milford, Liz
As part of our current ARC project ‘Mapping the Movies’, Dr. Mike Walsh and I are developing a geodatabase of Australian cinemas, covering the period from 1948 to 1971 and based on a consistent dataset found in the trade journal Film Weekly, providing basic information on the ownership, location, and capacity of approximately 4,000 venues. A principal purpose of the database is to provide an opportunity for crowdsourcing information about the venues from other material available on the web and from the interested public. We expect to engage the interest of organisations devoted to the history and preservation of cinemas and of school teachers developing local history projects under the national curriculum. The information gathered will include details of screening programs, photographs, and digitised newspaper reports. Funded by an eResearchSA Summer Scholarship, we are developing a set of templates for collection of crowdsourcing data and extend the website to manage and use the additional information. A broader aim of the project is to develop a generic open source geodatabase for use by Digital Humanities researchers who want to map relatively small scale datasets. The system is focused around a database structure that supports the definition of objects with metadata, allowing additional objects to be added to the system without the need to significantly change the underlying database structure. The system is focused on easy implementation and management, needing high-level IT skills for only brief periods in the establishment of a project, to define objects in the database and in the programming code, and customise the user interface to meet their specific needs. The paper will describe the evolution of the research project and demonstrate the website.
Open Access
Memory, placelessness and the Geoweb: exploring the role of locational social-networking in reimagining community
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Corbett, Jon; Evans, Mike; Romano, Zach
The concept of memory is integral to theorisations of both displacement and placelessness, especially when a sense of place exists only in memory or imagination for members of dispersed communities. Collective memories deployed to restore, re-establish, repatriate territory, and reconnect a people with its original homeland reveal the symbolic significance embedded within place, as well as the value of collective memory as a strategy of resistance and viable political tool. The challenge is to find ways that enable Aboriginal communities to document, share, and reflect on place-based memories and knowledge, and in so doing reestablish identity, culture, and language, which in turn will facilitate the re-appropriation of contested places. Geographic Information Technologies (GITs) are increasingly pervasive in Aboriginal communities in documenting aboriginal knowledge and land use and occupancy information. Many communities use GITs for a range of purposes, including land-use planning, cultural documentation, and territorial claims. The Geoweb is the GIT platform for Web 2.0 digital social networking applications. In its current state, the Geoweb is a tool for spatial representation rather than a platform for spatial analysis as with traditional GIS. Because of the interactive capability and ease of use of Geoweb technologies, they offer great potential for storing, managing, and communicating land-related knowledge to both decision-makers and community members themselves. The Geoweb's ability to compile and mash-up photographs, audio and video through a map interface gives it great potential for presenting place-based memories and knowledge, including toponyms, oral histories, and stories. This presentation reports on two community-based Geoweb projects with Aboriginal groups in Canada, the Metis Nation of British Columbia and the Tlowitsis Nation. It specifically examines the potential for Geoweb technologies to capture, communicate, and comment on community memories in these dispersed communities and discuss how the Geoweb medium alters information flow and the nature of the knowledge being shared.
Open Access
The MPPDA Database: a database of the extant records of the General Correspondence files of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc.
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Maltby, Richard; Milford, Liz
Showcasing how data management supports re-use and curation. The newly developed ANDS SC22B project funded MPPDA database now makes the material acquired by Professor Maltby available in an enhanced form, providing equitable but secure access to this valuable resource and a vastly improved way to browse and search for specific MPPDA records. This session will outline the project, how data management played a pivotal role in the project outcomes and the benefits which have resulted
Open Access
MPPDA: the digital archives of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America [Poster]
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Maltby, Richard; Milford, Liz
The MPPDA Digital Archives consist of a database of the extant records of the General Correspondence files of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., covering the period from 1922 to 1939. Established in 1922, the MPPDA was the trade association for the motion picture industry, and included all the major companies producing and distributing motion pictures in the United States in its membership. The association was popularly known as the Hays Office, after its first President, Will H. Hays, who remained in office until 1945. Hays was a leading Republican party politician, who resigned from President Warren Harding's Cabinet to take up the MPPDA position. After Hays' retirement, the association was renamed the Motion Picture Association of America.
Open Access
NeCTAR Research Tools Project: Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems: a heterogeneous, modular, and federated approach to archaeological information management
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Ross, Shawn A.
Archaeology is an inherently destructive undertaking. One principal approach – excavation – inevitably destroys that which it studies, while the other – archaeological survey – often records (or fails to record) heritage slated for destruction from human development or natural processes. Archaeologists must also archive and share complex data, both so that interpretations can be evaluated by others in the research community, and for the stewardship of cultural heritage. Exemplary data management in archaeology is thus a professional and ethical imperative. Unlike other disciplines with similar requirements for the management of complex data, no coherent, comprehensive archaeological information management system exists that can shepherd data through its entire life-cycle, from digital creation through processing and analysis, to archiving and dissemination. Few individual components of such a system have been broadly accepted, and strategies for federating existing resources remain underdeveloped. Modern data management techniques (e.g. digital collection of data, knowledge discovery using data warehousing techniques) are not widely used, and even relational databases are far from universal. Instead, academic researchers, consulting archaeologists, cultural heritage managers, government entities, and other groups organise archaeological information in countless ways, usually in an ad hoc mix of hard copy and digital formats. This paper outlines a proposal for a comprehensive information system for archaeology that uses flexible, robust, and extensible data standards, employing those standards to federate a range of components for acquiring, analysing, and archiving archaeological data. Dispersed yet integrated, it will allow data from archaeological field and laboratory work to be born digital using mobile devices, processed in local databases, extracted to data warehouses suitable for sophisticated analysis, and exchanged online through cultural heritage registries and data repositories. Existing standards and components are used wherever possible; new ones are proposed only where necessary.
Open Access
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online delivering unrivalled access to Oxford’s collection of scholarly editions, online for the first time [Poster]
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Whitfield, Marika
2012 sees the launch of a new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO), the first phase in publishing online the complete text of more than 150 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660. The site will launch with editions of works dating from the Renaissance and early seventeenth century, including Shakespeare’s plays, poetry by John Donne, and the letters of Thomas Hobbes. It will be updated over a number of years to ultimately include all of Oxford’s front-list of scholarly editions.
Open Access
Reading the text, walking the terrain, following the map: Do we see the same landscape?
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Eide, Oyvind
Maps and texts are different media. Reading a text gives quite a different understanding of an unknown landscape from the one learned from reading a map. This paper will show in some detail how maps and verbal texts are different media, and how these differences have consequences not only for how things are said, but also for what can be said at all using these two media. In an interview at the farm Solem in August 1742, farmer Ole Nilsen said that ‘North of there, no peasant farms are found’ (Schnitlers 1962: 152). How can we put the knowledge expressed in this sentence on a map? First we need to know where to put the ‘there’ referred to and how far north the ‘north of there’ implies. Given that we are able to decide on that, how do we express the fact that no farms are found? We could make the area north of ‘there’ blank. But blankness on a map does not say ‘no farms’, it rather says ‘nothing of interest’ – after all, we know there are things everywhere; stone, trees, etc., and maybe a farm or two, even if the map is blank. How can we better understand such problems? The method to be presented in the paper includes the creation of a conceptual model of the geographical information read out of a text. By attempting to produce maps from the information modelled, the differences between what can be expressed in the text and what can be expressed as a map is documented.
Open Access
Structural linearity and the hierarchy of online discussion participation
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Park, Sora
Due to accessibility and ease of use, the public is now able to engage in political discourse in the online space. However, the open space has been criticised for the lack of lively debates because most online message boards contain one‐sided views. The disparity among the readership and authorship – where the spiral of silence is amplified – is another point of criticism. The ongoing concern is whether this new environment leads to consensus through deliberation or whether it aggravates fragmentation and polarisation between clashing viewpoints. In this paper, I examine how the participatory behaviour in online discussion sites are related to the structure of threaded conversation. In threaded conversations posts appear on top of each other in reverse chronological order and each message is linked to its replies. Recent posts on the front page catch the attention of most visitors and depending on the popularity of the site, the pages are changed quickly. This is in contrast with blogs or social media where posts are controlled by the author and each message posts are shown according to the link between participants. In discussion sites, most members are not structurally linked with each other and readers usually select posts by the number of replies, topic reflected in the title of post and the reputation of the author. Thus the author has little control over what happens after the posting. The aim of this study is to empirically explore the online discussion process of the major online discussion sites in South Korea and how the structure of the sites induce different levels of participatory behaviour. The research questions that are asked in this study are: What is the relationship of the discussion sites’ structure to the different levels of participatory behaviour in online discussions? How does the reputation of online discussion participants affect the readership and responses to their posts? The first step of the research involves looking at what type of content and method of presentation leads to active discussion. Then, the processes of how messages are disseminated through various levels of participation within the discussion sites are analysed. The next step of research is to identify how the author’s reputation within the sites affects the dynamics of discussion.
Open Access
Visualising complex networks within humanities data for discovery and analysis
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, 2012-03) McCarthy, Gavan; Smith, Ailie; Melnikoff, Steven
This paper describes the preliminary work leading to a project to build a web services visualisation tool that addresses the multi‐dimensional metadata used to describe cultural datasets, especially those created by researchers to meet specific research ends. The project will utilise the Knalij service developed by Steven Melnikoff (Information Physics, The University of Melbourne) together with datasets curated using the eScholarship Research Centre’s Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) system. In the first instance it is proposed that the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and the Australian Women’s Register datasets be used to operationalise the tool. Using offline visualisation tools, the study of both embedded and implied complex network structures within standards‐based Humanities datasets has revealed significant potential for analysis, navigation, discovery, and the development of new research methods. In October 2011 Knalij was awarded the USA challenge.gov prize for the most innovative uses of National Library of Medicine data. Knalij offers an interactive web service that can visualise the whole of PubMed in real time. This is a landmark achievement that opens up web services, real‐time visualisation capability for complex Humanities datasets with both synchronic and diachronic variables. As noted in the Knalij press release in October: ‘We visualized the entirety of cancer research since 1800 and displayed the progression through the decades. Our maps are searchable, interactive, and ready for researchers to discover trends, patterns, and connections. This is the first time that anyone has visually displayed the entire scope of cancer research in one searchable application. We are very excited to present this to the world'. The paper will focus on Australian Humanities research‐driven datasets and explore a range of uses from project management and documentation to the revelation of novel insights and understandings.
Open Access
Where is the forward button? Writing for digital media in secondary education
(Australasian Association for Digital Humanities) Sukovic, Suzana
The Digital Storytelling is the working title of a project which awaits its main actors – high school students – to give it its name and final shape. The project has been developed at St.Vincent’s College, Potts Point and will be realised in co-operation with school-partners who have been invited to participate in the project. Different groups of high school students will be asked to respond to a range of literary and historical texts by using digital media to develop stories about their creative or analytical interpretations of chosen texts. The project will include research into students’ engagement with digital media and an evaluation of any impact of the project on students’ skills and knowledge, particularly their transliteracy skills. A range of qualitative and quantitative data will be gathered and compared among cohorts of students participating in the study. The Digital Storytelling has been conceptualised within the framework of the Australian National Year of Reading 2012, which provides a context to invigorate discussions about writing for new media and roles of high schools in students’ preparation for living and working in increasingly digital environments.

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