The Great Twentieth-Century Hole Or, what the Digital Humanities Miss. Paper looking at lack of representation of 20th Century Digital Humanities Presentation for Digital Humanities Benelux, June 2014

1. The Great Twentieth-Century Hole
Or, what the Digital Humanities Miss
Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunning
The European Library, National Library of the Netherlands
DH Benelux, June 2014
http://slidesha.re/1nZb1Ai
http://www.slideshare.net/alastairdunning/the-great-twentiethcentury-hole-or-what-the-digital-humanities-miss

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

3. 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)

4. Eric Nortman, True Blood,
Copyright Unknown
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011
/037/4/1/true_blood__eric_nortman_
_by_redfl0wer-d38xfwg.jpg

5. Chiave,, CulturaItaliaMuseiD-Italia
http://europeana.eu/portal/record/2048011/Athena_Plus_ProvidedCHO_CulturaItaliaMuseiD
_Italia_oai_culturaitalia_it_museiditalia_work_43799.html

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

7. Digital Humanities Projects
by Date of Corpus -
Classification Used
•Classical Era
•Post Classical / Medieval
•Renassiance
•18th Century
•19th Century
•1900-1950
•1950 onwards
http://wellcomeimage
s.org/indexplus/image
/L0025731.html

8. • 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

9. 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 …..

10. Data available at
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Obzf_n7vkB-
WwVXMH1XzouTSGwX89Glq2_WbhECDUQs/pubhtml
253 projects samples from 8 DH Centres

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

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

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

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

15. 20th
-century MITH projects are focussed
on very small number of performances
Beckett Directs Beckett
http://mith.umd.edu/beckett/

16. 20th
-century MITH projects are focussed
on very small number of performances
Music Theatre Online
http://mith.umd.edu/mto/

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

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

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

20. 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)

22. http://www.netlab.dk/

23. http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc
http://www.hathitrust.org/

24. 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

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

26. The Great Twentieth-Century Hole
Or, what the Digital Humanities Miss
Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunning
Thank you !
https://www.flickr.com/photos
/revilla/515536280/sizes/l