Invited Talks
Plenary Session 1
Day1: 2024-09-19, 14:30-15:30
Textual Similarities From Authorship Attribution to Distant Reading: A Few Remarks on the Package Stylo
Prof. Maciej Eder
Institute of Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences), Poland
The talk will revolve around software designed and developed specifically to perform text analysis tasks such as classification, clustering, and visualization. Special attention will be paid to the R library Stylo, which has been designed as a relatively simple, open source tool to conduct experiments in authorship attribution, but over the years evolved into fully-fledged set of functions tailored for different applications, including supervised and unsupervised classification, large-scale analyses following the ‘distant reading’ paradigm, sequential analysis of subsequent chunks of a text in question, and so forth. Apart from the original authorship attribution realm, the software can be used to address more general research questions, e.g. to trace genre, gender, chronology, intertextuality, and other stylometric ‘signals’.
Maciej Eder (maciejeder.org) is the director of the Institute of Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences), chair of the Committee of Linguistics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, principal investigator of the project Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure, co-founder of the Computational Stylistics Group, and the main developer of the R package ‘Stylo’ for performing stylometric analyses. He is interested in European literature of the Renaissance and the Baroque, classical heritage in early modern literature, and quantitative approaches to style variation. These include measuring style using statistical methods, authorship attribution based on quantitative measures, as well as “distant reading” methods to analyze dozens (or hundreds) of literary works at a time.
Plenary Session 2
Day2: 2024-09-20, 13:50-14:50
The Long Short History of Digital Editions
Dr. Susan Schreibman
Professor of Digital Arts and Culture, Maastricht University
Co-Director, DARIAH
While Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs) have been a mainstay of digital humanities scholarship since the 1990s, their long-term sustainability and preservation tends to be quixotic, precarious, and institutionally not well supported. The result: the vast majority of this scholarship simply disappears. And it has been disappearing for decades. It is a situation we tolerate as an academic community that we would not for other forms of research. If we were to tell academics that the articles and monographs they write would only be available for three-five years, traditional scholarship might cease.
Years of reports, white papers, symposia, and scholarly articles bemoan the lack of infrastructural support for digital humanities scholarship. Many consider the issues around sustainability to be first and foremost a technical issue, advocating for the development of editions to be created with a sustainability plan in mind (Hughes, 2021). Others argue that sustainability is not only a technical issue, but a theoretical and philosophical one (Drucker, 2021; Tucker, 2022). There is widespread discussion of how funding models and funding streams mitigate against long-term access of our digital scholarhship as we are typically funded for novelty and the creation of new resources (Maron and Pickle, 2014; Bergstrom et al 2024; Maron et al 2013). Even when a scholar follows institutional advice in best practice, moving institutions can cause the death knell of the resource as the technology stack used in the previous institution is not supported by the new one (Drucker, 2021). Relying on institutional support (eg the library or if one is lucky enough to be at an institution with a DH centre) can prove a dead end when institutional priorities change (Maron and Pickle, 2014). Despite wide-ranging, inclusive, and sustained conversations about the need to preserve digital scholarship in the humanities from as early as the mid-2000s (sometimes followed by significant funding – for example, Project Bamboo [Dombrowski, 2014]), the current situation has not significantly improved (Barats, 2020; Bergstrom et al, 2024). Current initiatives, such as the EU-funded OSCARS (https://oscars-project.eu/), are picking up the torch. And there are some projects and initiatives that have bucked the trend. For example, TAPAS, at Northeastern University (Flanders, et al, 2013) and TextGrid, funded by DARIAH-DE (Kuster et al, 2007), and of course the Text Encoding Initiative itself.
This talk will explore some of the history and issues around the preservation of digital humanities scholarship, particularly digital editions, solutions that have been proposed, and the issues with the solutions that have been proposed. It will conclude with a discussion of some current initiatives and ideas, including the disconnect between solutions developed for STEM not necessarily being suitable for the much of the scholarship undertaken in the humanities.
Works Cited
Barats, Christine, Valérie Schafer, and Andreas Fickers. "Fading Away... The challenge of sustainability in digital studies." DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2020).
Bergstrom, Tracy, Oya Y. Rieger, and Roger C. Schonfeld. "The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure." (2024).
Dombrowski, Quinn. "What ever happened to Project Bamboo?" Literary and Linguistic Computing 29, no. 3 (2014): 326-339. p 338.
Drucker, Johanna. "Sustainability and complexity: Knowledge and authority in the digital humanities." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, no. Supplement_2 (2021): ii86-ii94.
Flanders, Julia, and Scott Hamlin. "TAPAS: building a TEI publishing and repository service." Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 5 (2013).
Hughes, Lorna M. "Li e and Kicking: The Impact and Sustainabilit of Digital Collections in the Humanities'." Clare Mills, Michael Pidd and Esther Ward.. Studies in the Digital Humanities. Sheffield: HRI Online Publications (2014).
Kuster, Marc Wilhelm, Christoph Ludwig, and Andreas Aschenbrenner. "TextGrid as a digital ecosystem." In 2007 Inaugural IEEE-IES Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference, pp. 506-511. IEEE, 2007.
Maron, Nancy L., and Sarah Pickle. "Sustaining the digital humanities: Host institution support beyond the start-up phase." Ithaka S+ R 18 (2014).
Maron, Nancy, Jason Yun, and Sarah Pickle. Sustaining our digital future: Institutional strategies for digital content. Ithaka S+ R, 2013.
Tucker, Joanna. "Facing the challenge of digital sustainability as humanities researchers." Journal of the British Academy 10 (2022): 93-120.