Consulting for digital humanists
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00:00
DigitizingBitComputer animation
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Pattern recognitionChannel capacityOptical character recognitionText miningSoftwareObservational studyDigital signalVirtual machineIntegral domainVirtual realityComputational physicsEncryptionSystem identificationSpacetimePoint (geometry)Normed vector spaceMetric systemFreewareCohesion (computer science)Cohesion (computer science)WordNegative numberSoftwarePoint (geometry)Orientation (vector space)Computer scienceContext awarenessNormal (geometry)DigitizingPerfect groupField (computer science)Web 2.0Natural languageDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Contrast (vision)Group actionMetric systemComputerFreewareMultiplication signNP-hardOpen sourceComputer programClassical physicsTable (information)Computer fileOperator (mathematics)Observational studyWindowForm (programming)Element (mathematics)Stress (mechanics)Faculty (division)Functional (mathematics)Chemical equationRadical (chemistry)GenderFormal languageProcess (computing)Object (grammar)State observerMilitary baseSoftware industryNatural numberMobile WebLevel (video gaming)Physical systemComputer animation
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FreewareCohesion (computer science)Digital signalSoftwareTelecommunicationSlide ruleWebsiteIRIS-TPublic domainContext awarenessFocus (optics)File formatPoint (geometry)SoftwareDigitizingGroup actionArithmetic meanOpen sourceSoftware engineeringComputer scienceSlide rulePublic domainMusical ensembleWordCausalityFreewareDeterminismStress (mechanics)Goodness of fitQuantificationWave packetPosition operatorFile formatPresentation of a groupSet (mathematics)Shared memoryTelecommunicationOpen setView (database)Focus (optics)Projective planeContext awarenessFormal languageMultiplication signRoundness (object)Computer fileComputerCASE <Informatik>Computer animation
15:17
Program flowchart
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
So my name is Marie de Brumet, consulting for digital humanists, the cultural shock developing tools and pedagogy. This talk is given on behalf of the Center for Digital Humanities in Uppsala, which is where I work.
00:23
Here you have my contact, you can contact me via email, Mastodon, as well as my website. I'm an engineer in digital humanities, we'll come back on that later. What you need to know is that I'm located in two countries, in the city of Lille in France and in Uppsala, where my work and university is.
00:48
And in my spare time I'm an activist in Uppsala women coding, as well as sometimes in Ullug and Raoul in Uppsala.
01:01
So I'm not the first digital humanist you are encountering in the FOSDEM. I did a little bit of survey and so at least four people I could identify as digital humanists in the past. As the name of Jan Rjonsson, Vaniele Guido, Olivier Aubert, Antoine Fauchet.
01:23
Thank you to them for opening the path and just being a pioneer and indirectly making me feel welcome in coming to your community. So without further introduction, what is digital humanities?
01:44
It's a pretty new field and it's a blurry term. I'm not going to have the talk of three days and three nights without sleeping about how to define it. What you need to know is that it's the field in the intersections between computer science and humanities, all sorts of humanities.
02:07
And what in this context an engineer in digital humanities is, it's someone technical that will have expertise in one or several domains of computer science and whose mission is to help humanists in their projects.
02:24
By humanists we can mean a philosopher, literature analyst, historian, sociologist, archaeologist, etc. I thought to give you a bit of context, examples would talk more than a long discourse.
02:44
So if you're an engineer in digital humanities, you could be helping a theologist mapping all the colors of the Bible to show the color ambience of the New Testament. You could be also building an online databases to help an
03:06
art historian broadcasting their unpsychopedical knowledge about some engravings of books, etc.
03:20
You do not need to read this complicated table, but I will attract your attention to a couple of things. First, observe the subjects. The subjects are pretty academics, academical subjects, things that computer scientists will normally not be very familiar to,
03:44
like literature, Scandinavian languages, linguistics, here the ALM means the archives, etc. We have an audience of very academical people, people that have no contact with the corporate world, that have been in academia and stayed in academia after.
04:07
Look at this, we have a pretty gender balanced group and slightly actually female dominated. I counted 16 women here in this room, including me. So that's an interesting contrast.
04:22
Finally, the titles, it probably doesn't stick to you too much because it's a pretty specialized topic. Could we even say niche topics? And I had fun making a table of the differences between the engineering world and the humanistic world.
04:48
By the way, I have a background in classics before going to natural language processing, so I am accustomed to this switch of culture. Additionally to the remarks I have made, I will add that among engineers
05:03
and computer scientists, the programming is the norm and often as an operating system, you will see Linux or Mac, or at least when I was in the department of natural language processing, that was what I was seeing. You would use an academical context later, you would exchange terminal apps, etc., etc.
05:24
Whereas if you land in the department of humanities, you will have a point and click as a norm and offer proprietary tools as a norm. Windows, Mac, PowerPoint, Word, I have been asked in conferences to give PowerPoint, PPTX files and Word documents and no one gets offended by that.
05:50
So, yeah, industry influence, I can make a job, and I think finally the most important
06:02
is that in computer science, we are very metrics oriented, optimizing maybe speed or other quantified performances. Whereas the humanists are very question oriented. So between those two different audiences that we need to gather in digital humanities, how do we help each other?
06:32
To be able to continue my talk or end my talk in something positive, I will start
06:41
in the, let's say, more obstacles or negative points of trying this marriage between the two fields. I think if you want to have free software, computer science and free software in the digital humanities, you
07:05
need to overcome a lack of visibility from the free software world towards the humanists, and I think vice versa. And I thought of taking a short example of technical tools we are working with.
07:24
So in digital humanities, I'm specialized in web scraping and NLP, and us as engineers, we tend to use, I would say, open source tools like Python, Beautiful Soup and Spacey.
07:40
Whereas people that will be less computer savvy in digital humanities will use more perfect softwares, such as web scraper.io or NSCONK, which has the advantage to be point and kick tools, to be simpler, more straightforward, to have less functionalities as well.
08:02
And yes, another remark is that I noticed recently while giving courses to digital humanists that people are asking me if I can teach them GitHub. And I say, no, I can teach you Git, not GitHub. So it's very revealing, the fact that they don't even know the difference or what it means.
08:24
So it's very revealing that they know GitHub before understanding the notion of Git. So I think this is to stress my point about lack of visibility of the open source world, or maybe the over visibility of the freeware world.
08:40
The second obstacle to bringing free software to digital humanities is maybe a lack of cohesion. I mean, digital humanities is a nascent topic where we have a lot of groups already spread with different languages, digital historians, digital literature analysts, et cetera, et cetera.
09:04
So they have already a hard time gathering together. So in this context, it's hard to make, as well, a community of open source enthusiasts. So it's not yet built, this community in this context.
09:21
The next point or obstacle is, I would say, the lack of common references, or I would say, but not of common values. So it's hard to find a language to understand each other's. We'll come back on that in the positive points.
09:42
And yeah, that's it for the obstacles, I can see. Then on the positive points, or on what could make this marriage a success, we have first, I think we humanists will be a very receptive audience to the philosophy of free software.
10:06
I mean, enlightenment philosophy existed before, and was studied in humanities, and was studied in humanities before, which has turned and was born. And so they have those references, and those references to philosophy and value of spreading the knowledge, of sharing, and so on.
10:32
They have a lot of activism in them. I mean, half of my department is vegan, so to reveal something about them.
10:42
They are nascent, but varied community, and I think that's a positive point. It's a crowd that is diverse, and very unusual for our dev crowd.
11:01
Something non-neglectable, they have financial means. Let's broaden, the humanities in general do not have much financial needs, not as much as science. But digital humanists are attracting grants and subsidies for projects, and that's an indirect way to finance open source and free software.
11:27
I'm an engineer developing tools for digital humanists, and my salary is paid by the government because digital humanities is such a buzzword. Finally, one very interesting thing about this crowd is that they know about domains that
11:47
maybe engineers and computer scientists have interest on, but do not have a formal training on. A lot of them have access easily to a training on communication, science of education, ethics, and are trained to think critically all the time.
12:07
We end my presentation not in certitudes, but in doubts and questions. The questions we could have are ideas to reach better this community and how to make them feel welcome.
12:23
That was it for my talk. I just kept for illustration purposes, in case I have questions I happen to have prepared, and references here, all in the slides. Thank you.
12:48
We can have questions. Yes, I will open the floor for two questions.
13:04
I was wondering, are you aware of the research software engineering movement that's been going on for about the last ten years? Are you aware of the research software engineering movement that's been going on for about ten years now? There's quite an active group in the Nordic countries and in the UK that have a lot of common issues with what you've just been talking about.
13:20
There will be a very good community for you to get involved with. Aware like this? No research? Is it any linked with the Dev Room of yesterday about the research tools? I don't know. I wasn't in that Dev Room. Thank you for your remark. Please come to me after and I will write that down.
13:41
We have one minute left. Yes, on the other side. Thank you. How could you, would you suggest to approach someone in the humanities sector that maybe
14:05
needs a hand with a project but doesn't really know what can IT do for it? Does it really know what we do? I have a set of questions when I do consulting. I can read them to you.
14:21
First, context. What is your domain? What does your domain focus on? Because they can be very varied. What is the problem you try to solve? Eventually, what did you already try to solve your problem? What tools did you use? That will give you an idea because they will be very blurry about what they want. That will help anchoring. What are the data you have and hope to collect? And they rarely think about it.
14:45
And finally, and the most important, can you present me your data? Screenshots? Open your, probably they have an Excel file or something, whatever. Size, format. How has it been collected? And if you think, as a computer scientist, quantification, they don't think like that. They just think questions.
15:05
So I think that could help. You're welcome. Thanks everyone. Big round of applause.