Off we went to warm and hilly Lisbon Mikko Tolonen, Julia Matveeva and Inés Matres to represent Finland in the DARIAH Annual event that took place from 18 to 21 of June at the University of Lisboa and joined more than 250 SSH scholars and infrastructure developers in Europe and beyond to celebrate 10 years of existence, and plan for joint ventures for the years ahead.
To inaugurate us, Professor in English poetry Meredith Martin declared her intolerance to digital helplessness and encouraged us to own to our imperfect and unpolished workflows and to declare them loud and clear and to knock on all the important doors to make them better. This indeed can lead to success in getting funding to develop the infra development that your field needs, or as it was her case, to the creation of the digital humanities department at Princeton.
Diverse panels, working group meetings, and parallel sessions filled our last four days and we will need time to relay the most juicy in the proper channels and to recollect fruits from our networking efforts. But before leaving and closing the blog for the holiday season, I wanted to report on our presence na preciosa Lisboa and the mark we made in the intricate landscape of European digital research SSH infrastructures.
Mikko Tolonen, veteran in these events, double featured in the BiblioData working group and chairing the panel on experiences publishing workflows at the SSH Open Marketspace.
Discussing SSH Open Marketplace Workflows: User Experiences, Editorial Policy and Future… #DARIAH2024 pic.twitter.com/oO12jfZw86
— Elena Battaner (@BattanerElena) June 19, 2024
The BiblioData WG joins scholars and cultural heritage organisations, such as national libraries in their interest in respectively taking advantage and facilitating the use of historical bibliographic metadata for research. In turn, the SSH Open Marketspace was present in several panels highlighting the underlying theme of the event “workflows” and to market the concept researchers.To document and publish DH workflows which are unfamiliar to many can provide a help in setting up a research design to others less familiar or willing to enter the world for computational humanities research. Workflows are narratives that describe a task, furnished with information on people, software and skills needed; or entire processes within the research data-cycle; these narratives give context to research outputs, datasets or tools that are available for others to apply to their own projects. Similar to recipes (methodi.ca) or scenarios (Standardization Survival Kit).
Julia Matveeva from Turku Data Science group dashing in her Marimekko presented a poster for their “Scalable data science workflow for the Finnish national bibliography (Fennica)” documenting the process of harmonising and enriching book metadata to facilitate its statistical analysis. You can access this in our resources page,
Last day #DARIAH2024 fruitful exchange and assimmilation of ideas for developing SSH research infra, and opportunities to show off our own such as @UniTurku Julia Matveva’s Fennica data science workflow with @NatLibFiData pic.twitter.com/71qCz9WYku
— DARIAH-FI (@DariahFi) June 21, 2024
Inés Matres introduced the diverse streams inaugurated by FIN-CLARIAH this season to facilitate data-intensive visual research. As we are at the beginning, the talk focused on an ongoing mapping of visual research cultures interested in the imagery of history and of our contemporary times. This is a heterogeneous research community who in their majority apprise this abundance in qualitative and rudimentary ways such as taking snapshots in archives or taking screenshots of their born-environments. A small group of SSH researchers have skills or colleagues versed in data science methods who reported on quantitative and digital humanities methods, which we will take closer look at in order to adapt and start making visual heritage more accessible for research.
All are connected by common struggles that relate to the laborious task of finding or extracting images, or engaging in long processes to gather contextual data for their interpretation, or to annotate them to proceed to analysis. Despite differences, they are equally challenged in not having a suitable outlet for their datasets, neither in archives nor open repositories, quality, specificity, GDPR, third party ownership and copyright difficult the jump to open science. To bridge other gaps towards digital scholarship I have collected some ideas in my slides. This project is led by Elina Late and participants were selected in an discipline-agnostic way amongst the visual history network, the Tampere based research group on social media research and others and interviews examine tasks that derive from doing research with digital images. If you want to know more, please contact us!
Hyvää Juhannusta kaikille!