Presentation at DH2014 with Paul Spence on the history of DH in Spain. Abstract in http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Panel-795.xml
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Global Challenges, Local Interpretations. An analytical perspective on Digital Humanities in Spain ce (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London) zález-Blanco (Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digita umanities 2014 y of Lausanne (UNIL) & Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausan nd, 9 July 2014 03/07/22 03:49 PM ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 1 The original slides have been lightly edited here, with added commentary
Transcript
Global Challenges, Local Interpretations. An analytical perspective on Digital Humanities in Spain
Paul Spence (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London)Elena González-Blanco (Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, UNED)
Digital Humanities 2014University of Lausanne (UNIL) & Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)Switzerland, 9 July 2014
The original slides have been lightly edited here, with added commentary
1970s - Early research projects (BOOST: Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts) involving international collaborations
Historical context
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/
“En 1973 las humanidades digitales estaban firmemente asentadas en España”, Francisco A. Marcos-Marínhttp://fmarcosmarin.blogspot.com.es/2013/12/las-humanidades-digitales.html
The forty years that followed saw numerous isolated research projects in Spain, including the Miguel Cervantes Virtual Library, which frequently made valuable contributions to research in what was then called ‘humanities computing’, and which often had close relations with Italian colleagues involved in ‘informatica umanistica’ and with other Europeans initiatives such as the CLiP seminars. But as is so often the case for non-Anglophone traditions, this rich tradition in Spain is largely absent from historical depictions of the field at an international level.
First GO::DH Conference, Second Meeting of Digital Humanistshttp://caribbean2013.thatcamp.org/
Hispanophone Digital Humanities organisations
The last few years have seen a dramatic surge in activity in the digital humanities in Spain (see http://hd.paulspence.org/recursos/hh-dd-es/), which are part of a broader articulation of Hispanophone digital humanities organisations
Some landmark projects such as PARES (which provides access to the digital holdings of Spanish archives) and HISPANA (which follows OAI principles in connecting digital holdings throughout Spanish archives, libraries and museums) have played a key part in broader digital initiatives.
Tentative conclusions about DH research projects in Spain
• Delimited to large extent by traditional disciplinary boundaries• Formal evaluation and credit mechanisms for digital outputs are
a particular challenge in Spain• Collaborative research is not usually given appropriate credit• Strong theoretical tradition grounded in conventional humanities
disciplines or information science• But there is not the strong history of tool-building that is more
prevalent in other regional contexts. • Digital innovations typically result from fragile and unstable
partnerships with computational science researchers offering their time on a volunteer basis or from commercial agreements with software companies.
Master in DH, UCLM (2005-2011)
http://linhd.uned.es/p/escuela-de-verano/
• Some success in informal training/workshop events• But historically, there have been few experiences in
teaching digital humanities as a formal academic subject
• Master in DH at UCLM (2005-2011) was crucial in establishing DH as a subject of study in Spain
HDH2013 brought together 103 attendees, with 59 papers and posters accepted from nine different countries and covering a wide range of subject matter, including lexicology, digital libraries, art history, e-learning, digital edition and crowdsourcing. HDH2013 represented a first response to what Sagrario López Poza has identified as a “clear interest of an increasing number of researchers who are disoriented and isolated and wish to create areas of confluence” (López Poza ‘Humanidades digitales hispánicas’ in Ciencuentenario de la AIH, forthcoming), a group which has been visibly galvanized by ongoing Global Outlook debates in the DH
Community building in wider hispanophone field
Zotero group for ‘Humanidades digitales’ curated by Antonio Rojas Castro, with 42 members and 371 itemshttps://www.zotero.org/groups/humanidades_digitales
Publication venues for “humanidades digitales” in Spain
Data from ‘Who are you Digital Humanists?’ survey (Cleo).Graph from La stratégie du Sauna finlandais, Marin Dacoshttp://blog.homo-numericus.net/article11138.html
Rodríguez-Yunta, Luis. “Humanidades digitales, ¿una mera etiqueta o un campo por el que deben apostar las ciencias de la documentación?”. Anuario ThinkEPI, 2013, v. 7, pp. 37-43
DH under the microscope in Spain
• Ongoing atomisation• Identify of field• Cross-channel communication• Recognition for interdisciplinary research• Peer recognition at disciplinary level• Formal evaluation and credit• Opportunities for early career researchers• Career paths
Challenges for DH in Spain
• Which parameters to use when examining given regional/linguistic group?– “How many people self-identify with DH in some way?”– “How many people do we identify with DH by some pre-agreed metric?”– “How many people are actively involved in building digital models of
humanities research?”– “How many people are involved in reflective research on the impact of
technology on human scholarship?”– “How many people are involved in any kind of digital scholarship?”– Etc.
• Analysis of regional groups typically has overlapping, but non-identical objectives:– To research DH as a particular domain of scholarly activity– To build a digital humanities community– To build a DH research field with appropriate academic recognition– To improve visibility for particular geographic and linguistic groups within
the field as a whole and address imbalance
* Term coined by Roopika Risam during Global Outlook panel which this presentation was part of
Documenting a regional accent* of DH
Paul Spence, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College [email protected]
