Digital interactivity has triggered a transformation whose impact is greater than that of any other innovation in the history of technologies of communication. According to a 2016 Ericsson Mobility Report, over 90% of the world’s population will be covered by mobile broadband networks by 2021. “The world has been redrawn,” claims the Internet critic Andrew Keen, “as a distributed network.” It is becoming evident that we too are being redrawn as human beings, as individuals, and as citizens. At the heart of the change from analogue and print to digital is the capacity for connectedness that information technology brings – connectedness of information in and between databases, between experts and the public, between communities across the world, and between the arts and the sciences.
Advancing Digital Humanities moves beyond definition of this dynamic and fast growing field to show how its arguments, analyses, findings and theories are pioneering new directions in the humanities globally. Sections cover digital methods, critical curation and research futures, with theoretical and practical chapters framed around key areas of activity including modelling collections, data-driven analysis, and thinking through building. These are linked through the concept of ‘ambitious generosity’, a way of working to pursue large-scale research questions while supporting and enabling other research areas and approaches, both within and beyond the academy.
The online version of Volume 18 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which tells the life stories of hundreds of significant and celebrated Australians, will be launched tonight at The Australian National University. Featuring articles on 670 individuals with surnames from L to Z who died between 1981 and 1990, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australia. Included in the ADB are explorers, farmers, criminals, ballet dancers, speedway riders, and authors and politicians such as Patrick White, Christina Stead, William McMahon and Billy Sneddon. Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young, who will officially launch the latest version of the online Dictionary, said that the stories and lives featured in the ADB illuminate major themes in our recent history. “A vast range of people are consulting the Australian Dictionary of Biography online – researchers, students at primary, secondary and tertiary level, genealogists, and people watching documentaries and historical dramas on TV,” he said. “Since going online in 2006, the ADB now attracts 70 million views a year.”
In today’s era of ubiquitous computing and global online connectivity, e-research is enriching research across a growing range of academic disciplines. Its reach is extending beyond the science and technology fields where it originated, and is now “penetrating the social sciences and humanities, [though] sometimes with differences in accent and label” (Jankowski, 2009). This chapter discusses some of the ways in which humanities researchers are embracing new digital resources, formats and modes of collaborating in ways that further the traditional goals of humanities research, “to better understand ourselves, our history, and our cultural heritage” (Cole, 2007). Topics covered in this chapter include the growing opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches, building the information commons for public benefit, and the growing need for strategic investment in research infrastructure to support the humanities.
Australian researchers are recognised internationally for delivering solutions to the most complex and challenging questions facing cultures and communities. Their contributions are vital to the nation’s social wellbeing. Encompassing the study of society, identity, economy, business, governance, history, culture and creativity, this broad field links universities, government agencies, collecting institutions and creative industries with policy development and with communities. However, complex issues of national and global significance cannot be solved in isolation. They demand collaborative approaches which in turn require the infrastructure to support them. Across all sectors, research practices are being fundamentally influenced by leading-edge ICT, and social and cultural data of immense significance is being generated in many different forms. With considerable investment worldwide in eResearch infrastructure, innovation in the humanities, arts and social sciences is increasingly dependent on enabling technology to support research excellence.
The Arts and Humanities have traditionally been worlds apart from Science and Technology in their ways of pursuing and generating knowledge and understanding. So much so that the famous term, ‘The Two Cultures’, coined in the mid twentieth century by C. P. Snow to describe the vast gap between these discipline areas, is still current and relevant.[i] It continues to dominate the organisation of disciplines in universities and drive the distribution of most national research funding. However, quite suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, the digital environment began to trigger major changes in the knowledge economy, with the result that the humanities were thrown unexpectedly and involuntarily into a close relationship with technology. As one might expect in any forced marriage, it was not a case of love at first sight. In fact, the humanities have exhibited the full range of reactions—from totally ignoring the other, through unashamedly raiding their wealth, to wholeheartedly embracing the exciting future they seem to offer. Whatever the reaction, it is clear that the humanities are now inescapably entangled with technology, for better or worse, and the two cultures are connecting more than ever before, notably in the new research activities and spaces signalled by the term ‘e-research’.
Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity
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