News Digest 11.4

Symposium Examines Research Topics at Nexus of Digital Humanities and Computing

CLIR Issues (10/08) No. 65, Smith, Kathlin

The research challenges arising from the convergence of the humanities, humanistic social sciences, and technology was the focus of a recent symposium hosted by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The purpose of the conference was twofold:  To comprehend and envision how new media promote and transform the interpretation and analysis of text, image, and other sources of interest to the humanities and social sciences and facilitate new expression and teaching, and to understand how those processes of inquiry pose questions and challenges for research in computer science, humanities, and social sciences.  One session stressed the opportunities and challenges for research, pedagogy, and learning, with participants registering the basic problem of sharing resources when so many exist in incompatible formats.  Ensuring that scholarly resources are interoperable and that critical search and discovery tools are designed for broad use were some of the points that participants agreed on.  Constructing better connections between cutting-edge and general digital technology users was another issue discussed, as was the challenge of changing faculty members' concepts of publication from traditional forms to a services model.  Research areas highlighted by participants as stemming from the intersection of computing and humanities included language representation and computation to isolate characteristics of patterns in data, better techniques for searching and retrieving still and moving images, authoring system problems, methods for visualizing uncertainty and annotating premises behind conclusions, and consideration of whether validation methods used in computer science communities may be applicable to some humanistic data applications.  Among the collaboration opportunities identified by symposium participants was partnering domain experts with computer scientists to produce domain ontologies and investigating data and tool preservation strategies via collaborations among supercomputing partners, digital humanities partners, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/index.html#symposium