Yes, I will add an alarm in my calendar. I need a reminder in 20 years. On that day, I will listen to this talk.
This talk may be a good chance to see it as a time capsule. I'm setting an alarm in my calendar to watch this clip in 2041. You could join me, okay? So, set your alarm. And I would like to reflect on my talk at that time. Perhaps this term, digital humanities, disappeared.
Or it became so popular that this little introduction seems to be irrelevant at all. So, we've We will see. After this work is done, we all have our appointment, our calendar, our reminder.
We can start now. So I would like to introduce myself like every other colleague in the digital humanities by first expressing that I'm actually from another field. So my name is Svante, and I'm not only a Wattführerin.
I started my studies in museum studies in Leipzig. And in 2006, I was sometimes the only person in the room who was not only fascinated by those various objects you may find in a museum like paintings or sculptures or furniture, I was fascinated by the data. And I was somehow, sometimes really alone with this interest. But I found another home for my research interest called Digital Humanities.
And I share this home with colleagues from various disciplines like archaeologists or IT engineers or... Maybe philosophers, historians, could be from various disciplines. So this term, literature humanities, it's a young field. Some say it's 20 or 30 years old, and others count works from the late 1950s as a starting point. But for all of you who work actually in a field of information technology or software engineering or something like that, this term, literature humanities, may seem like a label.
for scholars of the humanities who changed from their personal typewriter to a personal computer. So, this is my favorite typewriter, a so-called Schreibkugel. Friedrich Nietzsche owned one, and there are letters in which he complains that this machine is constantly broken, but he's complaining a lot in his life, so it's not really special.
But nevertheless, he dedicated a poem to his typewriter. And all this information can be found in archives, libraries, and museums. So, where was I?
We as scholars in the digital humanities are not just those researchers with better typewriters than Friedrich Nietzsche. We are thinking about new digital methods for our old problems or new research questions for our research objects. So I do not dare to answer the object of research in the humanities, which may be everything that surrounds us.
But what keeps us together in this family of digital humanities? We may have different academic backgrounds, we come from various disciplines, and we are working with different material. But sometimes we have the same research interests. For example, similarity searches of our own material, like for text. Is it possible to find the author of an anonymous work, like a drama?
How could we describe similarity between two dramas? Is it just a count of words? How could we express an author's style by numbers? or for images.
Is it possible to find the painter of an artwork by comparing it to a large pile of digital images of different types, like sketches and prints and so on? So I ask myself, which measurable features within a painting could we extract, combine to help to express the essence of a Renaissance painting? Also for music, melodies and composers, how do we define similarity in music? How could we describe patterns in a way that machines and humans can understand them and process them to answer research questions?
So another topic that keeps us together could be building our digital research infrastructure for scholars in the digital humanities to solve our problems. So this seems to be a real transformation as it changes libraries, archives, museums or other institutions where we may find our material. So is everything that we do so new? I don't think. Not at all.
Sometimes we are standing on shoulders of giants like the information science. So here's my favorite card catalog. Aurélien Fontaine and his colleague Paul Audlett and all this... Nameless women, miraculously nameless, they build a giant knowledge-based system to gather every known fact, like every known fact, and this was in 1894. So these millions of index cards and documents were called the International Museum, the International Library, the International Bibliographic Catalogue, and the Universal Document Archive.
So everything at the same time. Some of us are building a similar system today. They want to connect bits of information of our cultural heritage with the help of linked open data. To build a giant knowledge base system to gather every known fact about tangible and intangible objects of our cultural heritage. So this task is not new, not at all.
But the way we are trying to solve this is new. We are doing it with interdisciplinary teams with decentralized infrastructure. We don't have like those million index cards, as you might know.
And we use open standards. This is different. And also the amount of data we are collecting today. So this was just just a chance to show my favorite card catalog, and to make clear, not everything that we do is so new. But when I started, I started in museum science, or museum studies, or museology, as you might call it.
So one of my first questions in the field of museum studies dealt with a legend from Merseburg. Merseburg is a small town, like 20 kilometers from Halle, and I wanted to find out why a turtle shell was hanging in Merseburg Cathedral. cathedral at a certain time. So my work consisted mainly of researching other legends and other sources, looking through them, evaluating them and writing a text about it.
So this was time consuming. And the result probably interested hardly anyone. Except my family. I'm really thankful that they read my turtle thesis.
So if we already had a giant knowledge system at that time, I could have. I found a lot of new things about similar texts and illustrations via similarity searches. I could have looked more closely at the genesis of those legends.
I could have not only compared several turtle legends in different places all over the world, the world, I could have related them to legends about other animals and stuff like that. So I would have accomplished more in less time. However, that alone is not enough for it really to get the label digital humanities.
This is just a faster typewriter. So, after all, if I just do it like for this research, for my first research, this is not digital humanities. I would also be important that I have aligned my other steps with it, like collecting, modeling, analyzing, and evaluating the research data to the point of publishing it in a form that itself becomes part of the knowledge system, like in this linked-open data world, and is available for my future colleagues. So for this purpose, we need a digital research infrastructure and a more collaborative and interdisciplinary way of research in the humanities.
So another topic for us is the digital long-term preservation. So now we are talking about really digital long-term preservation of our cultural heritage. And this includes digital artefacts as well.
So let's see what happens in 20 years. Is there an alarm in my calendar? Like in my mobile device, however it may look like?
Oh, yes. To watch a certain video clip. Ah, yeah, there's a link. So what happens if I click on it?
What could possibly go wrong? Okay. file not found or restrictions. I would have to pay a fee for my own content. Or instead of this talk, we see a CAD compilation, which may not be the worst case.
But for everyone who's still confident in this room that we still have access, this link is permanent here and the format is supported because, yes, we were smart. We uploaded it on YouTube. They will handle this.
Just a reminder, YouTube itself isn't 20 years old and no one of us has a deal. deal with YouTube, that this clip or any other clip will be preserved and accessible. So I hope that one of us, whoever he or she may recall herself like a digital humanist, a librarian, an archivist or a music expert stepped in, handled this, curated and preserved this clip and every other TED talk.
Thanks a lot.