Introduction to the Special issue: The sum of its parts, what a platform of digital humanities courses says about digital humanities

1.Introduction

This special issue of Education for Information features contributions from the collaborators behind the Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH). Driven by the principle of open education and addressing the popular interest in digital humanities methods such as text analysis or virtual reality, DiMPAH brought together teams of scholars from universities across Europe (Cyprus, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden) to develop seven open educational resources (OERs). Each OER is based around digital methods/practices applied in the humanities according to the expertise and experience of each team. This means that the topics covered in the platform range from data analysis to cataloguing, and from corpus linguistics to augmented reality. But it also means that the OERs are very much informed by the context in which the instructors have applied the method, which may be informed by the scholar’s discipline (e.g., linguistics), the nature of the project referenced (e.g., enriching digital newspaper collections) or a combination of the two (creating a system for analysing performances in the performing arts). As self-contained courses, each module in DiMPAH offers itself as an invaluable instructional resource for teachers interested in having students work with digital methods in the humanities, or having self-motivated students learn applications of the digital on their own.

In this paper, I will present some background to this initiative and summarize its deliverables in the form of the OERs. But beyond this, I will take a step back to reflect on this ambitious and diverse collaboration, bringing together educators from across Europe and from different quarters of the digital humanities, and ask: what does the DiMPAH suite taken in its entirety teach us about the field of digital humanities as a field of study today. Asking this question means approaching the suite of courses as a sample or cross-section of the digital humanities (DH), a microcosm of methods, technologies, and scenarios from a highly varied assortment of practitioners in DH. While the OERs are independently constructed courses, intended to serve as standalone learning experiences, the assortment in itself is conveying to students something about the extensive yet amorphous field they are engaging in through DiMPAH, and it therefore behoves us to articulate what statement this assortment is in fact making.

The value of such analysis is due to the nebulous nature of digital humanities as a relatively young and inchoate field unanchored to any traditional discipline and hounded by the persistent question of “what is digital humanities?” Answers have varied, but digital and computational methods have often been the common thread throughout, whether implicit or explicit. This is where the paper begins before introducing DiMPAH as the latest of a series of educational material for this poorly defined yet much sought-after area of scholarship. And it is with these questions in mind that we must appreciate the unique opportunity that DiMPAH offers: by amassing teams of Europe-based DH instructors and researchers each responsible for developing their own course introducing a method based on their own unique expertise, DiMPAH inadvertently serves us with an edifying cross-section of DH. This is what the latter half part of the paper will focus on unpacking: what does the suite reveal about DH as a field.

Lastly, as an assortment of resources emerging specifically from the context of Europe, coming from scholars from across the continent, it is worth asking what this specific suite of digital courses tells us about Europe and the new stories DH can tell us about the European experience moving forward.

2.Digital humanities

Each year digital humanities programmes and courses welcome a new cohort of students eager to learn about this innovative and variegated field. During a recent orientation meeting with an incoming cohort of DH master’s students at my university, one of the new students in attendance politely asked us for a succinct definition of the field of DH which she was formally entering. Mind you, the student made clear that she was not asking for a definition of the field for herself, but rather for a definition that she could give to others – especially prospective employers – who would be asking her about the subject matter in which she would be earning a degree. My response to the student enjoined her and her colleagues to treat this question from others as an invitation to offer their own bespoke definition of digital humanities, a definition reflecting their own pursuits and approaches within the field. In other words, keep the focus on one’s own activities as a manifestation of DH rather than pursuing a pure, abstract definition of DH in a vacuum.

Formalizing a definition of digital humanities has been a struggle since the fields rebranding in the mid-2000s inception, with moving battle lines delineating who to include and who to exclude (Ramsay, 2013; Warwick, 2016). This made the search of a definition contentious but also aspirational, as if a definition could finally afford the field coherence and – by means of this coherence – legitimacy and recognition on par with established fields of study. Yet these debates over “what is DH?” were already turning into a genre in itself (Kirshenbaum, 201). And the failure to provide a coherent definition of the field come to be embraced. Sites like What is Digital Humanities (https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/) cycles through a corpus of +800 definitions to highlight the plethora of views of DH practitioners, who variously emphasize the role of community, the types of methods employed, to epistemological basis, the sought after goals, and even exasperation at the question itself.

The idea of defining DH through the tools and methods (as opposed to a common object of study or the boundaries of formal disciplines) is not so new. Even before the field was rechristened as digital humanities and was still under the moniker of humanities computing (Vanhoutte, 2016) digital methods were placed at the heart-and-centre, as the initial emphasis on digitisation of analogue objects gave way to a focus on what could be done with the vast array of digital resources now available to scholars (Edmonds, 2016; Warwick & Bailey-Ross, 2013).

The first wave of digital humanities (or humanities computing), roughly corresponding from the post-WWII period to the mid-2000s, was largely enmeshed within traditional disciplines and emphasised building infrastructures and repositories (Berry, 2011). The creation of these initial repositories and digital libraries become the foundation for the next wave of DH, as disciplinary boundaries become more porous and collections were now seen as resources that must be more fully explored and exploited. It is this that makes the growing importance of methods as an identifying feature of DH, as the field escapes into the interstitial space between disciplines.

For instance, McCarty and Short (2002) set a methodological commons at the heart of their intellectual map of humanities computing. Others, such as Kirshenbaum (201), offered that DH consisted of a community of practitioners, though even this suggests a common repertoire of practices (i.e., methods). Even the “hack vs yack” debate in DH (Ramsay, 2013; Warwick, 2016) revolved around the proposition that methods and methodology exclusively conferred the status of DH, whereas engagement with theory and critique on its own failed to earn this designation.

But what about these methods, then? When Hughes et al. (2016) revisited the McCarty and Short model, they noted several core features. First, the technical methods in question – such has data mining and information visualisation – are originally developed outsides the humanities (information retrieval, statistics, human computer interaction, etc.). Second, these methods entailed broad-ranging collaborations among diverse actors. Thirdly, that same diversity was reflected in the combinations of data types, technical methods and multiple technologies (e.g., combinations of text, database, image, and GIS). And fourthly, these methods often entailed working with large-scale data sources and, hence, aggregating materials from multiple collections or sources. Obviously, trying to conceptualize the methods that made up DH required delving more deeply into what applications were being implemented within DH instead of glossing over the particulars in the interest of fitting them in a neat model that encapsulated DH as a whole.

Attempts to systematize the approaches within DH can best be illustrated by the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities (TaDiRAH, https://www.tadirah.info/) – a classification system for clearly and consistently labelling the practices undertaken by the DH community (Borek et al., 2016; Hughes et al., 2016). Developed by DARIAH and DiRT, the former the European digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities and the latter a digital humanities tool directory, TaDiRAH separates DH into six classes of activities (analysing, capturing, storing, interpreting, enriching, disseminating, and creating) which are further narrowed activity (e.g., analysing: content analysis, network analysis, stylistic analysis, spatial analysis, etc.) until the lowest level of techniques are specified (e.g., topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval). The intent behind such a system was to aid DH scholars in making their work discoverable through a systematic descriptive tool whereby technical approaches are made explicit and identifiable, allowing for the collocation of projects employing similar techniques despite dealing with any number of subject matters, operating at any size of scope, or employing any specific tools.

TaDiRAH is indisputably a vital representation of DH: one that puts methods at the centre through meaningful conceptual granularity. Yet it must also be acknowledged that it rests on the premise of abstraction: abstracting and isolating DH methods from the project themselves, thereby glossing over the differences and distinctions in how a method is in fact put into practice. Such a sacrifice is pragmatic, of course, but leads to representations of the field and its approaches that may accommodate many but fails to meaningfully represent anyone. For instance, in the four core elements mentioned by Hughes et al. (2016), we see a theme of boundary-crossing: imported methods, interdisciplinary teams, cocktails of data types, mixing of methods, assemblages of technologies, the smashing sources together. In short, transgression becomes the operative character of digital humanities when distilled from actual practices. Even the distinction of historical “waves” of DH reinforces this tendency for transgression: the second wave has been seen as a rise of hybridity and novelty, whether with respect to disciplinary paradigms, methodologies, artefacts, and material culture. Finally, there is the nascent third wave which Berry (2011) argues emphasises critical engagement with digital cultural and technologies themselves. Examples of this are the work in critical cultural studies (Marino, 2016, 2020) or critical infrastructure studies (Liu, 2018; Liu et al., 2021).

Projects like TaDiRAH represent a ground-up approach to understanding DH, and once again focusing on techniques and methods as the common thread. Yet the move away from clear, universal parameters on DH has also been followed by a move away from abstraction and generalizability. There is today an increasing movement towards particularizing and contextualization (Klein & Gold, 2019). This means shifting to understanding and representing DH as method and practices that inhabit and are meaningful within specific contexts, such as DeSpain and Travis (2018), teaching DH to students though affordances of techniques and technologies in understanding American literature.

It is with this understanding that we can now turn to the DiMPAH modules. When DiMPAH partners were invited to create a course on a digital humanities method, I argue that each of these partners implicitly offered an instantiation of digital humanities: not a totalizing definition that intends to answer the question in a definitive fashion, but rather something more in line of what I suggested to the student in the introduction: defining a facet of DH around their particular practices. With this in mind, this introductory article reflects on these modules to resolve DiMPAH’s statement on the nature of DH as a field of practice.

3.DiMPAH

In 2020, the Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH) project was awarded funding through an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships, with Koraljka Golub (Linnaeus University) as principal investigator. DiMPAH had the aim of developing a suite of online and open educational resources covering an array of digital methods, taught by academics with practical experiences with the methods in question. Such educational resources in DH are not new. Sites such as dariahTeach (https://teach.dariah.eu/) host a series of open educational resources (OERs) alongside those of DiMPAH. Many other examples abound: the public resources on DH from the indominable Miriam Posner (https://miriamposner.com/blog/tutorials-ive-written/) or William Mattingly (https://pythonhumanities.com/) come to mind. Even older material like Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History website (https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/index.php.html) still offers an invaluable contribution in this area. Yet despite such efforts, the need for educational material in DH persists.

Recognizing this, DiMPAH has offered its own measure, with seven online learning modules from a numerous teams of DH practitioners from across Europe. The main actors recruited to participate in DiMPAH were Marianne Ping Huang from Aarhus University (Denmark), Koraljka Golub, Fredrik Hanell, Romain Herault, Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, Pernilla Seversson, and Jukka Tyrkkö from Linnaeus University (Sweden), Tobias Blanke and Giovanni Colavizza from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Stella Hadjistassou from the University of Cyprus (Cyprus), Antoine Doucet and Cécile Chantraine Braillon from the University of La Rochelle (France), and Olívia Pestana from the University of Porto (Portugal). As an educator starved for resources to further the education of skillsets of our students, I can only express my appreciation for their contributions.

But many of these learning resources are developed in isolation, DiMPAH had the ambition of creating a suite of OERs with thematic and pedagogical threads. For instance, the platform would teach methods while leveraging several instances of European cultural heritage and pursue the aim of learning scenarios that allow new stories of Europe to be developed (e.g., social equity, transnational and cultural diversity, gender equality, good health and well-being). The conceit behind DiMPAH is that, beyond the need to expand the freely and online learning material to meet the demand for DH training, that complex societal challenges can be addressed through international, cross-disciplinary, collaborative research into human conditions, societies and cultures, and through comprehensive studies using relevant digital methods and datasets throughout Europe and beyond.

Naturally, DiMPAH stands as an impressive suite of resources for DH pedagogy, and one that taps into the primary driver for many in digital humanities: methods and techniques. Digital humanities encompasses many varied implementations, and the same is true in how such implementations are taught. It is a constant struggle to find the best resources and pedagogical approaches with which to introduce the uninitiated into the practices and techniques within the digital humanities or supporting the advancement in DH of already skilled students. Much of this is exacerbated by the fact that many techniques and tools are presented without any specific context – methods in a vacuum, as it were – for students who themselves bring heterogenous backgrounds: some students are intimately familiar with medieval manuscripts but have very little understand of the difference between a text file and a MS Word file; while other students still might come with a strong computational background but lack the context of humanistic epistemology and knowledge production, therefore failing to see how methods can substantively yet critically inform scholarship. DiMPAH, through its highly contextualized approach to methods, rides this fine line to an admirable degree.

The courses created by the aforementioned collaborators are available as online educational resources (OERs) which are openly accessibly to anyone and support asynchronous, self-paced, and modular learning. They are intended to offer introductions to digital methods in the humanities and to be used autonomously by a learner or be adapted to a formal learning context. The seven courses make up DiMPAH are as follows:

Even simply presenting the titles makes the spectrum of methods, tools, approaches, and objects-of-study immediately evident. In the following section, we provide more details on each OER to further substantiate these differences.

4.Conclusion: Future stories for Europe

These themes emerging from DiMPAH are instructive both to DH practitioners and educators, as they help us better frame the methods we impart to students whose enthusiasm to learn the latest tools and techniques may overshadow the considerations that make them actionable and worthwhile. This is the only way to ensure the enthusiasm is properly rewarded. Refraining from abstracting digital methods from the specificities of knowledge, situation, and intent, while still embracing the links that connect related instantiation of digital methods, we can offer a fuller and more fulfilling (and more honest) learning experience for students.

Given my remarks on situatedness and linkages in DH, I would like to conclude this paper with a brief reflection on what DiMPAH’s distinctly and eclectically European origins suggest about the future stories of Europe to be told, much in the same fashion the platform of modules was used to tell a story about the nature of digital humanities.

For one, it seems future stories of Europe are not to be confined by borders nor the particularities of storytellers telling them. DiMPAH illustrates how national and regional cultures can and will be juxtaposed and mashed-up with increasing ease, with few stories enjoying a stage to themselves or securing an exclusive audience of their own. OER6, for instance, brought together the historic experiences of Swedish and Cypriot settlements, while the resource behind OER3 (Newseye) is a multilingual collection of historic newspapers that are mutually searchable This also opens us to opportunities for new discoveries, unexpected connections, of the original narratives to be nurtured into existence: the future stories of Europe will be told to new audiences and those audiences will bring new readings of their own.

The next observation is that digital methods and practices are increasingly the basis for a new public literacy. Present day challenges (diversity, equality, health, economic rights) are increasingly being articulated through digital mediation, and digital methods are being adapted to capture this (as exhibited in OER4). Furthermore, digital methods present their own rhetorical force through the scale of data it can handle and the myriad of ways it can represent its findings (OER1, OER2, and OER3). DiMPAH makes the case that future stories of Europe will be shaped by and through these digital methods, and this power must be both handled responsibly and critically.

DiMPAH as an educational package has much to tell, perhaps more than was expected when it was originally conceived: it has much to say about the field it introduces to students and the region from which it arose. These lessons are worth attending to no less than the more explicit instructional content on digital methods the project’s collaborators have now made available for the world.