Fourth Digital Humanities Advisory Board meeting

On 3 April 2014 the DM2E Digital Humanities Advisory Board held their fourth meeting through Skype. This Board is responsible for steering the research direction of the DM2E project and ensuring that the technical development on the project responds to the needs of scholars.

Attendees from the Digital Humanities Advisory Board included:

Sally Chambers (DARIAH)
Alastair Dunning (Europeana)
Dirk Wintergrün (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Felix Sasaki (W3C)
Alois Pichler (University of Bergen)
Laurent Romary (INRIA)

In this meeting, Vivien Petras (Project coordinator, Humboldt-Universität) presented a summary of what happened in DM2E in the second project year.

DM2E DHAB Meeting: Report on the 2nd Project Review Meeting from DM2E

Christian Morbidoni (Net7) gave an overview of the progress of work package 3, which is researching the scholarly practices in the humanities as well as building the tools that respond to the needs of scholars.

DM2E DHAB meeting: WP3 Report Scholarly research platform from DM2E

Next, the workplan for the research on the digital humanities scholarly primitives was presented by Steffen Hennicke (Humboldt-Universität) and discussed between Board members. The three main principle research objectives of this task are (1) to investigate the functional primitives of Digital Humanists, (2) the kinds of reasoning Digital Humanists want to see enabled, and (3) the types of operations Digital Humanists want to see enabled. More information on this can be found in this paper (presented at the DH2013 conference):

Schreibman, S., Gradmann S., Hennicke S., Blanke, T., Chambers, S., et. al. (2013). Beyond Infrastructure – Modelling Scholarly Research and Collaboration. In: Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA, 16-19 July 2013. pp. 386-389.

In the third project year, the DM2E team is planning to supplement this research paper with a discussion on how the Scholarly Domain Model (SDM) relates to similar activities and if and how these activities map to the SDM. Another experiment with the Pundit tool based on a non-philosophical use case is being investigated, with the aim to demonstrate and evaluate the usefulness and added value of Pundit (especially ASK) and Linked Data: How do relevant research questions translate to the context of Pundit and Linked Data? The additional experiment and the earlier work on the Wittgenstein Incubator will be discussed and analyzed using the terminology of the SDM: Which primitives and activities have been enabled by the experiments and how have operations been enabled through RDF ontologies?

The Advisory Board provided some valuable input on further cooperation with other projects such as Europeana Cloud, DARIAH and Europeana 1914-1918, and approved on the proposed workplan.

Finally, all members agreed that Dirk Wintergrün will serve as interim Chair of the Digital Humanities Advisory Board in the next six months.