niels ole finnemann associate professor, head of netlab niels ole finnemann 2-3 december 2013 netlab...

NIELS OLE FINNEMANNASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, HEAD OF NETLAB

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN

2-3 DECEMBER 2013

NETLAB - RESAWNIELS OLE FINNEMANN

2-3 DECEMBER 2013

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND RI’S

1

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

THE CORE STORY

›In the 21th century an increasingly significant part of social, cultural, and political life - public and private - will be articulated in digital genres performed on networked digital media platforms.

›Internet materials, however, are rapidly changing or even disappearing except for those parts, which are archived.

2

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

THE CORE STORY

›Archived web materials will often be the only source available for those who might want to analyze and write the history of contemporary and near past society.

›Thus we have to document the significance and the uniqueness of these materials.

3

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

A SECOND PERSPECTIVE

› ‘Networked digital media allow physical as well as institutional walls to be bypassed, distances to be overcome and institutions to be bridged by digital interfaces and networks.’

› Thus the RESAW project might contribute to change the role of the archives ‘from acting in parallel at each their location to act in collaborative concert across distance.’

Finnemann, N.O. : Research libraries and the internet–on the transformative dynamic between institutions and digital media. Forthcoming Journal of

Documentation, vol. 72 2014.4

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

MAYBE A DREAM›If we assume that human affairs (which include physical, biological as well as cognitive dimensions) are more complex than purely physical and biological phenomena, then we might also assume that the social sciences and the humanities when dealing with such complex source materials may contribute to the development of sophisticated search methods which may also bring the study of social and human affairs back into a more central position in academia… end of dream

5

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

WHY ONE MORE RI

›A main reason is to be found in the particularities of the materials and the methods needed to deal with these materials.

›We need to further delimitate and characterize these materials.

›Public webmaterials, delimitation towards private materials, what about the dark web?

6

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

PUBLIC INTERNET MATERIALS /THE WEB

›Not the web per se but the public parts of the internet. Lagoons: gopher, WAP, Twitter,… new platforms to emerge. Mobile etc.

›We need to decide whether the primary delimitation should be that we deal with internet materials.

7

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

A SECOND AND THIRD DELIMITATION

›2. General web archives as prior to special purpose collections (e.g. research project defined corpora)

›3. In Europe general archives are most often national domain archives.

› A. Who takes care of .eu and other new domains?

› B. National archives are born incomplete as they can have no systematic way to archive materials published outside their own national domain.

8

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

A FOURTH DELIMITATION

›We may assume that the study of archived web-materials will often be combined with online studies.

›but considering the question whether such online studies should be included we propose that the RESAW project should primarily be concerned with archived materials.

9

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

HETEROGENEITY› A growing array of political, cultural and social agencies producing public materials on the web... be they commercially driven, driven by official obligations, by civic interests or by any sort of individual motivation.

› A result is a growing array of dedicated devices, software applications, tools and usages, and all of this connected as networked digital media.

› And still more different utilizations hypertext, remix, multimodality, interactivity, blending of authorship and editing practices over time, as well as build in dynamic scripts in the original materials.

10

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

HETEROGENEITY II

›The diachronic and synchronic messiness

›Networked digital media add three scales, each of which is continuously variable

Public – Private (in betweens)

Local-Global (in betweens)

Whom-to-whom

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

THE CHOICE MACHINE

› For some purposes we might use machines (choice machines) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration…When such a machine reaches one of these ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator. (Turing, 1936, 232)

On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The EntscheidungsproblemBy A. M. Turing. [Received 28 May, 1936.—Read 12 November, 1936.]

› What we find on the web today is primarily the result of arbitrary choices made every day by billions of external operators.

12

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

DISAPPEARANCE

› Some like to renew their sites and are not much concerned with old materials.

› Others are really concerned and want to modify things.

› A server might break down and some materials are lost.

› Some have to close down their sites for economical reason.

› Some sites are closed for political reasons. › Some are hacked or banned. Some public sites sites may be privatized

› All sorts of things can happen, and do happen. Digital materials are per definition modifiable and erasable.

› If we want to keep them, they need to be archived.13

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

ARCHIVED WEB MATERIALS

›Differ from online web materials

› They are selected and rearranged = ‘reborn’› They are incomplete› They are more than complete

14

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

THE MESSINESS OF ARCHIVED WEB MATERIALS

›…so let’s jump to the conclusion that any general web archive will always be a distorted replica, a ruin. Or rather a set of some times overlapping ruins, with various elements merged into each other. But, again they will often be the only remains left.

›They need a Research Infrastructure of their own

15

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS DELIMITATION?

›A big tent (Humanities Computing classic, HCI/GUI, and now networked digital media)

›A trading zone?

›DH: the trent stretched to include ‘the study of digital materials by help of software supported methods’.

16

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

DH AND RESAW

› Big Data – a conceptual issue rather than an issue of amounts of data?

› Small data

› The aim of RESAW should be to build a research infrastructure for all kinds of epistemological and methodological approaches whether they denote themselves as rooted within the sciences, the social sciences or the humanities. Doing so we may be path breaking.

17

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

POSSIBLE SYNERGIES

›If the infrastructure includes storage of research data, they can be accessed and reused.

›With the appropriate tools for annotations these can be developed in an ever ongoing cumulative process supported by the researchers and the task not left to the archives alone.

›It will favor mixed methods and visualization strategies and synergy in tool developments.

18

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

THEN WHAT IS IT?

›Well, Who knows?

›I did not address questions of accessibility, issues related to the huge variety of European languages, and other important matters including legal issues (intellectual property rights, privacy protection).

› There is work to be done.

19

NIELS OLE FINNEMANN


2-3 DECEMBER 2013

›Thank you

20

niels ole finnemann associate professor, head of netlab niels ole finnemann 2-3 december 2013 netlab...

Documents