Daniel Alves, Digital Methods and Tools: results and future needs
1. Results of the workshop and future directions
Daniel Alves, New University of Lisbon
2. Organization
• Luís Silveira and Daniel Alves (historians)
• 18-19, November 2011
• Lisbon, FCSH, New University of Lisbon
• Web: http://
digital-methods-and-tools-for-history.blogs
/
3. Objectives
• Discuss the implications of using digital technologies in
the production and dissemination of knowledge in
History;
• Understand how digital methodologies has influenced
historical research;
• Discuss advantages and disadvantages, as well as
identify innovative ways of linking the future of the digital
world to the study of the past;
• Stimulate debate about the interaction between History
and Information Technology, and encourage its use by
the academic community, especially young researchers.
4. Programme (day 1)
• Session 1: Primary sources and relational databases
• Session 2: Interaction of space and time: GIS and
History
• Session 3: Decoding historical sources: Text Encoding
• Session 4: Internet, digitization and digital preservation
• Session 5: Digital humanities and research
infrastructures
6. Participants (I)
• Presentations from 9 researchers from several
universities in Portugal, England, Ireland, Germany and
the Netherlands:
• John Bradley (King's College London)
• Joaquim de Carvalho (University of Coimbra)
• Paul Ell (Queen's University Belfast)
• Luís Silveira (New University of Lisbon)
• Malte Rehbein (Universität Würzburg)
• Rita Marquilhas (University of Lisbon)
• Melissa Terras (University College London)
• Daniel Gomes (Portuguese Web Archive)
• Peter Doorn (Data Archiving and Networked Services,
Nederland)
7. Participants (II)
• About 60 participants, including students, researchers
and teachers of diverse backgrounds, from various
Portuguese, English, and Spanish institutions;
• 40 of them attended the workshops on day 2;
• NeDiMAH was represented by Leif Isaksen, University of
Southampton.
8. Results (I)
• Giving the narrative nature of the discipline itself, we
must find ways of using and exploring models of
structured data (databases; XML; GIS) that pay special
attention to textual sources;
• The importance of building tools that can deal with large
corpus of textual information was one of the features
highlighted in virtually all the presentations;
• The relevance of combine "distant" and "close" reading
in the analyses of historical records;
9. Results (II)
• The potential of visualization techniques in the analysis
of large data sets;
• The ability of crowdsourcing methods and tools for
engaging a wider audience in research activities, and
making vast collection of manuscripts more easily and
rapidly available for historical research;
• The ability of web visualization tools to combine time and
space, to transmit a sense of place, to superimpose past
and current events, and to engage users;
10. Results (III)
• The “Digital” didn’t provoked a “revolution” in the
production and dissemination of knowledge in History,
but has brought interesting developments and new
challenges;
• Interdisciplinary encouragement is an important result;
• Collaborative work is another major feature;
• The importance given to texts and textual sources;
• But it’s also a major challenge to the historian’s training;
• The historian (the humanist) must not let himself become
dazzled by the technology and by an endless experiment
with tools each time more powerful and more available.
11. Future (needs?)
• The need for new ways to represent spatial-temporal
information is increasingly felt;
• The same for visualization techniques that must have a
better ability to represent networks;
• The need to preserve and value cultural heritage,
whether it has born in the digital format or converted
from the analog.
12. Outputs
• Six researchers that presented their work in the
workshop accepted the challenge to put together a
proposal for a special issue in an international peer
review journal
• Six papers, plus an introduction, were sent for peer
review in the beginning of September 2012