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