Talking Points (Provisional)

Discussing new topics in the humanities and data science

The Humanities & Data Science Discussion Group aimed at fostering networking across the humanities community and supporting cross-discipline discussions. The organisers (Federico Nanni, Leontien Talboom, Katie McDonough and Malvika Sharan) ran this event online on a monthly basis during the pandemic. The discussion group had an average of 20 participants, 50% of them from external institutions and generally 4-5 of them from international institutes and it covered a large variety of topics, moving beyond specific DH areas to reach out to the broad research community: the role of authorship, the concept of ground truth, open source journalism, ethical implication of archiving social media, current and future role of preprints and commercial organisations doing the job of libraries/archives.

Teaching

This group is composed of members who are involved in delivering and supporting digital humanities teaching and training whether through standalone courses and degree programs or as part of a broader research skills training program across different degrees. An increasing number of institutions are offering teaching provision in the digital humanities, though we recognise that this has reached differing levels of maturity in different locations.

The aim of the sub-group is to provide a forum for the exchange and discussion of the practical and theoretical challenges including institutional barriers related to DH teaching. In particular, we are interested in exploring the following:

  • How to develop good practice in DH teaching, continuing to uphold high pedagogical standards and pursuing innovative teaching approaches that keep pace with the research and technological advances in our discipline

  • How to address institutional challenges that arise from the often fragmentary nature of DH teaching provision, such as liaising across faculties, providing relevant courses for a range of subjects and study levels, and retaining skilled staff

  • How to coordinate efforts across training offerings in order to foster complementarity and address existing gaps We draw on group members’ varied experiences of supporting teaching at their institutions to identify successful strategies. We propose regular face-to-face events for colleagues to discuss and debate these issues and promote broader networking.

Chair: Anne Alexander (Cambridge)

Members: Bea Alex (Edinburgh), Anne Alexander (Cambridge), Giovanni Colavizza (Turing), James Cummings (Newcastle), Rachele De Felice (UCL), Fiona Douglas (Leeds), Leif Isaksen (Exeter), Ewan Jones (Cambridge), Anouk Lang (Edinburgh), Nora McGregor (BL), Thierry Poibeau (ENS), Pip Willcox (National Archives)

Digital humanities Data Study Groups

This working group organised the Turing Data Study Group on Discovering topics and trends in the UK Government Web Archive, with The National Archives as challenge owner , 9-13 December, 2019, The Alan Turing Institute.

Data science and digital humanities white paper

The group collaboratively edited white paper “The challenges and prospects of the intersection of Humanities and Data Science” also presented at the Digital Humanities Congress 2022 which has received substantial attention, including Barbara McGillivray’s interview with the Economist. The white paper is available as:

McGillivray, Barbara et al. (2020). The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A white paper from The Alan Turing Institute. Figshare. dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164