[00:00.000 --> 00:12.240]  So, my name is Marie Dubromé, Constructing for Digital Humanists, The Cultural Shock,
[00:12.240 --> 00:18.400]  Be Developing Tools and Pedagogy. This talk is given on behalf of the Center for Digital
[00:18.400 --> 00:24.680]  Humanities in Uppsala, which is where I work. Here you have my contact. You can contact
[00:24.680 --> 00:35.240]  me via email, mastodon, as well as my website. I'm an engineer in digital humanities. We'll
[00:35.240 --> 00:41.120]  come back on that later. What you need to know is that I'm located in two countries,
[00:41.120 --> 00:48.800]  in the city of Lille in France and in Uppsala, where my work and university is. And on my
[00:48.800 --> 00:58.000]  spare time, I'm an activist in Uppsala Women's Coding, as well as sometimes in Ulug and Raoul
[00:58.000 --> 01:06.520]  in Lille and Uppsala. So, I'm not the first digital humanist you are encountering in the
[01:06.520 --> 01:15.760]  first day. I did a little bit of a survey, and so at least four people I could identify
[01:15.760 --> 01:21.320]  the digital humanists in the past, as the name of Jan Jonsson, Vanilly, Guido, Oly de
[01:21.320 --> 01:28.560]  Ober, Antoine Fosche. Thank you to them for opening the path and just being pioneer and
[01:28.560 --> 01:39.360]  indirectly making me feel welcome in coming to your community. So, without further introduction,
[01:39.360 --> 01:49.960]  what is digital humanities? It's a pretty new field, and it's a blurry term. I'm not
[01:49.960 --> 01:54.960]  going to have the talk of three days and three nights without sleeping about how to define
[01:54.960 --> 02:02.680]  it. What you need to know is that it's the field in the intersections between computer
[02:02.680 --> 02:10.960]  science and humanities, all sorts of humanities. And what in this context an engineer in digital
[02:10.960 --> 02:18.360]  humanities is, it's someone technical that will have expertise in one or several domain
[02:18.360 --> 02:25.880]  of computer science and whose mission is to help humanists in their projects. By humanists
[02:25.880 --> 02:36.920]  we can mean a philosopher, literature analyst, historian, sociology, archaeology, etc., etc.
[02:36.920 --> 02:44.440]  I thought to give you a bit of context, examples would talk more than a long discourse. So,
[02:44.440 --> 02:51.840]  if you're an engineer in digital humanities, you could be helping a theologist mapping
[02:51.840 --> 03:00.400]  all the colors of the Bible to show the color ambience of the New Testament. You could be
[03:00.400 --> 03:09.840]  also building an online databases to help an art historian will be broadcasting their
[03:09.840 --> 03:22.240]  anti-copedical knowledge about some engravings of books, etc., etc. You do not need to read
[03:22.240 --> 03:31.560]  this complicated table, but I will attract your attention to a couple of things. First,
[03:31.560 --> 03:38.240]  observe the subjects. The subjects are pretty academics, academic subjects, things that
[03:38.240 --> 03:46.240]  computer scientists will normally not be very familiar to, like literatures, Scandinavian
[03:46.240 --> 03:55.040]  languages, linguistics, here the ALM means the archives, etc., etc. We have an audience
[03:55.040 --> 04:01.120]  of very academic people, people that have no contact with the corporate world, that
[04:01.120 --> 04:09.080]  have been in academia and stayed in academia after. Look at this, we have a pretty gender
[04:09.080 --> 04:15.240]  balanced group and slightly actually female dominated. I counted 16 women here in this
[04:15.240 --> 04:25.400]  room, including me. So, that's an interesting contrast. Finally, the titles, it probably
[04:25.400 --> 04:34.240]  doesn't speak to you too much because it's a pretty specialized topic. Could we even say
[04:34.240 --> 04:45.840]  niche topics? I had fun making a table of the differences between the engineering world
[04:45.840 --> 04:52.280]  and the humanistic world. By the way, I have a background in classics before going to natural
[04:52.280 --> 04:58.640]  language processing, so I'm accustomed to this switch of culture. Additionally to the
[04:58.640 --> 05:06.400]  remarks I have made, I will add that among engineers and computer scientists, the programming
[05:06.400 --> 05:13.640]  is the norm, and often as an operating system, you will see Linux or Mac, or at least when
[05:13.640 --> 05:17.840]  I was in the Department of Natural Language Processing, that was what I was seeing. You
[05:17.840 --> 05:24.200]  would use an academic context, you would exchange terminal apps, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas
[05:24.200 --> 05:30.320]  if you land in the Department of Humanities, you will have a point and click as a norm
[05:30.320 --> 05:37.120]  and offer proprietary tools as a norm. Windows, Mac, PowerPoint, Word, I have been asked in
[05:37.120 --> 05:44.760]  conferences to give PowerPoint, PPTX, files and Word documents, and no one gets offended
[05:44.760 --> 06:02.480]  by that. So industry influence, academic, and I think finally the most important is
[06:02.480 --> 06:10.760]  that in computer science, we are very metrics oriented, optimizing maybe speed or other
[06:10.760 --> 06:23.080]  quantified performances, whereas the humanists are very question oriented. So between those
[06:23.080 --> 06:27.600]  two different audience that we need to gather in digital humanities, how do we help each
[06:27.600 --> 06:40.160]  others? And to be able to continue my talk or let's say end my talk in something positive,
[06:40.160 --> 06:52.480]  I will start in the, let's say, more obstacles or negative points of trying this marriage
[06:52.480 --> 07:00.160]  between the two fields. I think if you want to have free software, computer science and
[07:00.160 --> 07:09.960]  free software in the digital humanities, you need to overcome a lack of visibility from
[07:09.960 --> 07:18.000]  the free software world towards the humanists. And I think this versa. And I thought of taking
[07:18.000 --> 07:26.320]  short example of technical tools we are working with. So in digital humanities, I'm specialized
[07:26.320 --> 07:34.440]  in web scraping and NLP. And us as engineers, we tend to use, I would say, open source tools
[07:34.440 --> 07:44.600]  like Python, beautiful soup and spacey, whereas people that will be less computer savvy in
[07:44.600 --> 07:54.000]  digital humanities will use more proprietary software such as web scrapper.io or Antconk,
[07:54.000 --> 07:59.000]  which has the advantage to be point and click tools, to be simpler, more straightforward,
[07:59.000 --> 08:07.600]  to have less functionalities as well. And yes, another remark is that I noticed recently
[08:07.600 --> 08:13.440]  while giving courses to digital humanists that people are asking me if I can teach them
[08:13.440 --> 08:20.640]  GitHub. And they say, no, I can teach you GitHub. So it's very revealing the fact that
[08:20.640 --> 08:25.880]  they don't even know the difference or what it means. So it's very revealing that they
[08:25.880 --> 08:32.560]  know GitHub before understanding the notion of Git. So I think this is to stress my point
[08:32.560 --> 08:37.080]  about lack of visibility of the open source world or maybe the over visibility of the
[08:37.080 --> 08:47.400]  freeware world. The second obstacle to bringing free software to digital humanists is maybe
[08:47.400 --> 08:57.000]  a lack of cohesion. I mean, digital humanities is a nascent topic where we have a lot of
[08:57.000 --> 09:02.560]  groups already spread with different languages, digital historians, digital literature analysts,
[09:02.560 --> 09:08.840]  et cetera, et cetera. And so they have already had time gathering together. So in this context,
[09:08.840 --> 09:15.960]  it's hard to make as well a community of open source answers. Yes, so it's not yet built
[09:15.960 --> 09:26.680]  this community in this context. The next thing I will point or obstacle is I would say the
[09:26.680 --> 09:34.320]  lack of common references or I would say of, but not of common values. So it's hard to
[09:34.320 --> 09:41.560]  find a language to understand each other. I will come back on that in the positive points.
[09:41.560 --> 09:52.600]  And yeah, that's it for the obstacles I can see. Then on the positive points on what could
[09:52.600 --> 10:02.600]  make this marriage a success, we have first, I think we humanists will be a very receptive
[10:02.600 --> 10:09.200]  audience to the philosophy of free software. I mean, enlightenment, philosophy existed
[10:09.200 --> 10:14.400]  in before, and it was a study in humanities, and it was a study in humanities before which
[10:14.400 --> 10:25.200]  A Starman was born. And so they have those references and those references to philosophy
[10:25.200 --> 10:35.280]  and value of spreading the knowledge of sharing and so on. They have a lot of activism in
[10:35.280 --> 10:42.320]  them. I mean, half of my department is vegan, such reveal something about them. There are
[10:42.320 --> 10:51.560]  nascent but varied community, and I think that's a positive point. It's a crowd that
[10:51.560 --> 11:04.040]  is diverse, very unusual for our dev crowd. Something non-neglectable, they have financial
[11:04.040 --> 11:14.200]  means. The humanities in general do not have much financial needs, not as much as science,
[11:14.200 --> 11:20.400]  but digital humanists are attracting grants and subsidies for projects, and that's an
[11:20.400 --> 11:29.200]  indirect way to finance open source and free software. I'm an engineer developing tools
[11:29.200 --> 11:34.720]  for digital humanists, and my salary is paid by the government because digital humanities
[11:34.720 --> 11:45.640]  is such a buzzword. Finally, one very interesting thing about this crowd is that they know about
[11:45.640 --> 11:51.560]  domains that maybe engineers and computer scientists have interest on, but do not have
[11:51.560 --> 11:59.160]  a formal training on. A lot of them have training or have access easily to training on. Communication
[11:59.160 --> 12:07.120]  and science of education, ethics, and are trained to think critically all the time.
[12:07.120 --> 12:14.640]  I will end my presentation not in certitudes, but in doubts and questions. The questions
[12:14.640 --> 12:23.600]  we could have are ideas to reach better this community and how to make them feel welcome.
[12:23.600 --> 12:30.600]  That was it for my talk. I just kept for illustration purpose in case I have questions
[12:30.600 --> 12:41.040]  I happen to have prepared. References here, all in the slides. Thank you.
[12:41.040 --> 13:07.840]  Are you aware of the research software engineering movement that's been going on for about the
[13:07.840 --> 13:13.160]  last 10 years? Are you aware of the research software engineering movement that's been
[13:13.160 --> 13:16.440]  going on for about 10 years now? There's quite an active group in the Nordic countries
[13:16.440 --> 13:20.360]  and in the UK that have a lot of common issues with what you've just been talking about.
[13:20.360 --> 13:23.160]  There will be a very good community for you to get involved with.
[13:23.160 --> 13:30.600]  I don't know. Is it any linked with the dev room of yesterday about the research tools?
[13:30.600 --> 13:33.080]  I don't know. I wasn't in that dev room.
[13:33.080 --> 13:41.440]  Thank you for your remark. Please come to me after and I will write that down.
[13:41.440 --> 13:59.120]  We have one minute left. Yes. Thank you.
[13:59.120 --> 14:06.160]  How could you suggest to approach someone in the humanist sector that maybe needs a hand
[14:06.160 --> 14:11.080]  with the project but doesn't really know what can IT do for it?
[14:11.080 --> 14:19.200]  Does it really know what we do? I had a set of questions when I do consulting.
[14:19.200 --> 14:22.960]  I can read them to you. First, context. What is your domain?
[14:22.960 --> 14:26.480]  What does your domain focus on? Because they can be very varied.
[14:26.480 --> 14:32.160]  What is the problem you try to solve? Eventually, what did you already try to solve your problem?
[14:32.160 --> 14:36.840]  What tools did you use? That will give you an idea because they will be very blurry about
[14:36.840 --> 14:43.240]  what they want that will help anchoring. What are the data you have and hope to collect
[14:43.240 --> 14:47.960]  and they rarely think about it? And finally, and the most important, can you present me
[14:47.960 --> 14:53.440]  your data? Screenshots. Open your, probably they have an Excel file or something, whatever.
[14:53.440 --> 15:01.080]  Size. Format. How has it been collected? And things you think, or as a computer scientist,
[15:01.080 --> 15:06.200]  quantification, they don't think like that. They just think questions. So I think that
[15:06.200 --> 15:07.720]  could help. Thank you.
[15:07.720 --> 15:10.080]  You're welcome. Thanks, everyone.
[15:10.080 --> 15:24.160]  A big round of applause.