Digital Humanities and its Applications

Rens BodInstitute for Logic, Language and Computation

Faculty of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

What are the ‘Humanities’?

NWO Report “Duurzame Geesteswetenschappen” (2008):

“The humanities study the expressions of the human mind”

such as linguistics, musicology, art history, literary studies, philology, historiography, etc.

In 21st century there are many different ways to investigate expressions of the human mind

Not only historically but also digitally

Humanities and ICT

Humanities are about to become the next big step in Information Technology:

Complex data: e.g. film Is it visual, textual, auditive?

Incomplete data: e.g. manuscripts How to deal with fragments, unclear handwriting?

Fuzzy data: e.g. paintings What are the units of painting?

Digital Humanities

The digital study of the humanities has led to new public-private initiatives

Digital Humanities is a research spearpoint at various universities

Several projects with small and large companies

Example: Center for Digital Humanities

In autumn 2011 the UvA Faculty of Humanities made seed money available for public-private projects that should lead to knowledge utilization: Concrete products in digital humanities and creative

industries Involves senior and junior researchers, even pre-PhD

VU and KNAW joined in too, as well as some people from HvA Has led to additional seed money

Criteria for public-private projects in Digital Humanities

Humanities-driven Specific research question that connects with existing research

in humanities

Private component Private partner that wants to invest (financially or in kind)

Concrete Should lead to concrete product, in principle marketable

Sustainable Product is accessible also after project is finished (open

access). New research prospects should be generated.

Example 1:Digital Canal Ring

What painting was hanging where in the Golden Age? The Ecartico-database on which Dr. Marten Jan Bok and

Dr. Harm Nijboer have worked for years, will be turned into a commercial app together with Webmapper Not only interesting for tourists but also for scholars – new

connections and patterns are discovered! Webmapper is specialized in geographic technology,

and the people involved are: Edward Mac Gillavry (previously with Tomtom) Richard Duivenvoorde (previously with Geodata).

Example 2:Musical Similarity

How can we find a musical piece similar to another piece w.r.t. meter, tempo, instrumentation?

Musical similarity models developed by Dr. Aline Honingh during last 3 years will be turned into a musical app for jogging, ballroom dance and DJ, together with Elephantcandy Dr. Aline Honingh is a musicologist/information scientist Bruno Rocha MA is a musicologist

Elephantcandy has developed audio software and specialized in music applications Victor Bergen Henegouwen

Example 3Political Search

Who said what to whom in the Dutch Parliament, and why?

Interactive public search system will be built based on previous research and applications developed by Dr. Jaap Kamps, Dr. Maarten Marx a.o., together with Spinque Dr. Jaap Kamps is a cultural information scientist

Spinque is an Information Retrieval company specialized in search engines for the web Dr. Arjen de Vries

Example 4:Emotions in Film

How can we automatically detect emotions in film? A database of (emotionally) tagged film shots will be

created, based on previous research by Prof. Ed Tan and Prof. Patricia Pisters, together with VicarVision Ed Tan is professor Communication Sciences Patricia Pisters is professor Film Studies

VicarVision is a major computer vision company specialized in facial emotional expressions M.J. den Uyl

Only project where the concrete product is a database

And many more examples from Computational Linguistics

From machine translation to speech recognition and automatic summarization

Yet today I explicitly focused on disciplines other than (computational) linguistics

Since common wisdom has it that these other disciplines do not lead to concrete products.

KNAW and VU are now also participating & many more partners

13 projects aiming at valorizing knowledge from humanities, all within Joint Center for Digital Humanities More than 70 people (UvA, KNAW, VU & private

partners)

KNAW released extra money: 3.5 million to stimulate Computational Humanities

projects 15 million Euro for a Center for Humanities and

Technology (CHAT), a.o.

Different way of thinking?

The idea that humanities are first of all important for Critical Mind or Historical Conscioussness, is mistaken

There have always been world-changing insights in humanities

IBM 2012: “The humanities are The Next Big Thing”

Steve Jobs 2011: “True innovation stands at the intersection of humanities and sciences”

Two upcoming talks in this session

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens ING) Computationele Letterkunde

Stef Scagliola (Erasmus University) Oral History & ICT