Trading Zones of Digital History

Doctoral thesis (2019)

As long as there have been computers, there have been scholars pulling at historians, challenging them to use these computers for historical research. Yet what role computers can have in historical ... [more ▼]

As long as there have been computers, there have been scholars pulling at historians, challenging them to use these computers for historical research. Yet what role computers can have in historical research is a matter of continuous debate. Under the signifier of “digital history”, historians have experimented with tools, concepts, and methods from other disciplines, mostly computer science and computational linguistics, to benefit the historical discipline. The collaborations that emerge through these experiments can be characterised as a two-sided uncertainty: historians uncertain how they as historians should use digital methods, and computational experts uncertain how digital methods should work with historical data sets. The opportunity that arises from these uncertainties is that historians and computational experts need to negotiate the methods and concepts under development. In this thesis, I investigate these negotiations as trading zones, as local spaces of negotiation. These negotiations are characterised as a duality of boundary practices. First, boundary crossing, the crossing of boundaries of disciplines, discourses, and institutions to collaborate. Second, boundary construction, the establishment of boundaries of groups and communities to preserve disciplinary values and remain recognisable as part of a community of practice. How boundary crossing and construction are balanced, whether disciplinary boundaries are shifted, and to what extent historians’ practices are transformed by continued interaction with computational experts, are open questions demanding closer scrutiny. These considerations lead to the research question underlying this thesis: how are historians affected by interactions with computational experts in the context of digital history collaborations? I investigate this question through a mixed-methods, multi-sited ethnographic approach, consisting of an open online survey which received 173 responses, 4.5 years of observations at the University of Luxembourg, 37 interviews, and an LDA topic modelling analysis of 10,918 blog posts from 73 historians between 2008-2017. Through these approaches, I examine trading zones as configured by three different dimensions. First, connectedness, the extent to which collaborators connect with one another through physical proximity, communication, and the sharing of practices. Second, power asymmetry, the extent to which participants shape their own field of action as well as the fields of action of their collaborators. Third, cultural maintenance, the extent to which collaborators become more alike or stay apart by adopting new practices or displacing previous practices. On a macro level, referring to the global historical discipline, I conclude that methodological approaches developed in local trading zones have hardly diffused to macro solutions. Insofar digital infrastructures were appropriated in the macro community, these were aligned with traditional practices. Rather than transforming historical scholarship, the challenge was to provide infrastructures congruent with existing values and practices. On a meso level, referring to the historians engaged in digital history trading zones, I conclude that the effect of interactions was dependent on individual decisions and incentives. Some historians experimented with or adopted computational practices and concepts. Yet other historians detached their work from the shared objective of a collaboration in order to reduce risks, as well as to maintain disciplinary practices. The majority of participants in trading zones were scholars from the humanities, physically distant from collaborators, communicating more often with disciplinary peers than with cross-disciplinary collaborators. As such, even when participating in trading zones of digital history, a significant number of historians remained aligned with traditional practices. Changing practices were regularly not in the direction of computational practices, but to incentives of politics or funding. While historians that participated in digital history trading zones therefore did learn new practices, this did not entail a computational transformation of their scholarship. Finally, on a micro level, some historians chose to engage intensively with computational experts. I call these individuals digital history brokers, who exemplified significant shifts in practices. Brokers conducted project management; coordinated practices from archival and library domains such as data collection, transformation, and description; learned about the potential and limitations of computational technologies and where to apply these; employed inter-languages to translate between the different collaborating domains; and finally transformed historical questions into infrastructural problems. Digital history brokers thereby not only developed interactional expertise to collaborate with computational experts. They furthermore developed political proficiency to negotiate the socio- economic potential of digital history strategies with politics, university administrators, and funding agencies. I therefore describe the practices of brokers as infrastructuring, covering a duality of negotiations. First, cross-disciplinary socio-technical negotiations with computational experts how to support scholarly practices with digital technology. Second, intra-disciplinary socio-political negotiations how to diffuse those practices within the community of practice. Digital history brokers therefore transform their own practices, so that other historians do not have to on meso or macro levels, but can employ digitised sources and digital methodology through infrastructures in a fashion that naturally fits into their practices as historians. I thereby provide a critical view on digital history grounded in how it is conducted and negotiated. This thesis is therefore aimed mainly at scholars interested in digital history and its relation to the historical discipline and to digital humanities, as well as scholars interested in studying digital history as a specific case of cross-disciplinarity. [less ▲]

Unpacking Collaboration in Digital History Projects

Scientific Conference (2017)

Digital History Projects As Boundary Objects

Scientific Conference (2017)

Trading Zones of Digital History

Presentation (2016)

AXES-RESEARCH — A user-oriented tool for enhanced multimodal search and retrieval in audiovisual libraries

in 2014 12th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) (2014)

AXES, Access for Audiovisual Archives, is a research project developing tools for new engaging ways to interact with audiovisual libraries, integrating advanced audio and video analysis technologies. The ... [more ▼]

AXES, Access for Audiovisual Archives, is a research project developing tools for new engaging ways to interact with audiovisual libraries, integrating advanced audio and video analysis technologies. The presented prototype is targeted at academic researchers and journalists. The tool allows them to search and retrieve video segments through metadata, audio analysis, as well as visual concepts and similarity searches. Presented here is a user-based vision on the research-oriented tool provided by AXES. [less ▲]

Just Google It

in Mills, Clare; Pidd, Michael; Ward, Esther (Eds.) Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 (2014)

The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the ... [more ▼]

The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data is whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average search skills of researchers. To gain insight into this process we conducted a survey among nearly three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium with the aim of finding answers to the following questions: 1) To what extent are digital databases and archives used? 2) What are the preferences in search functionalities 3) Are there differences in search strategies between novices and experts of information retrieval? Our results show that while scholars actively engage in research online they mainly search for text and images. General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana are rarely consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines, and mostly use keywords. Our overall findings indicate that Google is the key player among available search engines. This dominant use illustrates the paradoxical attitude of scholars toward Google: while provenance and context are deemed key academic requirements, the workings of the Google algorithm remain unclear. We conclude that Google introduces a black box into digital scholarly practices, indicating scholars will become increasingly dependent on such black boxed algorithms. This calls for a reconsideration of the academic principles of provenance and context. [less ▲]

Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age (Dataset)

Textual, factual or bibliographical database (2013)

Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age

in Icono 14 (2013), 11(2), 163--181

With an ever-growing supply of online sources, information to produce news sto- ries seems to be one mouse click away. But in what way do Dutch journalists actual- ly use computer-aided research tools ... [more ▼]

With an ever-growing supply of online sources, information to produce news sto- ries seems to be one mouse click away. But in what way do Dutch journalists actual- ly use computer-aided research tools? This article provides an inventory of the ways journalists use digital (re)sources and explores the differences between experts and novices. We applied a combined methodological approach by conducting an ethno- graphic study as well as a survey. Results show that Dutch journalists use relatively few digital tools to find online information. However, journalists who can be conside- red experts in the field of information retrieval use a wider range of search engines and techniques, arrive quicker at the angle to their story, and are better at finding information related to this angle. This allows them to spend more time on writing their news story. Novices are more dependent on the information provided by others. [less ▲]

Just Google It - Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars (Dataset)

Textual, factual or bibliographical database (2013)

Who are the users of a video search system? Classifying a heterogeneous group with a profile matrix

in 2012 13th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (2012)

Formulating requirements for a video search system can be a challenging task when everyone is a possible user. This paper explores the possibilities of classifying users by creating a Profile Matrix ... [more ▼]

Formulating requirements for a video search system can be a challenging task when everyone is a possible user. This paper explores the possibilities of classifying users by creating a Profile Matrix, placing users on two axes: experience and goal-directedness. This enables us to describe the characteristics of the subgroups and investigate differences between the different groups. We created Profile Matrices by classifying 850 respondents of a survey regarding a requirements study for a video search system. We conclude that the Profile Matrix indeed enables us to classify subgroups of users and describe their characteristics. The current research is limited to descriptions of subgroups and analysis of differences between these subgroups. In the future, we want to research what these differences mean with regard to the users’ performance and acceptance of a video search system and explore the use of a profile matrix for other types of search systems. [less ▲]