What do Digital Humanists want from a National Library?

dr. Steven Claeyssens | @sclaeyssens | [dr. Martijn Kleppe | @martijnkleppe]

Part 1

How we assist Digital Humanities scholars

Data

Data

= result of

more than 200 years of collecting

over 30 years of digitisation

+ almost 10 years of collecting born-digital publications

= machine readable, mostly textual

= structured or semi-structured

= legally as open as possible

www.delpher.nl www.kb.nl/dataservices

Lab

Lab

www.kb.nl/lab

= online and offline sandbox

1 co-ordinator

1 curator

2 programmers

= experimental data sets

= tools and software

= workshops

Programs

Programs

1. Fellowship Program

= 4 months, 1 fte | invited | successful academic

2. Researcher-in-Residence Program

= 6 months, 0,5 fte | open call | early career

Call is open! – blog.kbresearch.nl

Part 2

Our experiences with assisting Digital Humanities scholars

Additional analysis

Findings

Particular interest in the newspaper corpus

Very diverse research questions and use cases

Various ways of data delivery wanted

Most computer scientists have data-driven research questions

Most humanities scholars are driven by research questions

www.tijdschriftstudies.nl

Findings

Apart from a lot of good points of critique, also:

Conflicting wishes about the corpus

Poor knowledge about the corpus

Poor understanding of the difference between the data and the tool

blog.kbresearch.nl

Findings

Again: very diverse research questions and use cases

Proliferation of tools and software

Interest in several corpora

Part 3

Lessons

There are no typical Digital Humanities scholars.

Their needs change over time, change with skills.

The hard ‘news’

There are hardly any standard tools or techniques.

We need to be more transparant about the data (and the tools).

An API is not enough. Multiple ways to deliver the data are needed.

In the short term

We need to be more envolved in research projects.

We need to (collectively) develop a digital source criticism.

We need to (collectively) develop a tool criticism.

In the medium term

In the long term

Any questions?

www.kb.nl/dataserviceswww.kb.nl/dh

steven.claeyssens@kb.nl@sclaeyssens