I'm a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Information Studies. My interests include the history of computing, oral history and most aspects of digital humanities. My recent publications include Computation and the Humanities: towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities (Springer 2016) and the co-edited Digital Humanities in Practice (Facet 2012), Digital Humanities: a Reader (Ashgate 2013). I'm now at work on a new book about the female punched card operators who worked with Roberto Busa S.J. on what is often held to be the first Digital Humanities project.
This chapter gives an introduction to scholarly digital editions and how metamarkup languages lik... more This chapter gives an introduction to scholarly digital editions and how metamarkup languages like TEI and XML can be used to encode them (or make them machine readable)
In this paper we will present two case studies of research that has been carried out on the digit... more In this paper we will present two case studies of research that has been carried out on the digital remediation of German and Luxemburgish dialectal, regional and historical lexicography. In doing so, we will take some initial steps towards setting out what we hold the critical value of this research to be. The focus of the following reflections is not mere image digitisation; rather, we aim to reflect on a host of new research findings that can be created via the scholarly evaluation, interpretation, semantic annotation and subsequent analysis of research material and data using computational methods. To close we will briefly address the “absence of broad professional involvement” noted by McGann. By exploring how the German and Luxemburgish lexicographical material described here might both benefit from and enrich a global information space, such as the emerging Semantic Web, we will argue that Humanists need to engage with such developments so that their unique knowledge and learning may inform them
This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digit... more This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more than 70 years. However, we have no comprehensive histories of its research trajectory or its disciplinary development. The authors make a first contribution towards remedying this by uncovering, documenting, and analysing a number of the social, intellectual and creative processes that helped to shape this research from the 1950s until the present day.
By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research.
Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts.
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license
Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computation... more Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computational analysis has been made of how catalogues from the early modern period are constructed or of the way their structure and content relate to the world from which collections are assembled. The Leverhulme-funded ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections’ (2016–19), a collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum, seeks to change this. The Enlightenment Architectures project is analysing Sloane’s original manuscript catalogues of his collections to understand their highly complex information architecture and intellectual legacies. In this article we explore some of the challenges of seeking to integrate the methods of digital humanities with those of cataloguing, inventory, curatorial and historical studies and of bringing such interdisciplinary approaches to bear on early modern documentary sources. We do this through two case studies that highlight the approaches to encoding Sloane’s catalogues in TEI that Enlightenment Architectures has employed and the major challenges that these have brought to the fore.
The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate
learning has inclu... more The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items, which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right. A more sophisticated interaction with objects has been a particular focus for some time and meshes well with newer initiatives and strategies. Indeed, it was a forerunner of bringing research-based education into university curricula. These case studies describe how students could be part of genuine research projects while drawing on traditionally neglected aspects of learning such as touch and direct experience. It is no artificial exercise: Kador and his colleagues record that students have at times corrected mistakes in cataloguing, as well as reconsidering the ethics of objects often taken without permission as colonial curiosities. Francis Galton and his colleague Flinders Petrie must be reckoned with again, given the provenance of many of the objects available to UCL students on site. They are also concerned with the opposite direction: creating virtual versions of objects gives students the chance not just to learn, but to ‘produce’, by creating exhibition
This paper treats of a disadvantage called the problem of date and context, of using XML to encod... more This paper treats of a disadvantage called the problem of date and context, of using XML to encode the historical lexicography of Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish. This problem was brought to light during the creation of an electronic Lexicon of medieval Irish, and it occurs when certain units of a hard-copy text develop a new significance when represented in a digital environment. The disadvantage of encoding such information in XML is that the power of XML and its related technologies, such as XSLT, can enable transformations of information that are not, in linguistic terms, meaningful. But how can such a caveat be encoded in an electronic edition of a dictionary or lexicon? In order to answer this question, a new methodological approach to encoding some historical dictionaries will be proposed and a limitation of an influential theory of text, that forms the theoretical foundation of mark-up schemes such as the Textual Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange1, will be observed. Further, some conceptual differences that lie at the heard of a hard copy dictionary and its digital representation will be discussed.
The publication of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap 2 has ... more The publication of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap 2 has made clear the importance of dedicated Humanities RIs. However, only two Humanities RIs have been funded through this initiative. This report positions itself in terms of priorities and future research directions for a common strategy on RIs in the Humanities at the European level. 3 The bridging of physical and digital RIs presents opportunities and challenges with implications that are discussed under the following rubrics: researcher input and engagement in making RIs; preservation and sustainability; the evaluation of digital research and its outputs; communities of practice; cultural and linguistic variety (transnational RIs); education and training
This paper reflects on an aspect of Digital Humanities pedagogy employed at University College Lo... more This paper reflects on an aspect of Digital Humanities pedagogy employed at University College London and how integrative learning approaches are used by the faculty to communicate a research-based curriculum to an international cohort of students from widely differing backgrounds ,with a range of qualifications. It presents case studies that describe and evaluate the use of integrative learning exercises to scaffold the learning experience of students in both an established and also a newly developed core module, with supporting evidence from student feedback as well as from the tutors' reflective practice.
Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day1 has been held in October as a celebration of the first computer pro... more Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day1 has been held in October as a celebration of the first computer programmer, in order to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and math. While working with Charles Babbage, another nineteenth-century inventor, Lovelace (1815–52) identified the significance of his Analytical Engine (a machine that could conduct a number of different functions, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and its implications for computational methods. She saw that, via the punched-card input device, the Analytical Engine presented a whole new opportunity for designing machines that could manipulate symbols rather than just numbers. In 1843, Lovelace attempted to draw together romanticism and rationality to create a " poetical science " that allowed mathematics and computing to explore the world around us, recognizing the potential for a move away from pure calculation to computation and possessing a vision that foretold how computing could be used in creative areas such as music and literature. For Ada Lovelace Day 2013, it seemed apposite to look at some of the women working on one of the first " poetical science " projects in humanities computing: the Index Thomisticus. In the 1950s an Italian Jesuit priest named Father Roberto Busa teamed up with IBM to produce, via computational methods, a concordance to c. 11 million words of Thomas Aquinas and related authors. The project took over thirty years to complete and endures as one of the earliest and most ambitious projects in the field that is now called digital humanities, with Busa since renowned as the founding father of the field. The project itself had far-reaching impact on computational linguistics and the development of Internet technologies (L'Osservatore Romano). To produce the index, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas had to be encoded onto punch cards. However, there is very little in the official documentation of the project that broaches the subject of who actually did the work of data entry. This piece attempts to highlight the essential work by women employed on Busa's project, who, although not previously credited, were central to its success. The CIRCSE Research Centre2 at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, hosts the Index Thomisticus Treebank3 project and the University has recently accessioned the archive of Father Busa. Marco Carlo Passarotti from CIRCSE explained, in a 2013 e-mail, how the data entry was carried out: Once, I was told by Father Busa that he chose young women for punching cards on purpose, because they were more careful than men. Further, he chose women who did not know Latin, because the quality of their work was higher than that of those who knew it (the latter felt more secure while typing the texts of Thomas Aquinas and, so, less careful). These women were working on the Index Thomisticus, punching the texts on cards provided by IBM. Busa had created a kind of " school for punching cards " in Gallarate. That work experience gave
NOTE: This is the penultimate version of " 2015. Nyhan, J, 'Community archives in the UK: an over... more NOTE: This is the penultimate version of " 2015. Nyhan, J, 'Community archives in the UK: an overview'. In Katarzyna Ziętal (Ed) Community Archives. Models of cooperation with the state. FUNDACJA O ŚRODKA KARTA. PROGRAM ARCHIWISTYKA SPOŁECZNA P.221-237 " There may be minor differences between this and the published pdf version which you can find here: http://archiwa.org/as/as_img/uploaded/Archiwa%20spoleczne.%20Modele%20wspolpracy%20z%20 panstwem.pdf. A translation of this article into Polish ('ARCHIWA SPOŁECZNE. MODELE WSPÓŁPRACY Z PAŃSTWEM') can be found in that same PDF.
This introduction addresses two facets of the communication of Digital Humanities (DH) that have ... more This introduction addresses two facets of the communication of Digital Humanities (DH) that have framed this special edition of DHQ. I begin by discussing a number of articles about DH that have relatively recently appeared in mainstream newspapers. I then observe that a number of these articles not only show an impoverished understanding of the field's frame of reference but also misrepresent various aspects of it, for example, its interrelationship with the Humanities. Given that many academic publications on the question "what is DH?" have appeared in recent years, yet DH is, nonetheless, misrepresented in this way, I propose that the field must look again at the communication of its activities "in the round." Now that DH is arguably moving from the margins to the mainstream I propose that the time has come to address what we might call the "Public Communication of DH" so that we can better communicate to the general public and academics working in other disciplines what it is that we do. As the nature of DH's relationship to the Humanities is one that is frequently misrepresented in the mainstream media I propose that this would be an important area for endeavours in the "Public Communication of DH" to address and explore as early as possible. The articles included in this special edition enrich and expand ongoing conversations about the nature of this relationship. In doing so they make available a wealth of case studies, arguments and insights that can, in due course, be drawn on to further the "Public Communication of DH."
This chapter gives an introduction to scholarly digital editions and how metamarkup languages lik... more This chapter gives an introduction to scholarly digital editions and how metamarkup languages like TEI and XML can be used to encode them (or make them machine readable)
In this paper we will present two case studies of research that has been carried out on the digit... more In this paper we will present two case studies of research that has been carried out on the digital remediation of German and Luxemburgish dialectal, regional and historical lexicography. In doing so, we will take some initial steps towards setting out what we hold the critical value of this research to be. The focus of the following reflections is not mere image digitisation; rather, we aim to reflect on a host of new research findings that can be created via the scholarly evaluation, interpretation, semantic annotation and subsequent analysis of research material and data using computational methods. To close we will briefly address the “absence of broad professional involvement” noted by McGann. By exploring how the German and Luxemburgish lexicographical material described here might both benefit from and enrich a global information space, such as the emerging Semantic Web, we will argue that Humanists need to engage with such developments so that their unique knowledge and learning may inform them
This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digit... more This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more than 70 years. However, we have no comprehensive histories of its research trajectory or its disciplinary development. The authors make a first contribution towards remedying this by uncovering, documenting, and analysing a number of the social, intellectual and creative processes that helped to shape this research from the 1950s until the present day.
By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research.
Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts.
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license
Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computation... more Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computational analysis has been made of how catalogues from the early modern period are constructed or of the way their structure and content relate to the world from which collections are assembled. The Leverhulme-funded ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections’ (2016–19), a collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum, seeks to change this. The Enlightenment Architectures project is analysing Sloane’s original manuscript catalogues of his collections to understand their highly complex information architecture and intellectual legacies. In this article we explore some of the challenges of seeking to integrate the methods of digital humanities with those of cataloguing, inventory, curatorial and historical studies and of bringing such interdisciplinary approaches to bear on early modern documentary sources. We do this through two case studies that highlight the approaches to encoding Sloane’s catalogues in TEI that Enlightenment Architectures has employed and the major challenges that these have brought to the fore.
The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate
learning has inclu... more The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items, which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right. A more sophisticated interaction with objects has been a particular focus for some time and meshes well with newer initiatives and strategies. Indeed, it was a forerunner of bringing research-based education into university curricula. These case studies describe how students could be part of genuine research projects while drawing on traditionally neglected aspects of learning such as touch and direct experience. It is no artificial exercise: Kador and his colleagues record that students have at times corrected mistakes in cataloguing, as well as reconsidering the ethics of objects often taken without permission as colonial curiosities. Francis Galton and his colleague Flinders Petrie must be reckoned with again, given the provenance of many of the objects available to UCL students on site. They are also concerned with the opposite direction: creating virtual versions of objects gives students the chance not just to learn, but to ‘produce’, by creating exhibition
This paper treats of a disadvantage called the problem of date and context, of using XML to encod... more This paper treats of a disadvantage called the problem of date and context, of using XML to encode the historical lexicography of Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish. This problem was brought to light during the creation of an electronic Lexicon of medieval Irish, and it occurs when certain units of a hard-copy text develop a new significance when represented in a digital environment. The disadvantage of encoding such information in XML is that the power of XML and its related technologies, such as XSLT, can enable transformations of information that are not, in linguistic terms, meaningful. But how can such a caveat be encoded in an electronic edition of a dictionary or lexicon? In order to answer this question, a new methodological approach to encoding some historical dictionaries will be proposed and a limitation of an influential theory of text, that forms the theoretical foundation of mark-up schemes such as the Textual Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange1, will be observed. Further, some conceptual differences that lie at the heard of a hard copy dictionary and its digital representation will be discussed.
The publication of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap 2 has ... more The publication of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap 2 has made clear the importance of dedicated Humanities RIs. However, only two Humanities RIs have been funded through this initiative. This report positions itself in terms of priorities and future research directions for a common strategy on RIs in the Humanities at the European level. 3 The bridging of physical and digital RIs presents opportunities and challenges with implications that are discussed under the following rubrics: researcher input and engagement in making RIs; preservation and sustainability; the evaluation of digital research and its outputs; communities of practice; cultural and linguistic variety (transnational RIs); education and training
This paper reflects on an aspect of Digital Humanities pedagogy employed at University College Lo... more This paper reflects on an aspect of Digital Humanities pedagogy employed at University College London and how integrative learning approaches are used by the faculty to communicate a research-based curriculum to an international cohort of students from widely differing backgrounds ,with a range of qualifications. It presents case studies that describe and evaluate the use of integrative learning exercises to scaffold the learning experience of students in both an established and also a newly developed core module, with supporting evidence from student feedback as well as from the tutors' reflective practice.
Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day1 has been held in October as a celebration of the first computer pro... more Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day1 has been held in October as a celebration of the first computer programmer, in order to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and math. While working with Charles Babbage, another nineteenth-century inventor, Lovelace (1815–52) identified the significance of his Analytical Engine (a machine that could conduct a number of different functions, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and its implications for computational methods. She saw that, via the punched-card input device, the Analytical Engine presented a whole new opportunity for designing machines that could manipulate symbols rather than just numbers. In 1843, Lovelace attempted to draw together romanticism and rationality to create a " poetical science " that allowed mathematics and computing to explore the world around us, recognizing the potential for a move away from pure calculation to computation and possessing a vision that foretold how computing could be used in creative areas such as music and literature. For Ada Lovelace Day 2013, it seemed apposite to look at some of the women working on one of the first " poetical science " projects in humanities computing: the Index Thomisticus. In the 1950s an Italian Jesuit priest named Father Roberto Busa teamed up with IBM to produce, via computational methods, a concordance to c. 11 million words of Thomas Aquinas and related authors. The project took over thirty years to complete and endures as one of the earliest and most ambitious projects in the field that is now called digital humanities, with Busa since renowned as the founding father of the field. The project itself had far-reaching impact on computational linguistics and the development of Internet technologies (L'Osservatore Romano). To produce the index, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas had to be encoded onto punch cards. However, there is very little in the official documentation of the project that broaches the subject of who actually did the work of data entry. This piece attempts to highlight the essential work by women employed on Busa's project, who, although not previously credited, were central to its success. The CIRCSE Research Centre2 at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, hosts the Index Thomisticus Treebank3 project and the University has recently accessioned the archive of Father Busa. Marco Carlo Passarotti from CIRCSE explained, in a 2013 e-mail, how the data entry was carried out: Once, I was told by Father Busa that he chose young women for punching cards on purpose, because they were more careful than men. Further, he chose women who did not know Latin, because the quality of their work was higher than that of those who knew it (the latter felt more secure while typing the texts of Thomas Aquinas and, so, less careful). These women were working on the Index Thomisticus, punching the texts on cards provided by IBM. Busa had created a kind of " school for punching cards " in Gallarate. That work experience gave
NOTE: This is the penultimate version of " 2015. Nyhan, J, 'Community archives in the UK: an over... more NOTE: This is the penultimate version of " 2015. Nyhan, J, 'Community archives in the UK: an overview'. In Katarzyna Ziętal (Ed) Community Archives. Models of cooperation with the state. FUNDACJA O ŚRODKA KARTA. PROGRAM ARCHIWISTYKA SPOŁECZNA P.221-237 " There may be minor differences between this and the published pdf version which you can find here: http://archiwa.org/as/as_img/uploaded/Archiwa%20spoleczne.%20Modele%20wspolpracy%20z%20 panstwem.pdf. A translation of this article into Polish ('ARCHIWA SPOŁECZNE. MODELE WSPÓŁPRACY Z PAŃSTWEM') can be found in that same PDF.
This introduction addresses two facets of the communication of Digital Humanities (DH) that have ... more This introduction addresses two facets of the communication of Digital Humanities (DH) that have framed this special edition of DHQ. I begin by discussing a number of articles about DH that have relatively recently appeared in mainstream newspapers. I then observe that a number of these articles not only show an impoverished understanding of the field's frame of reference but also misrepresent various aspects of it, for example, its interrelationship with the Humanities. Given that many academic publications on the question "what is DH?" have appeared in recent years, yet DH is, nonetheless, misrepresented in this way, I propose that the field must look again at the communication of its activities "in the round." Now that DH is arguably moving from the margins to the mainstream I propose that the time has come to address what we might call the "Public Communication of DH" so that we can better communicate to the general public and academics working in other disciplines what it is that we do. As the nature of DH's relationship to the Humanities is one that is frequently misrepresented in the mainstream media I propose that this would be an important area for endeavours in the "Public Communication of DH" to address and explore as early as possible. The articles included in this special edition enrich and expand ongoing conversations about the nature of this relationship. In doing so they make available a wealth of case studies, arguments and insights that can, in due course, be drawn on to further the "Public Communication of DH."
A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community documentation project tha... more A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community documentation project that brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, typically March 18. The goal of the project, which has been run three times since 2009, is to bring together participants to reflect on the question, "Just what do computing humanists really do?" To do this, participants document their day through photographs and commentary using one of the Day of DH blogs set up for them. The collection of these journals (with links, tags, and comments) is, after editing, made available online. This paper discusses the design of this social project, from the ethical issues raised to the final web of journals and shares some of the lessons we have learned. One of the major challenges of social media is getting participation. We made participating easy by personally inviting a seed group, choosing an accessible technology, maintaining a light but constant level of communication prior to the event, and asking only for a single day of commitment. In addition, we tried to make participation at least rewarding in formal academic terms by structuring the Day of DH as a collaborative publication. In terms of improvements, we have over the iterations changed the handling ethics clearances for images and connected to other social media like Twitter.
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Books by Julianne Nyhan
By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research.
Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts.
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license
Papers by Julianne Nyhan
learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated
collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items,
which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right.
A more sophisticated interaction with objects has been a particular focus
for some time and meshes well with newer initiatives and strategies.
Indeed, it was a forerunner of bringing research-based education into
university curricula. These case studies describe how students could be part of genuine research projects while drawing on traditionally neglected aspects of learning such as touch and direct experience. It is no artificial exercise: Kador and his colleagues record that students have at times corrected mistakes in cataloguing, as well as reconsidering the ethics of objects often taken without permission as colonial curiosities. Francis Galton and his colleague Flinders Petrie must be reckoned with again, given the provenance of many of the objects available to UCL students on site. They are also concerned with the opposite direction: creating virtual versions of objects gives students the chance not just to learn, but to ‘produce’, by creating exhibition
Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273353167_Research_Infrastructures_in_the_Digital_Humanities [accessed Aug 31, 2017].
By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research.
Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts.
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license
learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated
collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items,
which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right.
A more sophisticated interaction with objects has been a particular focus
for some time and meshes well with newer initiatives and strategies.
Indeed, it was a forerunner of bringing research-based education into
university curricula. These case studies describe how students could be part of genuine research projects while drawing on traditionally neglected aspects of learning such as touch and direct experience. It is no artificial exercise: Kador and his colleagues record that students have at times corrected mistakes in cataloguing, as well as reconsidering the ethics of objects often taken without permission as colonial curiosities. Francis Galton and his colleague Flinders Petrie must be reckoned with again, given the provenance of many of the objects available to UCL students on site. They are also concerned with the opposite direction: creating virtual versions of objects gives students the chance not just to learn, but to ‘produce’, by creating exhibition
Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273353167_Research_Infrastructures_in_the_Digital_Humanities [accessed Aug 31, 2017].