NeDiMAH a Network for Digital Arts and Humanities

NeDiMAH a Network for Digital Arts and Humanities
Hughes, Lorna, National Library of Wales, lorna.hughes@llgc.org.uk
Jannadis, Fotis, Institute for German Philology, University of Würzburg, fotis.jannidis@uni-wuerzburg.de
Schreibman, Susan, Digital Humanities Observatory, Royal Irish Academy, s.schreibman@ria.ie
Introduction
The European Science Foundation has recently recommended the NeDiMAH Network for funding through its 2009 Research Network Programme. The Network will run from June 2011-June 2015, and will provide a focus for researchers using digital research methods in the arts and humanities. NeDiMAH will provide a “methodological layer” to enhance and add value to infrastructure initiatives, and to digital collections. Outputs of the Network will provide evidence of the value of ICT methods for arts and humanities research. This poster will describe the Network and encourage wide participation amongst DH2011 attendees in Europe, and explore pan-national collaboration.

Aims of the Network
The NeDiMAH Network will examine the practice of, and evidence for, advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities across Europe, and articulate these findings in a series of outputs and publications. NeDiMAH will provide a locus of networking and interdisciplinary exchange of expertise among the trans-European community of digital arts and humanities researchers, as well as those engaged with creating and curating scholarly and cultural heritage digital collections. NeDiMAH will work closely with the EC funded e-research infrastructure projects DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, (link) ) and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructures, (link) ), as well as other national and international initiatives. The Network will bring together practitioners to examine the use of formal computationally-based methods for the capture, investigation, analysis, study, modelling, presentation, dissemination, publication and evaluation of arts and humanities materials for research. This research will contribute to the classification and expression of ICT methods used in the arts and humanities in three key outputs: a map visualising the ICT methodological commons; an enhanced ICT Methods Ontology; and a collaborative forum for the European community of practitioners active in this area. These outputs will serve to formalize and codify the expression of work in the digital arts and humanities, give greater academic credibility to this work, and enable peer-reviewed scholarship in this area. NediMAH will maximise the value of national and international e-research infrastucture initiatives by developing a methodological layer that allows arts and humanities researchers to develop, refine and share research methods that allow them to create and make best use digital methods and collections. Better contextualization of ICT Methods will also build human capacity, and be of particular benefit for early stage researchers.

Background
Advanced ICT methods for discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing digital content (Unsworth, 2000) can be found at a key point of intersection between disciplines, collections and researchers: data-rich disciplines (e.g. archeology, library and information science, and musicology) have refined new ICT methods, and within the data-driven sciences research methods have emerged around data and information processes. The use of advanced ICT methods can effect significant benefits in arts and humanities scholarship. Humanities research can also benefit from the significant volume of digital material available to arts and humanities researchers, the access and use of which is now being supported by the development of research infrastructures.

Despite this activity, uptake and impact of ICT based methods remains fragmented. A recent DARIAH investigation into research practice and Research Actors, examining the institutional settings of digital scholarship in the arts and humanities, has shown that the use of ICT research methods is often concentrated in specific academic disciplines, or in libraries or archives, and there are few opportunities for transfer of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. This creates disciplinary "silos", and communities of practice tend to develop around disciplines, rather than research methods (e.g., archeological computing, etc). Reasons for limited uptake and multidisciplinary collaboration were expressed in the ACO*HUM report ( (link) ), and in the recent evaluation of the UK's AHRC ICT Methods Network ( (link) ). These indicated that there is an urgent requirement for an international collaborative effort to undertake a formal analysis and expression of the ICT methods that can be used for arts and humanities research. Computational methods demand the utmost rigour and precision in their application, and accordingly, research practitioners working in the emerging field of the digital humanities have begun to formalize new theories of the interaction between content, analytical and interpretative tools and technologies, methodological approaches, and disciplinary kinships.

NediMAH will be an interdisciplinary, international Network of expert practitioners in the digital arts and humanities with the following objectives:

To investigate and articulate the use of formal computationally-based methods for the capture, investigation, analysis, study, modelling, presentation, dissemination, publication and evaluation of arts and humanities materials for research.
To facilitate collaboration in this research by:
Building a community of practice that is inclusive in terms of disciplinary coverage and national representation, as well as seeking the active participation of scholars at all stages of the career cycle
Developing a framework for common exchange of expertise and knowledge
Linking researchers with their peers across the disciplines
Enabling participants to develop, share and refine ICT methods as the core elements of digital scholarship and articulate these methods formally
To map the outputs and findings of these investigations in two digital resources:
A "methodological commons" to express disciplinary commons, partnerships and synergies, and the potential for cross and interdisciplinary partnerships.
The ICT Methods Taxonomy:
To build a community knowledge base by extending the arts-humanities.net and DRAPIER resources across Europe. This resource will be embedded into DARIAH beyond the end of the funding period to ensure sustainability and continued dissemination of Network outputs.
To investigate issues related to the scholarly publishing of ICT methods in the arts and humanities
To publish Network research in a series of books and articles.
Network Activities
NeDiMAH has a collaborative structure that is trans-European, interdisciplinary, and able to leverage existing nationally funded research and research support activities that can collectively support the development of a better understanding of the role of advanced ICT methods in arts and humanities research. This will support a series of core activities and a mechanism for exchange of expertise and material. These activities include a series of Methodological Working Groups, convened to consider specific methodological areas over the entire duration of the Network. They will investigate the topic from three areas of scientific focus:

Investigating the use of the method and gathering information about specific projects that use it
Analysis of current practice
Modelling ways in which the method can be applied across the disciplines in scholarly practice
Each Working Group will convene a Workshop each year, a key activity by which advanced methods will be formalized.

Proposed Working Group topics include:

Spatial and Temporal Modelling
ICT methods include agent-based modelling geo-temporal referencing and predictive spatial modeling.

Information Visualization
Visualisation refers to techniques used to summarise and present data visually, in a form that enables people to understand and analyse the information. Formats can include images (3-D or 2-D), maps, timelines, graphs and tables.

Ontological methods
Ontological mapping is used to semantically interrelate information from diverse sources to represent complex relationships. In order to do that, it relies on ontologies, formal representations of a set of concepts and relations.

Information extraction and data mining
Text and data mining can reveal new knowledge from (usually) larger amounts of textual data extracting hidden patterns, analysing the results and summarising them into a useful format.

Linguistic Corpora for interdisciplinary research
To study language as expressed in such corpora, corpus linguistics makes use of methods such as annotation, content analysis and parsing. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely derived by an automated process.

Methods and tools for working with digital manuscripts and images
Methods include text encoding to image restoration, and tools for digital editions

Participation in the Network
NeDiMAH will invite the broadest participation from European researchers in the digital arts and humanities through an open call. The Network also has a Global Dimension, which would enable the participation of researchers outside the EU. NeDiMAH has the full support of the following international digital humanities organizations: the Allied Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC); and the Association of Computing in the Humanities (ACH) and CentreNet. Digital Humanities 2011 will be an important opportunity for the Network to invite collaboration.