The Great Twentieth-Century HoleOr, what the Digital Humanities Miss

Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunningThe European Library, National Library of the NetherlandsDH Benelux, June 2014

http://slidesha.re/1nZb1Aihttp://www.slideshare.net/alastairdunning/the-great-twentiethcentury-hole-or-what-the-digital-humanities-miss

Some background:

I’m part of the Europeana Newspapers project; access to 20th century newspapers is one of the problemshttp://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers

Source: http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/eac4c7ef-dd8a-4dfe-a243-815a5d62e34d

Copyright also an issue for Europeana

Number of objects linked to from Europeana by decade in 20th/21st century

(Last column boosted by crowdsourced contributions, I think)

Eric Nortman, True Blood, Copyright Unknownhttp://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/037/4/1/true_blood__eric_nortman__by_redfl0wer-d38xfwg.jpg

Chiave,, CulturaItaliaMuseiD-Italia http://europeana.eu/portal/record/2048011/Athena_Plus_ProvidedCHO_CulturaItaliaMuseiD_Italia_oai_culturaitalia_it_museiditalia_work_43799.html

http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/AS0000194FB20.html

Digital Humanities Projects by Date of Corpus - Classification Used

•Classical Era•Post Classical / Medieval•Renassiance•18th Century•19th Century•1900-1950•1950 onwards

http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0025731.html

• King's College London Department of Digital Humanities• Dutch Royal Academy, Huygens Institute, The Hague• Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities, University of

Maryland• Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska• Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, University of Newcastle,

Australia• HRI Digital, University of Sheffield• Cologne Center for eHumanities, University of Cologne• Centre for Digital Humanities Research, Australian National University

8 Digital Humanities Centres

253 Digital Humanities Projects

Caveats with the Sample

•Project is far from being the only unit of representation of the Digital Humanities•These are self-defined DH Centres; much more common in larger / Northern Europe / North Americas country•Also exist plenty of non-DH that have a digital aspect but only with a particular discipline focus that overlaps with digital •Countries with more sophisticated funding mechanisms can provide more targeted support for DH - the influence of the ODH in the US and JISC in the UK is apparent.•Concept of DH is not structured. A DH centre in Germany can have a very different focus to one in Taiwan; many academic groups focussing on digital uses in a single subject to not use the term DH•Of those where DH centres exist, not all of them have full lists of projects•My own language skills made a difference; Google translate can only take you so far

Bearing all this in mind …..

Data available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Obzf_n7vkB-WwVXMH1XzouTSGwX89Glq2_WbhECDUQs/pubhtml

253 projects samples from 8 DH Centres

Data available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Obzf_n7vkB-WwVXMH1XzouTSGwX89Glq2_WbhECDUQs/pubhtml

Projects at Nebraska often finish before 1923. Every Week http://everyweek.unl.edu/search

Projects at Nebraska often finish before 1923. The William F Cody Archive http://www.codyarchive.org/

Data available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Obzf_n7vkB-WwVXMH1XzouTSGwX89Glq2_WbhECDUQs/pubhtml

20th-century MITH projects are focussed on very small number of performancesBeckett Directs Becketthttp://mith.umd.edu/beckett/

20th-century MITH projects are focussed on very small number of performancesMusic Theatre Onlinehttp://mith.umd.edu/mto/

Data available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Obzf_n7vkB-WwVXMH1XzouTSGwX89Glq2_WbhECDUQs/pubhtml

Cologne projects in 20th-century nearly all based on linguistics – The Movima Inverse

Cologne projects in 20th-century nearly all based on linguistics – Tone and Intonation in Vietnamese

No large-scale data-driven projects on the following Walt Disney, Michel Foucault, The advertising strategies of the

Coca-Cola company, the rise and developments of the feminist movement, Picasso, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, the

formation of United Nations, Vladimir Nabokov, the rise and fall of the university in the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman, the Battle of Dunkirk, Pearl Harbour, television in the twentieth

century, the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1968 uprisings, Bretton Woods, Algerian independence, the

Korean War (check), Doris Lessing, Italo Calvino, Malcolm X, the development of the European Union, twelve tone

classical music, the Olympic Games, The World Cup.(or if there are, they are not easily findable)

http://www.netlab.dk/

http://www.hathitrust.org/htrchttp://www.hathitrust.org/

Europeana Cloud developing a more sophisticated tech architecutre for Europeana and its aggregators - http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud

Extending Europeana Labs to create Europeana Research to tackle some of these issues -labs.europeana.eu

http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/AS0000194FB20.html

The Great Twentieth-Century HoleOr, what the Digital Humanities Miss

Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunning

Thank you !

https://www.flickr.com/photos/revilla/515536280/sizes/l