digital humanities | Open World

digital humanities | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
I know it’s a crowded field, but I came across an AI / open data development recently that really made me stop and take a breath.
The Living Museum
introduces itself as follows:
If the artifacts in museums could talk, what would you say to them? Would you ask about their origins, or what life was like back in their eras? Or would you simply listen to their stories?
Created by an independent developer,
Jonathan Talmi
, The Living Museum is an experimental AI interface that uses content from the BM’s open licensed
digital collections database
to enable users to curate personalised exhibits and “talk” to individual artefacts about their history and origins.  The developer is unaffiliated with the British Museum and makes it clear that the data is used under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA licence.
In an
introductory blog post
Talmi says
I hope this project demonstrates that technology like AI can increase immersion, thereby improving educational outcomes, without sacrificing authenticity or factuality.
The app was launched on the Museums Computer Group mailing list and twitter a couple of weeks ago and it was met with a generally favourable response.  However there were some dissenting voices, from curators, art historians, and authors, who pointed out the problematic nature of imposing AI generated voices onto artefacts of deep spiritual and cultural significance, whose presence in the BM’s collections is hugely contested.
Others questioned the macabre ethics of foisting an artificial voice on actual human remains, such as the museum’s collection of mummies.  I had a surreal conversation with the mummy of Cleopatra, who died in Thebes aged 17, during the reign of Trajan. It was a deeply unsettling experience.
This is where “authenticity and factuality” were both sacrificed…
The response actually acknowledges the disrespectful and ethically questionable nature of the whole project. My head was starting to melt at this point.
Pressing the question of repatriation prompts the voice to “step out of the artificial artifact persona”…
The whole experience was as surreal as it was disturbing
There was also criticism from some quarters that the developer had “exploited” the work of professional curators by using the British Museum’s data set without their explicit knowledge or permission.  It’s important to note that the CC BY-NC-SA licence does explicitly allow anyone to use the British Museum’s data within the terms of the licence, however just because the license says you
can
, doesn’t necessarily mean you
should
. When it comes to reusing open content, the licence is not the only thing that should be taken into consideration.  This is one of the key points raised by the
Ethics of Open Sharing
working group commissioned by Creative Commons in 2021, and led by Josie Fraser. The report of the working group acknowledges that not everything should be shared openly, and highlights issues relating to cultural appropriation:
Ethical open sharing may require working in partnership with individuals, communities and groups and ensuring their voices are heard and approaches respected. While in some cases openly sharing resources can help to promote cultural heritage and redress gaps in knowledge, in others it may be experienced as cultural insensitivity, disrespect or appropriation — for example, in relation to sacred objects or stories and funerary remains.
Something that both the British Museum and developers using its digital collections should perhaps consider.
By coincidence, the launch of The Living Museum coincided with the release of
Mati Diop
‘s film
Dahomey
, winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award.
Dahomey
, also gives a voice to sacred cultural artefacts; a collection of looted treasures being repatriated from France to the former kingdom of Dahomey, in current day Benin. In Diop’s absorbing and hypnotic film the power figure of the Dahomeyan king Ghezo speaks in
Fon
, his voice disembodied and electronically modified.
In an interview with Radio 4’s
Screenshoot
(23:20), Diop spoke eloquently about “the violence of the absence of the artefacts from the African continent.”
“These artefacts are not objects, they have been objectified by the Western eye, by the colonial perspective, locked into different stages, art objects, ethnographic objects, even locked into beauty.”
“To me it was immediate to give back a voice to these artefacts because I felt that the film is what restitution is about, which is giving back a voice, which is giving back a narrative, a perspective. The film tries to embody the meaning of restitution.”
I was lucky enough to see
Dahomey
at the GFT accompanied by a conversation with Giovanna Vitelli, Head of Collections at
The Hunterian
, and Dr Christa Roodt and Andreas Giorgallis, University of Glasgow.  The Hunterian is just one of a number of museums interrogating the harms perpetuated by their colonial legacy, through their
Curating Discomfort
intervention.  The conversation touched on power, control and sacredness, with Vitelli noting
“Possession means power. We, the museums, hold the power, and control the power of language.  The film speaks powerfully about voices we in the global north do not hear.”
I’ve written in the past about the importance of considering
whose voices are included and excluded
from open spaces and the creation and curation of open knowledge. On the surface it may appear that AI initiatives facilitated by the cultural commons, like The Living Museum, have the potential to bring collections to life and give a voice to marginalised subjects, however it’s important to question the authenticity of those voices.  By imposing inauthentic AI generated voices on culturally sensitive artefacts there is a serious risk of perpetuating exploitative colonial legacies and racist ideology, rather than addressing harms and increasing knowledge equity. Something for us all to think about.
Earlier in April when I was preparing my
keynote
for the FLOSS UK Conference, which focused partially on issues of structural discrimination and lack of equality and diversity in open knowledge and open source communities, it struck me rather forcefully that there is one hugely successful OSS initiative supported by an almost entirely female developer and user community that rarely, if ever, gets spoken about in open knowledge and tech circles. That initiative is
Archive Of Our Own
. Hands up who’s heard of it? I suspect many of you won’t have heard of it. I know a few of you will have. I bet one or two of you won’t admit it.
So why the reticence?  Run by the not for profit
Organisation for Transformative Works
, the Archive is a massively successful project that has been sustained by a hugely diverse community of volunteers for almost ten years now. It’s about as open as anything could possibly be. Why are we not singing its praises from the rafters? Why is AO3, as it’s commonly known, the mad woman in the open source attic? Some of us know it’s there, but no one really wants to talk about it. The reason for this reticence, is also the reason for the Archive’s success. AO3 is a repository of transformative works, otherwise known as fanfiction.
I’m not going to debate the validity of fan works as a creative endeavour here, there is plenty of scholarly discussion on that point in other disciplines such as sociology and media, however I really do want to talk about
why
we don’t acknowledge AO3 as a hugely successful open project founded on the principals of equality, inclusion and diversity. Why aren’t we celebrating it and learning from it?
The success of AO3 is nothing short of staggering. Built on the Ruby on Rails framework, the archive is an open source platform developed, built and maintained by an army of volunteers, the vast majority of whom are women. The project is funded by subscriptions and donations; there is no foundation funding, no sponsorship, no advertising revenue. Indeed AO3 was originally created as a haven to protect fanworks from being monetized by
unscrupulous commercial ventures
who sought to turn fan labour into profit for their own gain. The Archive itself now has one and a half million users and hosts around four million individual works. It’s free and open to everyone, all user accounts are pseudonymous, and at no point are users required to reveal personally identifying information. In order to manage those four million works AO3 maintains probably the only large scale community generated tagging system that I’ve ever seen working in practice. And it’s all made possible by a large community of tag wranglers who manage the free text tags provided by users.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, the Organisation for Transformative works also publishes a peer reviewed open journal,
Transformative Works and Cultures
, maintains the
Fanlore
wiki to preserve the history of transformative works, it provides voluntary legal advice to creators to protect their works from legal challenge, and it has an active project,
Open Doors
, to absorb and curate other fan archives elsewhere on the web that are threatened by obscurity, obsolescence or deletion.
It’s an astonishing achievement, but it’s an achievement that many passionate open advocates know nothing about, and, if I’m being honest, that is something that’s pissed me off enormously for years.
So I was absolutely over the moon when I spoke to Claire Knowles, Library Digital Development Manager at the University of Edinburgh, at the recent
Digital Day of Ideas
(always a thought provoking event that pushes the boundaries) and she told me that Casey Fiesler, a member of OTW’s legal committee, would be presenting the opening keynote at this year’s
Open Repositories Conference
in Bozeman, Montana. Earlier this week I listened to Casey’s
keynote
through the conference livestream and was blown away by her talk.  Casey did an amazing job of communicating just what an important achievement AO3 is and how we can learn from its success. Giving an overview of the history and development of the Archive, Casey pointed out that AO3 is an example of amazing design, created for a community that already existed. The open software was designed and built entirely by women, which is remarkable given the small number of women in the open source community. And she concluded her keynote by asking
Is there something here that’s the key to making open source more welcoming to women? I don’t know. What I do know is that if you love something enough you can build your own thing and make it work. AO3 is a great example of a successful open repository but it’s an even better example of the power of community and everything that can come out of it.
The recording of Casey’s keynote isn’t online yet, though I’m sure it will be soon, but in the meantime, I’ve captured my live tweets from her keynote here;
Growing Their Own: Building an Archive and a Community for Fanfiction
. Many thanks to Casey for her amazing keynote and to the Open Repositories Conference Committee for inviting such an inspiring speaker.
These are my livetweets from Casey Fiesler’s inspiring
keynote
at the
Open Repositories Conference
in Bozemen, Montana in June 2018.
Growing Their Own: Building an Archive and a Community for Fanfiction
by Casey Fiesler, JD, Ph.D.
Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction repository with millions of users and works, was developed entirely by the community it serves, with a focus on representing the values of that community in its design and policies. Its history is rooted in needs for preservation, advocacy, and empowerment. This talk traces the growth and features of the archive, including grassroots development, design that promotes openness and inclusivity, and the benefits and challenges of maintaining a team of volunteers. Archive or Our Own is a unique example of a repository that has had a transformational effect on a community of content creators, and represents a design philosophy that could benefit other platforms as well.
Continue reading
I first signed up for twitter in April 2007 and I’ve been tweeting pretty much continually ever since; over 23,000 tweets and counting! It’s no exaggeration to say that, in terms of work, I would be lost without twitter.  Twitter has become so fundamental to my work and my identity as an open educational practitioner that I genuinely don’t think I could do my job without it.  Twitter is my workspace, it’s my office, it’s where I hang out with friends and connect to colleagues all over the world.  It’s where I pick up news, find new ideas, and listen to fresh perspectives. It’s where continuous professional development happens.  It’s where I learn. As someone who works remotely a lot of the time, twitter enables me to be part of a global connected community of open education practitioners.
Live tweeting ALTC by www.chrisbullphotographer.com
Twitter is also an invaluable tool for communicating and disseminating educational events all kinds of. It’s second nature for me to live tweet every event I attend and if I can’t get online, I feel a bit lost. I find that live tweeting helps me to process what I’m listening to and the 140 character limit means I have to synthesise the ideas as I go along. Sometimes I get invited to live tweet events, such as the ALT Conference and the Day of Digital Ideas, in a more official capacity. Live tweeting in an official capacity requires a slightly different approach to live tweeting from my own account.  When I live tweet on behalf of an event organiser I try to keep my tweets as factual, neutral and representative as possible.  If I’m tweeting personally, I tend to tweet the points that interest or irritate me, adding my own thoughts and comments along the way. It feels  quite different. If you’re interested in finding out more about how to use twitter to amplify academic events, here’s a presentation I gave at the Day of Digital Ideas at the University of Edinburgh:
Using Social Media to Amplify Academic Events
Despite the fact that twitter is such an important channel for me, I actually use very few twitter tools. I have
tweetbot
installed for occasions when I want to manage multiple accounts but I prefer to use the generic web interface.  I do have a couple of lists set up, but I very rarely use them, I prefer not to filter as I love the random serendipity of my twitter feed.  The only twitter tools I use with any regularity are
Storify
, for collating event tweets, and Martin Hawksey’s fabulous
TAGs
for archiving and visualising tweets associated with event hashtags.
Although I think of twitter as a work channel first and foremost, I tend not to filter what I tweet.  I don’t just tweet about educational technology, I tweet about all kinds of things that interest me – naval history, poetry, sexuality and gender,tattooing, art, politics, rugby, whatever.  These things are all part of my real life identity, so they’re part of my online identity too.
I follow a lot of historians on twitter and earlier in the week I stumbled across the #femfog tag at the International Medieval Congress #IMC2016.  Femfog is a term coined by the retired Mediaeval historian Allen J. Frantzen who apparently had “strong views” about his female colleagues.  In a now deleted personal blog post Frentzen wrote
“Let’s call it the femfog for short, the sour mix of victimization and privilege that makes up modern feminism and that feminists use to intimidate and exploit men … I refer to men who are shrouded in this fog as FUMs, fogged up men. I think they are also fucked up, but let’s settle for the more analytical term.”
If you want to read the whole sorry history of femfog I can highly recommend reading this post by Jo Livingston
Snakes and Ladders On Allen Frantzen, misogyny, and the problem with tenure
The #femfog session covered a wide range of issues relating to women in academia in general and in humanities in particular, including lack of diversity, misogyny, racial and sexual discrimination even “dig culture” and harassment on archaeological excavations*.  I was only able to follow snippets of the conversation as I was in the process of writing this blog post
NewDLHE – personal reflections on measuring success
, which ironically touched on some of the issues being discussed. You can revisit the #femfog discussions on this storify
#FemFog at IMC 2016
One tweet that did catch my eye though was this one:
Women are often told they are ‘intimidating’ if they stand up for themselves. It’s a way of policing us and the spaces we occupy
#femfog
— Debbie White (@medievaldebbie)
July 6, 2016
I retweeted it and added
If I had a penny for every time I’ve been told I’m “intimidating” I’d be able to retire by now
#femfog
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell)
July 6, 2016
It’s true. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told I’m “intimidating”.  I’m genuinely bemused by this.  I mean I’m barely over five feet tall and I’m the kind of person who actively avoids conflict and aggressive behaviour so why do colleagues find me intimidating? Of course I’ve always had my suspicions that the kind of behaviour people find “intimidating” coming from me would be regarded as perfectly normal among older, male colleagues. For example I don’t hesitate to speak up in meetings and if I have something to contribute to the debate I’ll say it (waiting my turn first of course). I also often chair meetings, committees and events which sometimes necessitates stopping some people from monopolising the conversation in order to ensure everyone has an opportunity to speak.  Is that really such “intimidating” behaviour? Or am I missing something?
Anyway, my reblog seems to have struck a chord as several colleagues retweeted it and added their own comments.
@LornaMCampbell
@melissaterras
I never get ‘intimidating’ but I get ‘defensive’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘chippy’ A LOT.
— Ealasaid Munro (@Ealasaidmunro)
July 6, 2016
@LornaMCampbell
people don’t like my “tone”. All the time, I get told by privileged white men that my “tone” is an issue.
— melissa terras (@melissaterras)
July 6, 2016
@LornaMCampbell
@medievaldebbie
yes, and often by men who, oddly enough, get intimidated so easily
— notanna1AnnaNotaro (@notanna1)
July 6, 2016
@LornaMCampbell
from grad student, once: “everyone says you’re really mean and don’t make any sense, but you really helped me.”
#intimidate
— Aimée Morrison (@digiwonk)
July 6, 2016
@Ealasaidmunro
the *challenge* is the problem, no matter the shape or tone it takes
— notanna1AnnaNotaro (@notanna1)
July 6, 2016
@Ealasaidmunro
I usually retort with “I’m not here to be liked, I’m here to be brilliant”. BOOM.
#howyoulikemenow
— melissa terras (@melissaterras)
July 6, 2016
Three days later and this thread is still going strong on twitter. Seems like we’re an intimidating bunch…
* I should add, despite working on archaeological excavations for many years, I never personally experienced any harassment though I was well aware it existed and I was certainly familiar with dig culture.
I recently went along to the first meeting of the
Digital Cultural Heritage Research Network
here at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of the network is to
“bring together colleagues from across the University to establish a professional network for researchers investigating digital cultural heritage issues, seeking to include perspectives from diverse disciplines including design, education, sociology, law, cultural studies, informatics and business. Partners from the cultural heritage sector will play a key role in the network as advisors and collaborators.”
About DCHRN
Anyone who follows this blog will know that I have a bit of a thing about opening access to digital cultural resources so I was pleased to be able to contribute a lightning talk on digital cultural heritage and open education. This was one of an eclectic series of lightning talks that covered a wide range of subjects and topics.  I live tweeted the event and Jen Ross has collated tweets from the day in a Storify here:
Digital Cultural Heritage Research Network, Workshop 1
and has also written a recap of the workshop here
Recap of Workshop 1: Cultural Heritage Sparks
My EDINA colleague
Lisa Otty
kicked off the day talking about the
Keepers Extra Project
which aims to highlight the value of the
Keepers Registry
of archiving arrangements for electronic journals. Lisa noted that only 17% of journals are archived in the Keepers Registry and asked the very pertinent question “do we trust publishers with the stewardship of electronic journals?” I think we all know the answer to that question.
I confess I rehashed a previous
presentation
on the comparative dearth of openly license cultural heritage collections in Scotland which allowed me to refer for the millionth time to Andrew Prescott’s classic blog post
Dennis the Paywall Menace stalks the Archives
. This time however I was able to add a couple of pertinent tweets from the
Digging Into Data Round Three Conference
that took place in Glasgow earlier in the week.
One lightning talk that was particularly close to my heart was by
Glyn Davis
who spoke about the openness, or lack thereof, of gallery and museum content, and reflected on his experience of running the
Warhol MOOC
.  Glyn noted that license restrictions often prevent copyright images from being used in online teaching and learning, however many of the students who participated in the Warhol MOOC understood little about copyright restrictions and simply expected to be able to find and reuse images via google, so lots of discussion about open access was required as part of the course.
www.artcastingproject.net
Other highlights included
Jen Ross
‘ talk on
Artcasting
a project which is exploring how digital methods can be used inventively and critically to reimagine complex issues. The project has built an app which engages audiences by allowing them to capture images and decide where to send them in time and space and time, while also retrieving data for evaluation.
Bea Alex
introduced the impressive range of projects from the
Language Technology Group
, including historical text projects, which aim to use text mining to enrich textual metadata with geodata from the
Edinburgh Geo Parser
. Stephen Allen spoke about the MOOC the National Museums of Scotland created to run in parallel with their
Photography – A Victorian Sensation
exhibition.  The museum now hopes to reuse content from future exhibitions for more MOOCs. Rebecca Sinker presented a fascinating keynote on Tate’s research-led approach to digital programming which prompted an interesting discussion on how people engage with art now that so much of it is available online.
Angelica Thumala
spoke all too briefly about her research exploring emotional attachment and experience of books in different modalities, and left us with one of the loveliest quotes of the day
“Books are constant companions, people carry them around and develop physical and emotional attachments to them.”
The workshop ended with four group discussions focussing on issues raised by participants; openness and preservation; participation and interpretation; semantic web and curation; and how can DCHRN create a sustainable interdisciplinary network.  These and other issues will be picked up in the next workshop
Research that matters – playing with method, planning for impact
takes place in March
DCHRN is coordinated by:
Dr Jen Ross, Digital Education
Dr Claire Sowton, Digital Education
Professor Sian Bayne, Digital Education
Professor James Loxley,  Literatures Languages and Culture
Professor Chris Speed, Design Informatics
On a side note, it’s a while since I’ve done a lightning talk and I’d forgotten how difficult it is to put together such a short presentation. Seriously, it took me most of an afternoon to put together a 5 minute talk which really is a bit ridiculous. Seems like I’m not the only one who struggles with short presentations though, when I moaned about this on twitter, a lot of people replied agreeing that the shorter the presentation, the more preparation is required. Martin Weller reminded me of the quote “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, while Kevin Ashley invoked Jeremy Bentham who was allegedly happy to give a two hour speech on the spot, but a fifteen minute talk required three weeks notice.  I guess I’m with Bentham on that one!
Digital humanities is an area that I’ve been interested in for a long time but which I haven’t had much opportunity to engage with, so earlier this week I was really excited to be able to go along to the Digital Scholarship
Day of Digital Ideas
at the University of Edinburgh.  In the absence of my EDINA colleague Nicola Osborne and her fabulous live blogging skills, I live tweeted the event and archived tweets, links and references in a storify here:
Digital Day of Ideas 2015
.  I also created a
TAGS archive
of tweets using Martin Hawksey’s clever
Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet
The event featured three highly engaging keynotes from Ben Schmidt, Anouk Lang, and Ruth Ahnert, and six parallel workshops covering historical map applications and OpenLayers, corpus analysis with AntConc, data visualisations with D3, Drupal for beginners, JavaSCript basics and Python for humanities research.
Humanities Data Analysis
~ Ben Schmidt, Northeastern University
Ben explored the role of data analysis in humanities and explored the methodological and social challenges presented by humanities data analysis.  He began by suggesting that in many quarters data analysis for humanities is regarded as being on a par with “poetry for physics”.  Humanities data analysis can rase deep objections from some scholars, and seem inimical to the meaning of research.  However there are many humanistic ways of thinking about data that are intrinsic to the tradition of humanities. Serendipity is important to humanities research and there is a fear that digital research negates this, however it’s not difficult to engineer serendipity into cultural data analysis.
But what if borrowing techniques from other disciplines isn’t enough? Digital humanities needs its own approaches; it needs to use data natively and humanistically, as a source of criticism rather than to “prove” things. Humanities data analysis starts with the evidence, not with the hypothesis.  The data needs to tell stories about structures, rather than individual people.   Johanan Drucker argues that what we call “data” should really be called “capta”:
Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.
Johanna Drucker on data vs. capta
Ben went on to illustrate these assertions with a number of examples of exploratory humanities data analyses including using
ngrams
to trace Google books collections, building visualisations of ship movements from
digitised whaling logbooks
, the
Hathi Trust bookworm
, and exposing
gendered language in teachers reviews
on Rate my Teacher.  (I’ve worked with ships musters and log books for a number of years as part of our
Indefatigable 1797
project, I’ve long been a fan of Ben’s whaling log visualisations which are as beautiful as they are fascinating.)
Ships tracks in black, show the outlines of the continents and the predominant tracks on the trade winds. © Ben Schmidt
Ben concluded by introducing the analogy of Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths
and urged us to create data gardens and labyrinths for exploration and contemplation, and to provide tools that help us to interpret the world rather than to change it
Gaps, Cracks, Keys: Digital Methods for Modernist Studies
~ Anouk Lang, University of Edinburgh
Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities
Anouk explored the difficulties and opportunities facing scholars of twentieth-century literature and culture that result from the impact of copyright restrictions on the digitisation of texts and artefacts. Due to these restrictions many modern and contemporary texts are out of digital reach.  The
LitLong
project highlights gaps in modernist sources caused by copyright law.  However there are cracks  in the record where digital humanities can open up chinks in the data to let in light, and we can use this data as the key to open up interesting analytic possibilities.
During her presentation Anouk referenced the
Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities
, situating it in reference to the
Blast Manifesto
, Nathan Hensley’s
Big Data is Coming for Your Books
, and Underwood, Long and So’s
Cents and Sensibility
By way of example, Anouk demonstrated how network analysis can be used to explore biographical texts. Biographies are curated accounts of people’s lives constructed by human and social forces and aesthetic categories. There is no such thing as raw data in digital text analysis: all the choices about data are subjective. Redrawing network maps multiple times can highlight what is durable. For example network analysis of biographical texts can reveal the gendered marginality of writers’ wives.
In conclusion, Anouk argued that digital deconstruction can be regarded as a form of close reading, and questioned how we read graphical forms such as maps and network illustrations. How do network maps challenge established forms of knowledge? They force us to stand back and question what our data is and can help us to avoid the linearity of narrative.
Closing the Net: Letter Collections & Quantitative Network Analysis
~ Ruth Ahnert, Queen Mary University of London
Ruth’s closing keynote explored the nature of complex networks and the use of mathematical models to explore their underlying characteristics.  She also provided two fascinating examples of how social network analysis techniques can be used to analyse collections of early modern letters, a set of Protestant letters (1553 – 1558) and Tudor correspondence in State Papers Online,  to reconstruct the movement of people, objects, and ideas.   She also rather chillingly compared the Tudor court’s monitoring of conspiracies and interception of letters with the contemporary surveillance activities of the NSA.
Ruth Ahnart. Picture by Kathy Simpson, @kilmunbooks.
Ruth introduced the concept of betweenness* – the connectors that are central to sustaining a network.  Networks are temporal, they change and evolve over time as they are put under pressure.  Mary I took out identifiable hubs in the Protestant network by executing imprisoned leaders, however despite removing these hubs, the networks survived because the sustainers survived, these are the people with high betweenness.  In order to fragment a network it is necessary to remove, not the hubs or edges, but the nodes with high betweenness.
Ruth went on to introduce Eigenvector centrality which can be used to measure the quality of people’s connections in a network, and she explored the curious betweenness centrality of
Edward Courteney
, 1st Earl of Devon (1527 – 1556). Courteney’s social capital is quantifiable; he was typical of a character with high Eigenvector centrality, who cuts across social groups and aligned himself with powerful nodes.
In conclusion, Ruth suggested that network analysis can be used to open archives, it doesn’t presume what you’re looking for, rather it can inspire close reading by revealing patterns previously unseen by traditional humanity research.
I was certainly hugely inspired by Ruth’s presentation.  I have some passing familiarity with the concepts of network analysis and betweenness centrality from the work of
Martin Hawksey
and
Tony Hirst
however this it the first time I have seen these techniques applied to historical data and the possibilities are endlessly inspiring.  One of the man aims of our
Indefatigable 1797
research project is to reveal the social networks that bound together a small group of men who served on the frigate HMS
Indefatigable
during the French Revolutionary War.  Using traditional techniques we have pieced together these connections through an analysis of ships musters, Admiralty archives, contemporary press reports, personal letters and birth, marriage and death certificates.  We have already built up a picture of a complex and long-lived social network, but I now can’t help wondering whether a more nuanced picture of of that network might emerge through the application of social network analysis techniques.  Definitely something to think more about in the future!
Many thanks to Anouk Lang and the Digital Scholarship team for organising such a thought provoking, fun and engaging event.
* For an excellent explanation of the concept of betweeness, I can highly recommend reading
Betweenness centrality – explained via twitter
, featuring Tony Hirst and my former Cetis colleagues Sheila MacNeill, Wilbert Kraan, and Martin Hawksey.  It’s all about the genetically modified zombies you see…
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