Digital Humanities in Estonia: Digital Divide or Linguistic Isolation?

Mari Sarv, Kaisa KulasaluEstonian Folklore Archives - Estonian Literary Museum

DH2014 Lausanne, 11.07.2014

What are the reasons of underdevelopement of digital humanities in Estonia?

• Population: 1,31 million• Official language: Estonian

(finno-ugric language)• Speakers of Estonian (in Estonia

and abroad): 1,29 million• Area: 45,227 km2

• Independence declared: 1918• Foreign occupation: 1940–1991 • Independence restored: 1991• Joined the EU: 2004• Currency: Euro

Estonia 101

Wired country• Electronic elections• E-Tax Board• E-School• E-Census• E-Estonia…http://www.egov-estonia.eu/

Home of:• Skype• TransferWise• European IT Agency• NATO Cooperative Cyber

Defence Centre of Excellence

Linguistic divide within Estonia30% of the population speaks Russian as their first language.Two (more or less) separate communities (for historical reasons).

1. Russian speakers use the state e-services (and internet in general) far less than Estonians (TNS Emor 2012).2. Russian-speaking group has lower scores in computer skills and in information processing tests (PIAAC Study 2013).

... as a digital divide

Implications of IT-boom for humanities

• development of language technology, computational linguistics• need to preserve digital governmental documents: digital

preservation department in Estonian National Archives founded in 1999

• large-scale digitization of cultural heritage collections from mid-nineties onwards

• collection and preservation of digital-born cultural heritage• creation of digital infrastructures to manage evergrowing digital

collections and make them available for public

DH seminar in 2013• first introduction of the concept of DH to Estonian humanities

community• linguistics, folkloristics, archeology, literary studies, arts & cultural

heritage studies• DH evolves where the collections are (memory institutions rather than

universities)• initiative to create an informal network and a will to further

collaboration

Two waves of digital humanities(Schnapp & Presner 2009)

- digitisation projects and creating the infrastructure- database search and retrieval- text analysis

- interpretation and research methodologies for digitised and born-digital materials- digital toolkits - new disciplinary paradigms

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Second, Qualitative w

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Using digital methods for researchLinguistics

- co-operation of the linguists and computer-scientists since the 1950s;- curriculum of computational linguistics since 1997;- language technology and digital language resources.

The other fields of humanities- sporadic interest, depends of the interests and skills of individual researchers;- tools tailored for a single researcher.

Linguistic divide• size of the language community is very small and the

community of researchers even smaller• materials to work with are often in Estonian and

unintelligible for international audience• the tools are language-specific

• collections and education are separated• lack of systematic technological knowledge base

among the humanities researchers

DH divide

How to bridge the DH divide?

• to build an efficient local DH community/network• to establish more connections with the

international DH community• to spread the information on the new

developements, solutions, possibilities ...• to promote changes in the educational strategies• to localize software developed in/for other

languages

To sum up:

• wired country doesn’t necessarily have booming digital humanities

• linguistic divide easily turns into a digital one• the size of the language community sets its

limits to the human resources and possibilities

Supported by:

Kaisa Kulasalu, kaisa.kulasalu@gmail.comMari Sarv, mari@haldjas.folklore.ee, @kaskekanke

Estonian Folklore Archives of Estonian Literary Museum