NeDiMAH: Network of Digital
Methods in the Arts and Humanities
www.nedimah.eu
Prof. Lorna Hughes, University of Wales Chair in Digital
Collections, National Library of Wales, NeDiMAH Chair
Digital Humanities Luxembourg
December 5th 2013

NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and
Humanities
Chairs
Lorna Hughes, UK (Chair)
Fotis Jannidis, Germany
Susan Schreibman, Ireland
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Aims
Research the practice of advanced ICT
methods in the arts and humanities
Develop activities, publications, and
networking
Outputs
– Map of digital humanities in Europe
– A taxonomy of digital humanities
– A collaborative forum for Digital
Humanities Methods in Europe
Support from 16 Member Organizations:
1. Bulgarian Academy of Science
2. The National Foundation of Science, Higher Education
and Technological Development of the Republic of
Croatia (NZZ)
3. The Danish Council for Independent Research –
Humanities (FKK),
4. The Academy of Finland – Research Council for Culture
and Society
5. TGE ADONIS – National Centre for Scientific Research
(CNRS)
6. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
7. Hungarian Academy of Sciences, (MTA)
8. Irish Research Council for the Humanities (IRCHSS),
9. Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
10. Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NOW)
11. Research Council of Norway (NCR)
12. Portugal Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)
13. Romanian National Research Council (CNCS)
14. Swedish Research Council (VR)
15. Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
16. UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Digital Humanities: the challenge for researchers
• Disproportionate investment in creation, management and curation of digital
resources versus use of digital content for scholarship (in the UK from 20008, AHRC funded approx. £43million of creation of digital projects, only £1.5
million into use of digital collections for research)
• Lack of accessible evidence for the transformative use of Digital Humanities
• Lack of consistency in description of Digital Humanities methods
• Inconsistent digital humanities research methods training for postgraduates
• Decreases in research funding: need to do more with less, international cooperation is key
• Networks needed to take existing work forward in broader context
• Risk of national and disciplinary fragmentation hiding good work

NeDiMAH
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ESF has funded a unique Network examining the use of digital methods in the
arts and humanities
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Only similar activity: UK-only AHRC ICT Methods Network 2005-8
Wide (and growing) interest by ESF Member Organisations (16 to date)
Timing: Digital Humanities experiencing increased international attention
Facilitates participation of established researchers and young scholars
Provides evidence for scholars and policy makers
NeDiMAH:
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Inclusive in disciplinary, national and career-stage representation
Developing a framework for common exchange of expertise and knowledge
Linking researchers with their peers across the disciplines
Enabling participants to develop, share and refine ICT methods as the core elements
of digital scholarship and articulate these methods formally
Investigating issues related to the scholarly publishing of ICT methods in the arts and
humanities
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Digital humanities: a collaborative workspace
• Digital collections and project with digital
CONTENT
METHODS
outputs
• Researchers demand high-quality content
•Freely accessible content enables greater use and
re-use
• “Scholarly primitives” to gain new knowledge:
discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, s
ampling, illustrating, and representing digital
content
• Software to gather, analyze and/or process data
TOOLS
• To enable existing research processes to be
conducted better and/or faster
• To enable researchers to ask, and
answer, completely new research questions

Digital Humanities: a “Methodological Commons”
(McCarty and Short)
(McCarty and Short)

The “scholarly primitives”: methods in digital humanities
(Unsworth)

Taxonomy of Methods for the arts and humanities
http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/
Methods/ICT-methodology.aspx

NeDiMAH Working Groups
Methodological Working Groups
1. Spatial and Temporal Modelling
2. Information Visualization
3. Linked Data
4. Building and developing Corpora
5. Using Corpora: Information retrieval and modelling
6. Scholarly editions
7. Scholarly publishing
8. ICT Methods Taxonomy
Charge to the Working Groups
– Investigation and analysis of current practice: Documenting the practice of digital
humanities through exemplars
– Modelling application of the methods in scholarly practice across the disciplines
– Producing evidence for advancing the state of the art in understanding the
scholarly ecosystem for digital humanities

Key output: NeDiMAH ICT Methods Ontology
• The scholarly ecosystem for Digital Humanities will be articulated in the NeDiMAH
ICT Methods Ontology
• Ontology will be developed with DARIAH VCC2 (understanding and expanding
scholarly practice) and DARIAH research community, NeDiMAH ICT Methods
Taxonomy WG (Lorna Hughes, Christian-Emil Ore, Costis Dallas, Matt
Munson, Torsten Reimer, Erik Champion, Orla Murphy, Panos Constantopoulos);
and the Digital Curation Unit-IMIS, Athena Research Centre, Greece
• Gathering data from all NeDiMAH activities about practice of Digital Humanities
as structure for ontology layers and definition of schemas; building software
environment/database tool for specifications of research methods
• Build on existing DH taxonomies, other ontologies, expanding state of the art
• To be completed Feb. 2015
• Outcome: a formal ontology for Digital Humanities, including classification
and a shared vocabulary

An ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and
Humanities: Objectives
• Provide evidence of the use of digital resources for scholarship to
support visibility and sustainability of digital collections and scholarship
• Enable the critical evaluation of digital humanities: projects that are
transparent; well-documented; reviewable across disciplines
• Making visible multi-disciplinary, multi-technology projects, nationally
and internationally
• Explore the potential benefit of the ontology as a guide and learning
tool for the scholarly community, with DARIAH VCC2
• Documenting partnerships across disciplines and organizations: building
collaborative, scholarly infrastructures as well as technical
infrastructures

Workplan outputs
• An ontology delivered in both document and machine readable
forms
• A Web service of a database containing the ontology definition and
functionality to support access to and evolution of the ontology.
• In document form, the ontology will include definitions of entities
and properties, and examples of occurrence and use after the
model of ISO standard 21127 CIDOC CRM. Compatibility will be
ensured
• In machine readable form, the ontology will be defined in RDF/S
(RDF Schema), to support use in a wide range of applications
accessing registries and knowledge bases that contain information
about methods and their context of use.
• The taxonomic parts of the ontology will comply with SKOS (Simple
Knowledge Organization System)

Workplan outcomes
• The compliance with standards allows syntactic as well as semantic
interoperability between future registries and applications employing
this methods ontology and other CIDOC CRM – and SKOS – compliant
information systems in the arts and humanities and in
libraries, museums and archives.
• The Web service will provide (a) access to the ontology for
research, education and development purposes under a suitable
open policy, and (b) support for maintenance.
• Various access methods are foreseen, e.g., faceted classification
trees, predefined simple and complex query types, form-based
queries, ad hoc SPARQL queries, and browsing.
• The ontology will be “an explicit specification of a shared
conceptualization” of the domain of digital research methods and
their context of scholarly use. It includes types of objects and/or
concepts, and their properties and relations.
• The service will be sustained by DARIAH over the long term

Benefit to scholarship
• The ontology will formalize and codify the expression of work in the digital
arts and humanities
• Greater academic credibility for the use of Digital Humanities methods, and
support for peer-reviewed scholarship in this area.
• Maximise the value of national and international e-research infrastructure
initiatives by developing a methodological layer that allows arts and
humanities researchers to develop, refine and share research methods
• The ontology will have potential usefulness for eliciting and prioritizing the
functional requirements for planned digital infrastructures in the
A&H, following an evidence-based, user-centred approach.
• The development of a commonly agreed nomenclature in the nascent field
of Digital Humanities: something that typically happens with the maturing
and consolidation of disciplines / research domains.