Talks

MaDiH (مديح) involves King’s Digital Lab (KDL) / King’s College London eResearch‚ the Hashemite University‚ the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL)‚ the Department of Antiquities of Jordan‚ the Jordanian Open Source Association‚ and the EAMENA project. The project delivers training in Research Software Engineering (RSE) best practice‚ alongside white papers‚ a prototype National Data Catalogue‚ and a prototype National Heritage Portal. Workshops are identifying datasets‚ held both in Jordan and overseas‚ to ‘repatriate’ (through federation) data collected in Jordan but held offshore. The project is contributing to the development of Jordan’s digital cultural heritage‚ identifying key systems‚ datasets‚ standards‚ and policies‚ and aligning them to government digital infrastructure capabilities and strategies. By defining a robust architecture for digital cultural heritage‚ informed by RSE best practice‚ the aim is to assist the Department of Antiquities in their planning processes‚ help product development teams develop their systems‚ facilitate the aggregation of valuable datasets held in disparate repositories‚ and ensure data generated from research activity is properly stored and widely accessible.

The UK government is promoting collaboration between the creative industries and universities‚ through the £33m Audiences of the Future programme and the £80m Creative Clusters programme. The initiatives enable what Etzkowitz et al would refer to as the ‘triple helix’ between universities‚ government and industry‚ with an emphasis on next-generation entertainment and arts production. Transferring knowledge from universities into the creative industries is a key part of the policy. This paper describes a project that aims to analyse and improve cross-sector collaboration using STS methods (including laboratory‚ infrastructure‚ and platform studies) in combination with narrative theory. The project is being developed by To Play For‚ a pioneer in interactive storytelling‚ and a team at King’s College London involved in digital humanities‚ cultural studies‚ and ‘research software engineering’ (RSE). The teams have embedded a developer within To Play For‚ to contribute to narrative and technical development‚ and are developing a model for cross-sector collaboration through observation and process modelling. The goal is to improve the innovative potential of To Play For’s Charisma.ai immersive story-telling and game development engine. The primary result will be a demo based on an award-winning immersive theatre piece that will showcase Charisma’s ability to ‘remember’ user input and adapt the story experience accordingly‚ and a publishable collaborative model. The project sits at the intersection of STS‚ engineering‚ and the creative industries‚ demonstrating that meaningful knowledge transfer across these three domains is possible.

This paper describes our efforts to create an RSE career pathway by scaling a model implemented in a digital humanities and social science lab (established in late 2015) towards the wider university. By offering permanent contracts and focusing on diversity‚ the team has grown from 6 men and 1 woman to 8 men and 5 women. A flat HR structure supports a Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) based on an Agile methodology‚ routing work through a project manager‚ analysts‚ UI/UX designers‚ software engineers‚ and a systems manager. Entry-level‚ Senior‚ and Principal roles are defined in a lab career development document‚ aligned to Agile DSDM® and Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). The lab HR policy encourages staff to produce career portfolios‚ including a wide variety of outputs from code to design artefacts‚ for assessment by a promotions panel. Conversations are under way with IT and HR to scale the lab approach to RSE careers towards the wider university‚ grafting it onto the emerging IT People Strategy as a defined career path that can support recruitment and retention. The model is not without issues‚ but provides a useful reference point for the wider community.

The text of my contribution to the Critical Infrastructure Studies panel at MLA 2018‚ New York‚ January 6th‚ 2018. The panel was framed by comments by Alan Liu (University of California‚ Santa Barbara)‚ Matthew K. Gold (The Graduate Center‚ CUNY)‚ and comprised Tung-Hui Hu (The University of Michigan)‚ Shannon Mattern (The New School)‚ Tara McPherson (University of Southern California)‚ and me. The paper argues that in an era when cultural politics are defined by the digital‚ and the arts and humanities (like all disciplines) are confronted with a complex soup of systems engineering‚ tools‚ datasets‚ and emerging computational methodologies and epistemologies‚ the intellectual challenge turns from merely critiquing the literary and cultural domain to reflecting on the infrastructure that influences and shapes that activity. Such inquiry calls for a level of self-reflexivity — acknowledgement of the intersection of critic and machine — that demands macro as well as micro focus and a willingness to attend to sometimes dizzying complexity. No easy resolution is possible‚ Smithies suggests. The promise of critical infrastructure studies is not so much a definition of global humanities infrastructure‚ as a seed for a genre of writing on and about critical entanglement with computing platforms‚ methods‚ and devices.

The digital humanities has a long history of innovation in technology‚ techniques and communications. Historically‚ innovation tends to be associated with business processes. Critics may object to such ‘industry’ language and claim that ‘innovative’ processes may in fact lead‚ inevitably‚ to instrumentalist perspectives. This paper will explore these issues through reference to “Open Innovation”‚ using the recent establishment of the King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London (King’s) as a case study. KDL’s primary purpose is to increase digital capability across the Faculty of Arts & Humanities by working with academic staff to develop research proposals and projects‚ and deliver a range of digital research outcomes. The expectation is that the presence of the Lab will complement teaching and research in the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) and further enhance the reputation King’s has in digital humanities. This paper will describe KDL plans (working with DDH) to underpin high quality teaching and research‚ but also high quality (industry standard) software development processes‚ and a culture of innovation‚ experimentation‚ and entrepreneurship. Using KDL as a case study we will show how the concept of Open Innovation (as proposed by Henry Chesbrough) resonates strongly with the digital humanities. Concepts of being open (in terms of open sourcing or open access)‚ pursuing open reflection and collaboration within Open Innovation‚ present a mirror in which we can see ourselves as digital humanities academics. This is a vision of the digital humanities as a catalyst for research across disciplines‚ providing a means to enable collaborations and intellectual partnerships‚ but also as IT industry professionals merely working in one of several knowledge domains. To this end‚ the paper will present a mapping demonstrating the contrast between the principles of Open and Closed Innovation‚ comparing different modes of communication and collaboration across the digital humanities.

The UC CEISMIC Digital Archive (Millar et al.‚ n.d.) was developed to store and make publically available digital content produced during the course of a major earthquake sequence‚ which hit the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand between 2010 and 2012. The project was presented at DH2012‚ Hamburg‚ when its key assets had just gone live (Smithies‚ 2012). This report on the current state of the archive is the most significant to be made at a digital humanities conference since then. It will report on governance‚ ethics‚ and technology but‚ more importantly‚ reflect on lessons learned and outline plans for the next decade of operation. The Canterbury earthquake sequence has been described as a truly ‘large-scale’ event. It included a devastating 6.3 magnitude tremor on 22 February 2011 that resulted in 185 deaths and caused significant damage to large portions of the city. Over 12‚000 aftershocks followed‚ including 31 greater than magnitude 5 on the Richter scale. Recovery is ongoing‚ with portions of the inner city only recently opened to the public. Significant infrastructure renewal and building remediation and construction are expected to continue across the city and surrounding areas for another decade (Johnston‚ 2014). The University of Canterbury‚ where the UC CEISMIC team is based‚ is planning for over 1‚000 construction workers to be on campus during 2015 to repair earthquake damage and build a significant new science and engineering block. The UC CEISMIC project has been positioned by the University of Canterbury as one of four flagship projects targeted to lead the way towards recovery‚ and leads a consortium of 11 national organizations that has recently expanded to include scientific as well as cultural heritage agencies. The archive currently stores 80‚000 public items with a further 15‚000 either embargoed or in process‚ ranging from audio and video interviews to images and official reports. Tens of thousands more items await ingestion. Significant lessons have been learned about data integration in post-disaster contexts‚ including but not limited to technical architecture‚ governance‚ ingestion process‚ and human ethics. Team members have recently gained access to almost 1 million historic tweets‚ which will be subject to computationally intensive analysis (Williford and Henry‚ 2012). The depth and breadth of the CEISMIC project‚ and the innovative work it has prompted‚ are directly attributable to it being a digital humanities project. The archive was modeled on the Center for History and New Media’s September 11 Digital Archive 1 and conceived‚ designed‚ and built by digital humanists. Its operational program office is staffed and managed by humanities and digital humanities graduates. Its core values are derived from principles instilled in all DH graduates: civic responsibility‚ the value of our digital cultural heritage‚ deployment of technology to enable research‚ use of open-source tools‚ the importance of craft skills and tacit knowledge‚ the importance of communication and community engagement‚ and our responsibility to future generations. It presents an excellent model for digital humanities teams faced with the problem of archiving significant post-disaster events. The archive has implemented a technical architecture optimized to resolve issues with data integration in post-disaster contexts (Spennemann‚ 1999). The system relies on a bespoke research-oriented repository built using open-source tools and hosted at the University of Canterbury‚ New Zealand. It sits on virtualized university infrastructure‚ including access to New Zealand’s national High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and REANNZ high-speed broadband research network. Tiered backup and recovery stores all content on both high-availability disk and off-site tape storage. DigitalNZ‚ a unit within the New Zealand National Library‚ performs national metadata aggregation (Oldman et al.‚ 2014). This allows the archive to leverage an extensive range of existing government IT infrastructure; although over 75% of CEISMIC content is hosted at the University of Canterbury‚ content is contributed from a wide range of government agencies. The federation is bonded at a technical level through DigitalNZ’s modified Dublin Core schema‚ with each contributing archive responsible for adding additional metadata if possible (Sugimoto et al.‚ 2002). Access is provided through one key and two subsidiary websites‚ a mobile app‚ and two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Long-term preservation has been outsourced to New Zealand’s National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA)‚ a government agency responsible for preserving key national digital assets for the long term. Unusually for a digital humanities project‚ CEISMIC has grown to become a significant ‘enterprise’-level undertaking‚ with a mature portfolio of services‚ relationships with peak government agencies from the chief executive level down‚ integration into the university’s project and technical change management functions‚ and strategic concerns that intersect not only with university but local and national government policy. Because of its vocal advocacy for digital cultural heritage archiving in the immediate post-disaster context‚ the project is positioned as a possible future repository of earthquake-related big data of radical size and scope (Spennemann‚ 1999). It is recognized as one of the success stories of the national earthquake experience; it reflects the development of post-disaster social capital in fundamental terms (Aldrich and Meyer‚ 2014). Despite this‚ the CEISMIC project is well known as a community-focused effort with minimal staff and resources‚ struggling to attract external funding and move key operational staff from temporary to permanent contracts. Although there is awareness of the project at the ministerial level across multiple government departments‚ the scale of the CEISMIC ecosystem has made it difficult to secure a single business owner outside the research community. This tension is perhaps typical of many digital humanities projects: at once creative and vibrant‚ and under threat. Despite this‚ and unlike other digital humanities post-disaster projects (Rivard‚ 2012)‚ the intention is to keep the CEISMIC project operational for several decades into the future. This is a perhaps radical aspiration that contrasts with the more modest goals of similar projects‚ but it offers interesting perspectives for the global community. New Zealand has a particular set of cultural values (and institutional characteristics) that make projects like CEISMIC possible. Lack of state boundaries‚ a small digital GLAM sector‚ and a tradition of cultural innovation and inter-disciplinary cooperation combine to allow the CEISMIC ecosystem to grow. Unlike other cyber-infrastructure projects‚ the archive has exceeded its initial goals and is implementing strategies that appear capable of securing it a long-term future. Again‚ this was due to the application of digital humanities values rather than computer science and engineering values‚ and achieved because it evolved from the bottom up‚ rather than being imposed (even with the benefit of significant funding) from the top down (Dombrowski‚ 2013). For these reasons it presents the global digital humanities community with a useful model that encompasses design‚ development‚ ethics‚ governance‚ and community engagement. Note 1. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media‚ September 11 Digital Archive‚ http://911digitalarchive.org.

This paper will contribute to the global history of computing and the history of late twentieth century New Zealand. It will outline the history of computing in New Zealand from 1950 – 2000‚ charting the development of computational thinking and computers in that country and using computing history to help explain the relationship of New Zealand to post-industrial culture. The global history of computing is a mature field‚ with solid general histories from scholars like Ceruzzi and Campbell-Kelly et al‚ detailed discussions about important people and specific machines‚ and works describing the development of companies like IBM. Combined with work undertaken in Science and Technology Studies and sociology‚ alongside vibrant amateur communities‚ we have a solid understanding of the global history of computing‚ and the development of computing in the United States and United Kingdom. The situation is less positive when it comes to national histories. Our understanding of the development and diffusion of computing technologies in areas peripheral to the global narrative is limited. Eden Medina provided a useful example of what can be achieved in Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011)‚ adding to work on Chile by Juan Alvarez‚ Claudio Gutierrez and Tiago Saraiva. Useful work has also been done by John Vardalas in Canada. New Zealand should provide an excellent addition to these histories. As with technologies like the telegraph and refrigerated shipping‚ New Zealanders eagerly latched onto computational thinking and‚ later‚ computational devices. Newspapers suggest human computers were regularly used as far back as the 1860s‚ and by the 1930s analog computing devices like the ‘Lightning Computer’ were common. After World War Two New Zealanders Leslie Comrie and Bill Phillips were involved in the development of significant machines in the United States and United Kingdom. By the 1960s local machines were being designed and built‚ and a range of commercial devices were installed in government and university facilities. During the 1970s economic policies foregrounded massive public works projects‚ leading to the installation of Australasia’s most powerful computer‚ and during the 1980s staff at Victoria University of Wellington were involved in the early development of Internet-based technologies. As with the work of Medina et al‚ New Zealand computing history promises to provide historians of technology with an insight into the interplay between local and global processes. New Zealanders began installing computers en mass at about the same time as American companies like IBM began to standardise their products and develop international sales channels. Initial impulses to design and manufacture their own machines‚ or use ones built or marketed by their traditional trading partners in Australia and the United Kingdom‚ were eventually over-whelmed by more practical needs for cost-effectiveness and reliability. Thus we can see the effect of the first ‘silicon valley’ boom of the 1950s and 1960s on an isolated product of the British Empire. Unlike nineteenth century technologies like the telegraph and refrigerated shipping‚ which connected the country back to ‘Home’ in Britain‚ advances in computing technology plugged the country into the developing post-industrial world.

The UC CEISMIC Digital Archive was established in 2011 to identify‚ archive‚ and make publically accessible digital content related to the events that occurred following the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011. The programme is underpinned by a Consortium of 11 national cultural heritage and research agencies‚ and employs 5 full-time employees devoted to the archiving process. Governance comprises a Programme Board‚ and a Research Committee chaired by the Dean of Postgraduate Research and including representation from the Human Ethics Committee. 85‚000 items have been archived to date‚ including a wide range of video‚ audio‚ and documentary material. In many ways the UC CEISMIC Archive is an excellent example of best practice in digital archiving‚ and has been recognized as such by several high-profile international teams. The programme team has been contacted by researchers and government agencies from Europe‚ North America‚ and Japan‚ confronting similar problems of scale and complexity‚ and looking for models to underpin their work. Conversations are underway about Phase 2 development of the archive‚ designed to leverage the existing governance model and systems in order to produce a national asset for post-disaster archiving‚ research‚ and pre-preparedness. The goal is to ensure a broad view is taken of data archiving requirements in the Canterbury context‚ with a view to developing a platform capable of enabling a wide range of future research in not only the arts‚ social sciences‚ and humanities‚ but engineering‚ health‚ geography‚ business‚ and data science. Lessons from UC CEISMIC suggest that enabling such a platform is less an issue of technical systems‚ as of governance and political will. This talk will outline the opportunities for data integration‚ archiving‚ and research identified by the UC CEISMIC Programme‚ outline the real-world issues that make those opportunities difficult to leverage‚ and suggest approaches that might allow positive forward movement over the crucial period from 2015 – 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAN7pMNJLIY<br />

The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive was built following the devastating earthquakes that hit the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand from 2010 – 2012. 185 people were killed in the 6.3 magnitude earthquake of February 22nd 2011‚ thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed‚ and the local community endured over 10‚000 aftershocks. The program aims to document and protect the social‚ cultural‚ and intellectual legacy of the Canterbury community for the purposes of memorialization and enabling research. The nationally federated archive currently stores 75‚000 items‚ ranging from audio and video interviews to images and official reports. Tens of thousands more items await ingestion. Significant lessons have been learned about data integration in post-disaster contexts‚ including but not limited to technical architecture‚ governance‚ ingestion process‚ and human ethics. The archive represents a model for future resilience-oriented data integration and preservation products.

The University of Canterbury has recently completed development of New Zealand (and Australasia’s) first digital humanities degree program that is also standards-approved on a national level. The process required the development of document sets that were submitted for review by the University of Canterbury Faculty‚ Academic Advisory Committee‚ Academic Board‚ the New Zealand Vice-Chancellor’s Committee on University Academic Programs (CUAP)‚ the New Zealand Vice-Chancellor’s Committee‚ and the Tertiary Education Commission. Fourteen national and international reviewers‚ drawn from technology education‚ information science‚ computer science‚ high performance computing and the digital humanities also provided their opinions. The program represents a significant baseline for future digital humanities programs‚ and the lessons learned during its development are of importance to the broader digital humanities community. Although New Zealand universities operate with basically the same degree of independence in course and program development as universities elsewhere in the world‚ the requirement to submit all new programs to a national standards body is unusual‚ if not unique. It may be that the University of Canterbury digital humanities program is the most closely scrutinised example the digital humanities community have seen. This has resulted in a program that is embedded within both the culture of Canterbury‚ and the national educational policies of NZ. It therefore comes with a higher degree of legitimacy‚ but also a complex set of stake holders. Moreover‚ because of the close policy ties between New Zealand and Australia (in education as well as other areas) the program has implications for the Australasian region as a whole.

Humanities scholars in the United States and United Kingdom have been involved in the development of eResearch infrastructures for some years‚ guided by landmark reports like the Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006) and units like the Office for Digital Humanities at the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Australia has recently started work on a major project to aggregate its humanities and cultural datasets and provide networked infrastructure (HUNI). All three countries collaborated on Project Bamboo‚ a platform for the provision of humanities-focused tools and infrastructure funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. New Zealand humanities academics have not been involved with any of these initiatives in a meaningful way and have scant expertise in either digital humanities or the development of eResearch infrastructure. Despite that‚ the country is relatively well positioned to leverage existing infrastructure built through the science and technology communities and the government sector into a world-class humanities eResearch infrastructure. Short‚ medium‚ and long-term strategies are needed to increase awareness of eResearch among humanities researchers‚ educate them about ways it can enhance their research‚ and elicit requirements for a Phase 1 humanities eResearch infrastructure. Unlike the science and technology disciplines (and although the HUNI requirements provide a sophisticated point of reference)‚ humanities requirements are likely to be basic and focused more on education and elementary infrastructure provision than computationally intensive services. Opportunities exist‚ nevertheless‚ for significant inter-disciplinary collaboration and the development of data hosting‚ management‚ and preservation services that could offer significant benefits for future researchers. Even if adoption remains low for some time‚ opportunities exist to collaborate with international projects‚ reducing downstream costs by integrating with overseas humanities infrastructures.

The Canterbury region‚ in the South Island of New Zealand‚ experienced two major earthquakes during 2010 and 2011. On September 4 2010 a magnitude 7.1 quake struck at 4.35 am‚ causing widespread damage and two serious injuries. Significant aftershock sequences followed. On February 22 2011 a 6.3 magnitude quake hit at 12.51 pm. This earthquake caused severe damage and resulted in the loss of 185 lives‚ making it the second worst natural disaster in New Zealand history. Like the first‚ the second quake has been followed by thousands of aftershocks‚ including two significant earthquakes on June 13th and three on December 23rd 2011. The University of Canterbury CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive draws on the example of the Centre for History and New Media’s (CHNM) September 11 Archive‚ which was used to collect digital artefacts after the bombing of the World Trade Centre buildings in 2001‚ but has gone significantly further than this project in its development as a federated digital archive. The new University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme – initiated to build the archive – has gathered together a Consortium of major national organizations to contribute content to a federated archive based on principles of openness and collaboration derived directly from the international digital humanities community. Two primary archive ‘nodes’ have been built by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (‘QuakeStories’) and the University of Canterbury (‘QuakeStudies’) to collect content from the public and researchers respectively‚ and a ‘front window (www.ceismic.org.nz) has been provided by the University of Canterbury to bond the Consortium‚ raise funds‚ and provide a platform for future aggregated search functions‚ which will be powered by New Zealand’s bespoke cultural heritage schema maintained by Digital NZ. Other nodes in the federation include The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa‚ the National Library‚ Christchurch City Libraries‚ NZ On Screen‚ the Canterbury Museum and the New Zealand Film Archive. The aim is to create a permanent record of digital objects for both present and future generations. To this end the technical requirements for QuakeStudies have been reviewed by the National Digital Heritage Archive with a view to ingesting significant subsets of content (if not creating a complete dark archive) for long-term preservation. Significant attention has been paid during the design process to multi-cultural and multi-lingual requirements‚ to ensure content from a broad range of New Zealand communities can be ingested and researched. Future development aims to create a bi-lingual interface in English and Māori.

The Canterbury region‚ in the South Island of New Zealand‚ experienced two major earthquakes during 2010 and 2011. On September 4 2010 a magnitude 7.1 quake struck at 4.35 am‚ causing widespread damage and two serious injuries. Significant aftershock sequences followed. On February 22 2011 a 6.3 magnitude quake hit at 12.51 pm. This earthquake caused severe damage and resulted in the loss of 181 lives‚ making it the second worst natural disaster in New Zealand history. Like the first‚ the second quake has been followed by thousands of aftershocks‚ including two significant earthquakes on June 13th 2011. The University of Canterbury CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive draws on the example of the Centre for History and New Media’s (CHNM) September 11 Archive‚ which was used to collect digital artefacts after the bombing of the World Trade Centre buildings in 2001‚ but has gone significantly further than this project in its development as a federated digital archive. The new University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme – initiated to build the archive – has gathered together a Consortium of major national organizations to contribute content to a federated archive based on principles of openness and collaboration derived directly from the international digital humanities community. Two primary archive ‘nodes’ have been built by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (‘QuakeStories’) and the University of Canterbury (‘QuakeStudies’) to collect content from the public and researchers respectively‚ and a ‘front window (www.ceismic.org.nz) has been provided by the University of Canterbury to bond the Consortium‚ raise funds‚ and provide a platform for future aggregated search functions‚ which will be powered by New Zealand’s bespoke cultural heritage schema maintained by Digital NZ. Other nodes in the federation include The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa‚ the National Library‚ Christchurch City Libraries‚ NZ On Screen‚ and the Canterbury Museum. The aim is to create a permanent record of digital objects for both present and future generations. To this end the technical requirements for QuakeStudies have been reviewed by the National Digital Heritage Archive with a view to ingesting significant subsets of content (if not creating a complete dark archive) for long-term preservation. Significant attention has been paid during the design process to multi-cultural and multi-lingual requirements‚ to ensure content from a broad range of New Zealand communities can be ingested and researched. Future development aims to create a bi-lingual interface in English and Māori. The story behind the UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive goes somewhat further than other similar digital archives. Not only is it being used to initiate New Zealand’s first Digital Humanities programme‚ but it hopes to fulfil an important role in the cultural and intellectual recovery of the Canterbury region following the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. New Zealand is a country with significant levels of technology uptake‚ and the vast majority of content produced following the earthquakes was created in digital form. As the central focus of the recovery efforts was‚ of necessity‚ focussed on the physical and spiritual well-being of the Canterbury public‚ it was quite possible that large amounts of valuable content would be lost to future generations. This altered somewhat after the initial phase of critical response ended‚ only to be replaced with new issues. Various institutions began gathering digital content into their separate repositories‚ but no co-ordinated approach was taken‚ creating a situation where disparate ‘nodes’ of content might be stored with little possibility of sharing and reuse. It was becoming possible that‚ although terabytes of content would be captured‚ future generations of citizens and researchers would need to go to myriad different archives‚ each with their own metadata standards‚ in order to get a complete picture of events. Aside from the obvious inconvenience of this‚ such a situation would seriously constrain the possibility of sophisticated downstream data analysis and content reuse. The digital humanities ethos of sharing and open collaboration has had a significant positive effect in this context. Consistent recourse to the digital humanities’ message of collaboration has fostered a culture of trust that has in turn allowed an extremely broad Consortium to be initiated. Although there is little chance that the resulting federation will be technically seamless‚ this has allowed potential conflicts of interest to be put aside and technical discussions to start at a relatively early stage in proceedings‚ significantly enhancing the chances of developing a highly functional distributed archive. Additionally‚ the digital humanities’ emphasis on open communication and community engagement has fostered a healthy culture across the federation‚ which has contributed significantly to the success of the project. This is represented most forcefully in the use of not only crowd-sourcing techniques‚ but a mobile recording studio fitted out with video and audio equipment‚ that has been taken to the suburbs of Christchurch to record public reaction to the earthquakes. This pro-active approach‚ coupled with robust attention to project structure‚ governance and human ethics‚ has created not only a digital archive‚ but a community of friends and partners‚ and a vibrant new digital humanities programme. The project is also unusual for a digital humanities project in it becoming a flagship project for the broader university. Although the project and research teams are predominantly from the arts and humanities‚ close collaboration is also occurring with computer scientists‚ health researchers‚ social scientists and economists. As with the interest from New Zealand’s national heritage agencies‚ digital humanities principles of collaboration and sharing‚ combined with well-considered metadata ontologies and system architecture‚ has prompted the project to occupy a central position in the post-earthquake recovery landscape. More than just an IT project‚ the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive is providing local‚ national and international public and researchers with a forum for discussion‚ organization and collaboration as well as a heritage asset in itself. This paper will outline the project and present a model that will hopefully allow our approach to be reproduced in similar post-disaster recovery situations. Key to this model is the conscious use of digital humanities methodologies such as crowd-sourcing‚ community building and attention to open metadata ontologies and open access principles to create a robust and functional federated archive system. The model has several benefits‚ including the ability to develop a ‘distributed nodal network’ of archives and repositories independently‚ thus reducing the need for centralisation that would encumber development‚ but it requires a long-term vision and a strong governance framework to ensure the federation holds together and organizations feel comfortable sharing content. Similarly‚ while it offers excellent potential for teaching and research across the humanities as a whole‚ the relatively advanced nature of the project provides limited opportunity to involve students in system development. Instead‚ the project has created internships that will see students working as ‘curators’ on the research node in the federation‚ uploading content and taking responsibility for metadata quality and the integrity of manual procedures.

Presented at DHN2021 as part of the panel discussion ’Towards deterioration‚ disappearance or destruction? Discussing the critical issue of long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects’‚ chaired by Mats Fridlund (University of Gothenburg) and with Jessica Parland-von Essen (Senior Coordinator at CSC– IT Center for Science‚ Finland) and Victoria Johansson (Deputy Director of Lund University Humanities Lab‚ Sweden).

My talk about Research Software Engineering (RSE) career paths for the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network workshop ’Capacity Enhancement in DH: Training and Beyond’‚ 15 December 2020.

Digital Humanities laboratories‚ where teams of software engineers collaborate with researchers on work ranging from large funded projects to sundry experiments‚ provide unexpected insights into the current state and future potential of the humanities. King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London – a large team by contemporary standards - demonstrates how these facilities contribute to theory‚ method‚ and the wider knowledge environment. This talk describes KDL from methodological‚ epistemological‚ technological‚ and business perspectives in an attempt to align the lab to the longue durée of history. The ‘collision’ of these elements in the physical space of a central London laboratory offers a complex interpretative domain‚ as rich in potential meaning and implication as scientific laboratories studied in earlier decades. The various methodologies used in the lab present a complex entanglement of humans and machines with the economics of contemporary academia‚ but also an experimental space where the future of the humanities is - for better or worse - being influenced.

Digital research laboratories exist at a cross-road where research‚ business‚ finance‚ technology‚ and HR meet. Set against the post-Enlightenment history of scientific research they are a recent phenomenon‚ however‚ still evolving their infrastructure‚ tools‚ and methods. This has led to a range of issues related to software engineering process‚ infrastructure design and maintenance‚ archiving and maintenance‚ recruitment and retention and job satisfaction‚ and – ultimately – the quality of their research outputs. This talk discusses these issues in the context of King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London‚ a team of 13 Research Software Engineers (RSEs). Launched in 2015 the lab builds on over 30 years of activity in Digital Humanities at King’s‚ and is branching out into Digital Social Science‚ and Digital Creativity. Work ranges from building digital object repositories and scholarly digital editions to data analysis and visualization‚ and more recently immersive experiences‚ photogrammetry‚ and XR. Drawing on research in Science & Technology Studies (STS) and the history of computing‚ the lab’s activities are informed by a philosophy that helps it manage complexity and thrive. This talk will provide some historical context for the work of digital laboratories‚ outline KDL’s approach to software engineering and HR‚ and consider some issues related to problem solving and capability building.

Misremembering Machines details a collaboration between an SME game company and an embedded Digital Humanities (DH) Research Software Engineer (RSE) to study the effect of memory on AI driven storytelling. The RSE is both a developer and a writer‚ uniquely suited to providing technical and creative feedback‚ and providing the connective tissue between the development and critical strands of the project. The project centred around translating an immersive theatre show into a video game‚ where AI characters replace the interactive audience elements. The AI characters dissemble‚ misremember and outright lie about the player’s actions and choices. This translation raised a series of interrelated technical‚ social‚ and creative issues related to agency‚ bias and representation in AI driven storytelling‚ as well as the challenge of effective collaboration between different academic disciplines and the creative industries.

A 5 minute introduction to the ’digital’ workshop theme.

A 10 minute overview of processes for digital preservation at King’s Digital Lab.

King’s College London eResearch was established in 2017‚ to increase digital research capability across the university. Its mandate extends from technical infrastructure to human resources‚ skills development‚ and training. One of our priorities has been to identify a community of research software professionals‚ and define clear career pathways for them. Our career development model is being trialled in King’s Digital Lab (KDL)‚ a digital humanities and social science laboratory hosted in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. The model requires permanent contracts and defines clear promotion pathways‚ from entry level to Senior and Principal roles. Each role is aligned to IT and industry standards using the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). A promotions process requires staff to produce a portfolio‚ for assessment by an independent panel comprising the Vice Dean Research‚ Head of Professional Services‚ and external reviewers. The career development model is being circulated to local‚ national‚ and international colleagues‚ and will be freely distributed after the KDL trial is complete. The hope is that‚ rather than being a constraining model that restricts our understanding of what a ‘Research Software’ professional can be (either inside or outside King’s College London)‚ it is built on and adapted for local circumstances. The long-term hope is that‚ by working to define local career pathways‚ we can contribute to professionalisation‚ job security‚ and job mobility in the UK and overseas. This talk will provide an overview of the career development pathway‚ a description of key roles and policies‚ and insight into issues that will be noted in the end of trial report’.

An overview of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) in King’s Digital Lab.

This talk will outline a chapter in James’ current monograph project‚ ‘The Digital Modern: Humanities and New Media’ (Palgrave Macmillan)‚ due for completion in 2016. The chapter explores issues raised by the intensive use of software by humanities researchers‚ through the lens of debates about ‘software-intensive science’ that are troubling scientific research communities. The goal is to define what software-intensive humanities research is‚ and to explore its implications for daily practice and epistemology. One impact‚ for example‚ is to alter practice towards a laboratory-like model where research proceeds through the development and use of tools designed to enhance (or in some cases make possible) research outputs. Such work is embedded in sets of practices and experiences that need to be understood if we are to fully understand the impact of digital modernity on research practices in the humanities‚ and has special implications for people involved in the development of humanities research laboratories.

The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive was established to collect‚ preserve and make publically available content related to the devastating earthquakes that hit Canterbury‚ New Zealand‚ following a 7.1 magnitude tremor on September 4th 2010. The earthquakes took 185 lives‚ and led to damage to the built environment estimated to exceed 40 billion. The archive was developed in the context of an ongoing disaster situation involving over 12‚000 aftershocks lasting two years. The CEISMIC collection is fast approaching 100‚000 items – a considerable size for a digital humanities project – and significant datasets have been identified for inclusion in the future‚ but the project is still better described as an example of ‘difficult data’ than ‘big data’. Archiving and describing major collections of video‚ audio‚ images‚ and documents presents difficulties of system design and maintenance that surpass that of even genuinely ‘big data’ projects in the commercial world and hard sciences. Rather than indicating that big data has become the central problem of large cultural heritage collections‚ then‚ UC CEISMIC indicates ongoing attention needs to be paid to collecting‚ managing‚ and analyzing ‘difficult data’.

The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive contains tens of thousands of high value cultural heritage items related to a long series of earthquakes that hit Canterbury‚ New Zealand‚ from 2010 - 2012. The archive was built by a Digital Humanities team located at the center of the disaster in New Zealand’s second largest city‚ Christchurch. The project quickly became complex‚ not only in its technical aspects but in its governance and general management. This talk will provide insight into the national and international management and governance frameworks used to successfully build and deliver the archive into operation. Issues that needed to be managed included human ethics‚ research ethics‚ stakeholder management‚ communications‚ risk management‚ curation and ingestion policy‚ copyright and content licensing‚ and project governance. The team drew heavily on industry-standard project management methods for the basic approach‚ but built their ecosystem and stakeholder trust on principles derived directly form the global digital humanities community.

Meet James Smithies from Kings College in London (UK)‚ Steve Crouch from the Software Sustainability Institute/Southampton (UK) and Keith Gutfreund from Elsevier‚ Boston (USA).