Digital Humanities: Opportunities and Challenges for Historical Research

The workshop brings together a range of experts in the Digital Humanities to discuss the possibilities of using digital tools for doing historical research, with the underlying aim of the workshop being to introduce the members of IAKH to the latest developments in the field of Digital Humanities, and to look for synergies and possible future collaboration opportunities. The event is co-organised by IAKH and the ERC project “Before Copyright”.

Programme 14th September 2023:

This workshop is organised by IAKH and Before Copyright and co-funded by the European Union (ERC, BE4COPY, 101042034). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Abstracts

Anna Foka

Mapping Antiquity: The Digital Periegesis Project

Spatial analytical methods predate the field of digital humanities, most notably through cartography, the practice of drawing and studying maps. More recently, the spatial analysis of texts via Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is trending as a research method. Mapping pre-modern space is rarely a matter of documenting toponyms or establishing precise coordinates. Rather, space becomes place through interaction with historical agents and the human footprint left on the ground in the form of monuments, religious sites and other infrastructures. While contemporary geographic information science and historical modes of describing space often appear to have disparate, even incompatible, viewpoints of the world, there is a growing ecosystem that seeks to remedy the complexity of ancient space. This ecosystem of tools, content and communities about ancient place and space illustrate how collaboration within the field of digital humanities can be an opportunity for scientific discovery. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the affordances and challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, projects and contemporary digital research infrastructures for the analysis of ancient narratives. The case study is a well-known ancient narrative of space: namely Pausanias’s Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece), a ten-volume description of Greek towns, villages, monuments, works of art and their histories from Attica to Phocis, following a circuit around the Peloponnese. The Digital Periegesis project, funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW 2017.0057; 2018–2021), and comprising an interdisciplinary team of scholars builds on existing digital spatial research infrastructures, using maps as visual portals into narratives, as a means to interrogate rather than merely illustrate spatial information. In the second phase of the project that is financed by the Swedish Research Council from 2022 to 2026 (Vetenskapsrådet 2021-02799) the Digital Periegesis project is set out to investigate descriptions of time and people and to incorporate this to the ongoing Digital Periegesis’s visualisation.

Doris Gruber

The Handpress World and Machine Learning: Potentials, Limits, and Possibilities

Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence (AI), is increasingly affecting our everyday lives. The algorithms decide, e.g., what advertising we see, which dating partners are suggested to us, or how we drive cars. This development has also arrived in historical research. The presentation draws on experiences of the project ‚Ottoman Nature in Travelogues 1501–1850: A Digital Analysis (ONiT)‘ funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: P 35245). ONiT strives to identify and categorize images and texts regarding ‚nature‘ (flora, fauna, and landscapes) in printed travelogues of the handpress period with the help of machine learning. The presentation discusses how such algorithms can be relevant to a wider research community, what the next step in their development should be and why we should not consider them as mere tools that facilitate and accelerate already established processes of historical analysis.

Kristoffer Nielbo

Like Beads on a String - Temporal Reconstructions of Past Events

Temporal reconstructions of the past (i.e., History with majuscule H) often depict complex processes in the past (i.e., history with minuscule h) as point-like events (ex. the protestant reformation, the French revolution, and the fall of the Berlin wall), that is, as a collection of point-like primitives with exact temporal coordinates (ex., 1517, 1789, 1989) resulting in a beads-on-a-string model of history. Most historians would agree that this reconstruction is flawed, but still assume that it is useful as an abstraction of past events. We argue however that representations of events as points make us inattentive to the underlying dynamics of history, and prone to biased and erroneous inferences. Instead, history can be described as changes between more or less stable states of individual and community being. Some states are well-known and their transitions have distinct event signatures (ex. pandemics) while other states are less apparent (ex. gender liberation) and lack well-known signatures. This talk presents the `Event Detection and Description' framework for reliable detection and description of event signatures. The pipeline is data agnostic, applicable to relatively sparse data, and has been applied to a range of historical problems (ex. author profiling, consumer history and media monitoring).

Jon Carlstedt Tønnessen

Empowering Researchers for a Computational Turn

Integrating digital data and computational tools within the Humanities is not merely a technological challenge. It is also a methodological one. Are we prepared for a computational turn? This paper will explore some of the skills and competencies that our researchers have highlighted as essential when facing the Digital Age, and further discuss our Department’s efforts to enhance these competencies among our academic staff. First, I will present some findings from mapping the digital research competencies among our tenured staff. This will involve how they view their current ability to utilise digital data and analyse these computationally, as well as the tools and approaches that seem to be most prominent among the researchers at the department. Building on this, I will present how we are working to improve competencies in these areas, collaborating with other actors partly by organising informal meetups where experiences and knowledge can be shared through practical tutorials and peer discussion. Building on this, I will highlight some of the tools and techniques that seem to emerge within the Digital Humanities that might have interesting to our academic staff, including the use of machine-learning and generative technologies: areas where IAKH may be interested in developing and building relations with others to improve in the years to come, ensuring that we maintain and develop our position as a quality institution in studies of the past.

Matteo Valleriani

From Data Management to Explainable Artificial Intelligence

The presentation builds on the distinction between Digital and Computational Humanities, dwelling mainly in the field of historical sciences. While DH focuses on data mining, management, and exploration, CH is specifically concerned with data analysis. In the former, the emphasis will be on semantic technologies and, in the latter, on integrating an approach dictated by the precepts of complex systems physics with historical studies. The focus of the presentation will then be on the use and development of machine and deep leaning technologies in both the DH and CH fields. It will show how they can be applied and discuss how these technologies can be developed to better serve the purpose of the humanities. The presentation will conclude by exploring the new possibilities that the recent development of Explainable Artificial Intelligence offers to research in the humanities and how this approach may be a first step toward configuring an AI suitable for historical argumentations.

Gerben Zaagsma

Digital History and the Politics of Digitisation

This paper will explore a key question for historians today: what are the politics of cultural heritage digitisation and its implications for historical research? And how to assess this from a global perspective? In a research environment that increasingly privileges what is available online, the questions of why, where, and how we can access what we can access, and how it affects historical research have become ever more urgent. My talk will outline a framework through which to contextualize the politics of (digital) heritage preservation, and a model to analyze its most important political dimensions. To add some historical perspective, I will put this discussion in the broader context of the ways in which technology has shaped historical research practices and knowledge production, not just in the past two decades but in fact already since the late 19th century.

List of speakers and commentators

Speakers:

• Geert Kessels & Pim van Bree, developers of Nodegoat and founders of the research and development firm LAB1100.
• Anna Foka, Professor in Digital Humanities and Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Uppsala University.
• Doris Gruber, Researcher at The Austrian Academy of Sciences, division Digital Historiography and Editions.
• Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Professor of Humanities Computing at Aarhus University and director of Centre for Humanities Computing Aarhus. Doris Gruber, researcher at The Austrian Academy of Sciences, division Digital Historiography and Editions.
• Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, Head of The Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History
• Jon Carlstedt Tønnessen, Research Librerian at The National Library of Norway and advisor for digital research at IAKH. 
• Matteo Valleriani, Research Group Leader, Department I at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; honorary professor at the Technische Universität of Berlin.
• Gerben Zaagsma, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg.

Commentators:

• Marius Buning, PI of the ERC project Before Copyright and Associate Professor of Early Modern History at IAKH, University of Oslo.
• Dag Haug, Professor of Linguistics, Greek and Latin, and academic leader of Humit – Center for digital development at The Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo.
• Eirinn Larsen, Professor and historian on modern Norway and Scandinavia/Norden at the University of Oslo.
• Annika Rockenberger, Senior Academic Librarian, University Library.
• Steinar Sæther, Professor and head of studies at IAKH
• Lars Magne Tungland, Information technologist at DHlab and the Language Bank at the National Library of Norway.

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