Not Only Text, Not Only Data

Arguably the first true digital humanities project was the creation of the Index Thomisticus by Robert Busa, starting in the 1940s. A concordance of the works of Thomas Acquinas, Busa sparked a new field of research and heralded a wave of development, as others scrambled to create textual corpora and the tools, algorithms, and interfaces that allow scholars to investigate them. From there, practitioners of effectively every discipline have witnessed significant expansion in the breadth of their research through everything from digital recording of cultural artifacts to abstract modeling of information in recent years. 

Over time, this has evolved to the point where it now includes the digital recording of virtually all “objects” within the humanities, and their attendant analytical interconnections: individuals, places, material culture, concepts, artworks, and more. Yet Busa’s legacy remains: despite the diversity of approaches, ideas, data, and methods in today’s digital humanities, focus often remains on more text centered projects, and the legacy of these projects is often reduced almost entirely to the data they produce. We propose addressing the challenges posed by this second wave of expansion as the conference motto: not by excluding text-centered approaches but by placing them within a broader context, and not by disregarding the importance of their data but by making sure also to conserve the methods, algorithms and transformations of that data which spark the fresh insights and new knowledge we seek. 

Cloistering of data and fields can hinder fruitful re- search. Disciplines such as art history and archaeology traditionally produce and analyze datasets related to material culture, including climate data, landscape profiles, and image matrices. They also produce material analytical data, including human biological data such as genetics, and perception data, like eye-tracking, EEG, fMRT, and so on. However, this data is most helpful when it is contextualized by informed integration with further information that completes a historical and contextual picture, necessitating varied data obtained through the analysis of diverse datasets. The conference aims to foster greater consideration of what diverse data means for scholars.

Data creation is not the end but rather the very beginning of contemporary projects. Researchers in the digital humanities now frequently find themselves not only producing data but also conceiving of and developing algorithmic frameworks for their analyses. Both the data itself and the approach taken are equally vital: data often lose much of their value when divorced from the methods used for both their creation and analysis. This aspect of knowledge production – the development of methods and their expression as functions and algorithms – has yet to receive sufficient attention in terms of sustainability and reproducibili- ty within the digital humanities. The lack of clear standards and best practices in this regard remain a fundamental challenge in digital humanities research. The same applies to preservation of interfaces and scripts of all kinds. Here too, it is essential to intensify cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Code and algorithms play a role that is as crucial for interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields of study (from computer science to social sciences) as academic prose. Other disciplines can only understand humanities data if they comprehend interpretations, which, in turn, depends on how they are processed. Hence, the development, preservation, and informed discussion of code are core components – if not prerequisites – for interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary engagement.

The conference aims to create a productive space for encounters and discussions to explore these issues. Panels, round tables, workshops, and poster sessions will bring together experts from fields related to digital cultural heritage research, digital archives, and data science disciplines, as well as representatives from traditional, text- and language-oriented digital humanities. We look forward to providing a venue for discussion and deliberation to push research ever forward, to foster discourse on code and algorithms, databases and archives, and text and data.