Silke Schwandt (ed.) Digital Methods in the Humanities

#### **Editorial**

Digital Humanities is an evolving, cross cutting field within the humanities employing computer based methods. Research in this field, therefore, is an interdisciplinary endeavor that often involves researchers from the humanities as well as from computer science. This collaboration influences the methods applied as well as the theories underlying and informing research within those different fields. These implications need to be addressed according to the traditions of different humanities' disciplines. Therefore, the edition addresses all humanities disciplines in which digital methods are employed. **Digital Humanities Research** furthers publications from all those disciplines addressing the methodological and theoretical implications of the application of digital research in the humanities. The series is edited by Silke Schwandt, Anne Baillot, Andreas Fickers, Tobias Hodel and Peter Stadler.

**Silke Schwandt** (Prof. Dr.), born 1980, teaches Digital and Medieval History at Bielefeld University. She received her PhD in Medieval History from Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in 2010. Her research focus in Digital History lies with the transformation of scholarly practices through digitalization and with the advancement of digital literacy.

Silke Schwandt (ed.) **Digital Methods in the Humanities**

Challenges, Ideas, Perspectives

This volume has been prepared within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing the World", Bielefeld University, Germa-

ny, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

#### **Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek**

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

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**© Silke Schwandt (ed.)**

#### **© First published in 2021 by Bielefeld University Press, an Imprint of transcript Verlag**

http://www.bielefeld-university-press.de

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Proofread by Julia Becker, Bielefeld Typeset by Michael Rauscher, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5419-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5419-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839454190

Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

# **Introduction** Digital Humanities in Practice

*Silke Schwandt*1

# **Digital methods for humanities research: chances and challenges**

Digital Humanities (DH) is a growing field within the Humanities dealing with the application of digital methods to humanities research on the one hand as well as addressing questions about the inf luence of digital practices on research practices within the different humanities disciplines on the other. Edward Vanhoutte differentiates between computing methods being used "*for* and *in* the humanities".2 In his view the field of Digital Humanities, which was referred to as Humanities Computing before 2004, profited from the fact that the development of the first electronic computers were well underway during the Second World War, but were only fully operational after the war was over. This meant that their original military purpose, primarily in the field of ballistics and cryptanalysis, became obsolete, and the developers involved started looking for new operational scenarios in which the computers could be put to use. This failure, as Vanhoutte puts

1 I want to thank all contributors to this volume for their articles as well as their patience and dedication during our collaboration. The same goes for all members of team INF without whom this volume would not have been possible. This is especially true for Julia Becker, who proofread this volume and made it into what it is today. This book has been written within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing. Changing and Ordering the World", Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

2 *Vanhoutte, Edward*, The Gates of Hell: History and Definition of Digital | Humanities | Computing, in: Melissa M. Terras/Julianne Nyhan/Edward Vanhoutte (eds.), Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2016, 119–156, 120.

it, allowed the computers to be used in the field of the humanities, especially in machine translation, from the 1950s onwards.3 Clearly, this marks the beginning of the use of computing *for* the humanities, rather than *in* the humanities. Although Vanhoutte argues that both aspects can never be fully separated from each other, most digital practices can usually be attributed more to the one than to the other. At first glance, automatic word-by-word translations seem to be the attempt to use the computer in a clearly framed environment where the researchers trusted that its abilities would do exactly what they expected. It was only when the automatic translations started to provide unexpected results that the researchers started to think about their perception and understanding of the – in this case English – language while looking for explanations for the mistakes the computer made. Vanhoutte refers to Roberto Busa who "identified the major problem with research in Machine Translation not as the inadequacy of computers to deal with human language, but as man's insufficient comprehension of human languages".4 Busa himself is one of the earliest and most important pioneers in Humanities Computing, or Digital Humanities, since he started a cooperation with IBM in order to create a concordance of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1940s. His relatively early assessment demonstrates the impact that the use of computational, or digital, methods can have on our understanding of the humanities as a research field and on the objects of that research. Busa hints at the necessity to alter our conceptions of language rather than looking for computational miscalculations. It is this impact that substantiates the apprehension that the field of Digital Humanities (or Humanities Computing as it was called during his time) is not only an advanced methodology but a research field in its own right. The vastness of such a field that might encompass any digital practices in the humanities – from communication practices to data management and data mining – accounts for the lack of a formal definition of what Digital Humanities actually is. The website "What is Digital Humanities" alone offers 817 different definitions collected by the

3 *E. Vanhoutte*, The Gates of Hell, 120–123.

4 *E. Vanhoutte*, The Gates of Hell, 125. Vanhoutte refers to *Busa, Roberto,* The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus, in: Computers and the Humanities 14 (1980), 83–90, 86.

project "Day of DH" from 2009 to 2014.5 Helene Schlicht and Anna Maria Neubert offer more insight into the definitions, workings, and self-determinations of Digital Humanities in their respective contributions to this volume.6

The historical account of Edward Vanhoutte shows one thing for sure that is also present in most Digital Humanities definitions: DH is a genuinely interdisciplinary endeavor. It brings together two very distinct research areas, Computer Science and the humanities, as well as many diverse research disciplines, methods and questions. The productive interaction between computer scientists and humanities researchers is one of the biggest chances and at the same time the biggest challenge in DH. As shown in the example from the early days of automated text analysis, the use of computational methods can inspire new research in the humanities. Unfortunately, their implementation is also often seen as an unnecessary and time consuming undertaking that only reproduces results that could have been generated by 'traditional' methods as well.7 This impression leads to the assumption that DH is merely about methodology and focuses too much on the digital side of things, highlighting the results rendered by the application of digital tools to (mostly) text material. The innovative potential of interdisciplinary research of this kind is easily overlooked and downplayed. While it is absolutely necessary that research projects in DH offer interesting perspectives for both Computer Science and the humanities, the tendency to overemphasize the value of the new and advanced computer technologies belittles the importance of the humanities. Regardless of the alleged progress that comes with digitalization or the supposedly higher objectivity inherent in empirical data, it is still necessary and will remain essential to interpret the results produced by computational methods to arrive at reliable propositions.

5 *Heppler, Jason*, What Is Digital Humanities, https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ [accessed: 21.08.2019].

6 See the contributions of Helene Schlicht and Anna Maria Neubert in this volume.

7 See for a similar discussion *Schwandt, Silke*, Digitale Objektivität in Der Geschichtswissenschaf t? Oder: Kann Man Finden, Was Man Nicht Sucht?, in: Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 24 (2016), 337–338. doi:10.12946/rg24/337-338.

### **1. Doing DH in Bielefeld: data infrastructure and Digital Humanities**

In 2017, the German Research Foundation (DFG) granted funding to the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) "Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing the World".8 The Research Center consists of fourteen individual subprojects led by researchers from many different humanities disciplines, such as History, Literary Studies, Art History, Political Science, and Law. Situated at the heart of the center is the infrastructural project INF "Data Infrastructure and Digital Humanities" which is "responsible for supervising all data- and information-related activities by providing a collaborative digital work and research environment for the whole SFB."9 The project comprises expertise from the field of computer and information science as well as from the humanities, thus being well positioned to advise the other subprojects and to further the development of digital methods for the humanities. The main trajectories of the INF project include the implementation of a communication and project management tool for the Research Center as well as a data publication platform, where all historical source material is made available in digital formats. These aspects belong to the field of Research Data Management. Additionally, INF also supports the researchers in all questions regarding the use of digital methods for their subprojects. After developing a workf low for the digitization of documents with the help of OCR tools,10 we advised six projects in total on how to tackle their research interests by using digital methods. They come from a variety of humanities disciplines and used different tools and analytical methods.

At the core of our work lies the task of modeling.11 The practice of modeling may not be totally unknown to humanities scholars, although it has not yet been extensively discussed as such. Modeling seems to belong to the Sciences and has long been described as one of their core scholarly practices – especially in Physics. The need to implement the practice of modeling into

8 *Universität Bielefeld*, SFB 1288, Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing the World, https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/sfb1288/ [accessed: 21.08.2019].

9 *Universität Bielefeld*, SFB 1288, TP INF, Data Infrastructure and Digital Humanities, https:// www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/sfb1288/projekte/inf.html [accessed: 21.08.2019].

10 This workflow is described in detail in the contribution to this volume by Patrick Jentsch and Stephan Porada.

11 Anna Maria Neubert describes our work in detail in her contribution to this volume.

the humanities comes from the wish to productively interact with computational methods. Digital tools need a model to work with, an explicit and consistent representation of the world. Humanities researchers may have such representations at hand for the time periods, societies, etc., which they regard as their research objects. But they seldom frame them as a model. Willard McCarty defines such models as "either *a representation of something for purposes of study*, or *a design for realizing something new*."12 In our work at the Research Center we learned that modeling in order to build a representation for purposes of study is essentially a process of translation and transformation. It requires a great deal of communication and mutual understanding. Working in the humanities calls for adaptable interpretations that form, for example, our narrations of the past. Computer scientists, on the other hand, are trained to solve problems by finding one answer to any question. Therefore, the process of modeling does pose a challenge, especially to the humanities researcher. But it also opens up new ways of interacting with our knowledge about our research material and questions. McCarty points out two effects of computing to that end: "first, the computational demand for tractability, i. e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides".13 In my opinion, it is the second effect, the manipulability of digital representations that offers the most interesting possibilities for the humanities. After using one distinct, explicit, and consistent model to arrive at that representation, the interpreter can always go back and change his or her presuppositions. Often, the digital representation that offers ways of manipulation is realized through visualizations.14 These can be graphs, diagrams, trees, or network visualizations. Martyn Jessop sees the strength of digital tools of visualization in "[…] the ability of these tools to allow visual perception to be used in the creation or discovery of new knowledge."15 He stresses that in using visualization tools knowledge is not only "transferred, revealed, or perceived, but is created through a dynamic process."16 He also claims that "[digital visualiza-

12 *McCarty, Willard*, Humanities Computing, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 24.

13 *W. McCarty*, Humanities Computing, 25.

14 *Jessop, Martyn*, Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity, in: Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (2008), 281–293. doi:10.1093/llc/fqn016.

15 *M. Jessop*, Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity, 282.

16 *M. Jessop*, Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity, 282.

tion] allows manipulation of both the graphical representation and the data it is derived from."17 Therefore, each visualization represents a certain interpretation of the source data, which depends on a manipulated version of that data. Bettina Heintz, a German sociologist working on the epistemological challenges posed by scientific visualizations, discusses the practice of such manipulations as one of the central practices in working with digital tools. The information behind the visualization is "altered, filtered, smoothed, and adjusted, until there is a relation between the expected and the presented".18 This practice does not only happen at the beginning of the research process but also over and over again during the research process. Interacting with digital tools in this way is a "genuinely experimental process".19 As McCarty says, "modelling problematizes".20 Hence, through visualization, the process of modeling can be continuously reevaluated. Modeling, as well as visualizing, enables humanities researchers to explore their digitalized source material in new ways. "As a tool of research, then, modelling succeeds intellectually when it results in failure, either directly within the model itself or indirectly through ideas it shows to be inadequate."21 What McCarty calls 'failure' could also be framed as 'productive irritation' – something that irritates the expectations of the researchers, which differs from their previous knowledge in such a way that it inspires new ideas about the allegedly wellknown material.22

Six of the individual research projects in the Research Center at Bielefeld University have taken up this challenge and decided to evaluate digital methods for their humanities research. They joined the team of project INF in modeling their research ideas so that we could find digital tools that would help to answer those questions. In line with the overall research interests

17 *M. Jessop*, Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity, 238.

18 *Heintz, Bettina/Huber, Jörg*, Der verführerische Blick: Formen und Folgen wissenschaf tlicher Visualisierungsstrategien, in: Bettina Heintz/Jörg Huber (eds.), Mit dem Auge denken: Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaf tlichen und virtuellen Welten (Theorie:Gestaltung 01), Zürich/Wien/New York: Voldemeer; Springer, 2001, 31.

22 See *Schwandt, Silke*, Digitale Methoden Für Die Historische Semantik: Auf Den Spuren Von Begrif fen in Digitalen Korpora, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaf t 44 (2018), 107–134 for the idea of such productive irritation.

of the SFB 1288, these research questions all focus on practices of comparing while addressing such practices in different times, different genres or media, and performed by different historical actors. Practices of comparing seem to be ubiquitous – even today. What makes them historically interesting are the situational contexts in which they are being used, where they either stabilize certain ideas and structures or re-organize and change them. Comparing the modern West to the rest of the world, generating narratives of supremacy or eurocentrism, seems almost natural. The analysis of the emergence and the development of this specific comparison as well as the careful scrutiny of the situations in which this comparison is being made of fer new insights into the development of nation states, of racism, and much more.23 Digital tools of annotation and text analysis have proven to be especially useful in supporting research into practices of comparing since they allow, for example, simultaneous viewing of results as well as the detection of speech patterns representing specific modes of comparing. At the same time, DH methods are themselves often comparative and, therefore, implementing them makes it imperative to ref lect on our own practices of comparing.24

# **2. Matching research practices and digital tools**

The research projects, which serve as the basis for the contributions to this volume, all deal with textual material. It was therefore necessary to find tools for automatic textual analysis that would match the different underlying research questions. As text analysis tools we decided to work with *Voyant Tools* and *AntConc*. They both offer ample possibilities to calculate word frequencies, compile concordances, among other things, as well as provide visualizations of patterns within text documents or corpora.

23 *Epple, Angelika/Erhart, Walter*, Die Welt beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens, in: Angelika Epple/Walter Erhart (eds.), Die Welt beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens, Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2015, 7–31.

24 *Neubert, Anna/Schwandt, Silke*, Comparing in the Digital Age. The Transformation of Practices, in: Angelika Epple/Walter Erhart /Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020 [in print].

Voyant Tools is a web platform containing several open access text analysis tools.25 It was developed by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair and is freely accessible on the web. The tools available operate mainly on word frequencies as well as the calculations of word distances. They span from well-known applications such as word cloud visualizations *(Cirrus)* to more elaborate tools focusing on the calculation of word repetitions throughout a text *(Knots)*. 26 For the purposes of the projects in this volume the scope of tools provided by Rockwell and Sinclair is enough. In practice, it seems to be especially appealing to literary scholars and their interests in the use, frequency, and distribution of words and phrases throughout a text. Malte Lorenzen makes use of Voyant Tools in his article "Testing Hypotheses with Dirty OCR and Web-Based Tools in Periodical Studies".27 One of the tools he uses is Cirrus, the world cloud tool. Although the developers claim that word clouds "are limited in their interactivity […] [and] do not allow exploration and experimentation",28 Lorenzen uses a series of these clouds to achieve just that. Confronting the different clouds with each other renders them exploratory after all through the practice of comparing. At the center of this comparison lies data that can be viewed as a representation of text, or rather as information about text. Rockwell and Sinclair claim that, in general, "[v] isualizations are transformations of text that tend to *reduce* the amount of information presented, but in service of drawing attention to some significant aspect."29 In the case of the word cloud the 'significant aspect' is the frequency of words in relation to each other represented by the relative size of their visualization. Hence, using digital text analysis tools often does not give us concrete or direct information about texts as a whole but about words, or character combinations, that need to be related to textual documents as superordinated, larger units before they can be interpreted. As Rockwell and Sinclair put it, "the magic of digital texts is that they are composed of discrete units of information – such as the character unit – that can be infinitely

25 *Rockwell, Geof frey/Sinclair, Stéfan*, Voyant. See through your Text, https://voyant-tools.org/ [accessed: 27.08.2019].

26 *Rockwell, Geof frey/Sinclair, Stéfan*, Tools, https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/tools [accessed: 27.08.2019].

27 See the contribution of Malte Lorenzen in this volume.

28 *G. Rockwell/S. Sinclair*, Text Analysis and Visualization, 276.

29 *G. Rockwell/S. Sinclair*, Text Analysis and Visualization, 276. Highlights in the original.

reorganized and rearranged on algorithmic whims".30 Whether it is magical or not, analyzing small, linguistic units of information instead of reading texts as indivisible entities offers new insights for researchers working on textual material as is being proven by the contributions in this volume. Joris C. Heyder and Christine Peters made use of a tool called AntConc for the same purpose.31 Developed by Laurence Anthony,32 AntConc "is a freeware, multiplatform tool for carrying out corpus linguistics research and datadriven learning".33 Other than Voyant Tools, it is a stand-alone tool that can be downloaded and installed locally on a computer. The tool comprises a Concordance Tool, a Concordance Plot Tool, which of fers a barcode visualization of a keyword in context results, a File View Tool, N-Grams and Collocates Tools as well as Word List and Keyword List Tools. This range of tools is especially useful for studies interested in the word use present in certain documents or corpora. It of fers the possibility to look for words surrounding specific keywords that of fer insight into the concepts represented by words.

The contributors to this volume used digital text analysis tools such as Voyant Tools and AntConc in order to explore new ways to analyze the material they were researching. Rockwell and Sinclair describe two principles that they deem important when engaging with automatic text analysis: "Don't expect too much from the tools [and] [t]ry things out".34 The first is about perspective. "Most tools at our disposal have weak or nonexistent semantic capabilities; they count, compare, track, and represent words, but they do not produce meaning – we do."35 While it seems obvious that the count of words does not carry semantic meaning, it is necessary to keep it in mind while looking for hooks for interpretation. This is also what makes working in DH a challenge. It is imperative to learn how to read visualizations and data as well as we read text. "Visualizations make use of a visual

30 *G. Rockwell/S. Sinclair*, Text Analysis and Visualization, 279.

31 See their contributions in this volume.

32 *Anthony, Laurence*, AntConc Homepage, https://www.laurenceanthony.net/sof tware/ant conc/ [accessed: 27.08.2019].

33 *Anthony, Laurence*, AntConc (Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux), https://www.laurence anthony.net/sof tware/antconc/releases/AntConc358/help.pdf [accessed: 27.08.2019], 1.

34 *G. Rockwell/S. Sinclair*, Text Analysis and Visualization, 288.

35 Ibid., 288.

grammar, just as language requires a linguistic grammar, and we need to be able to parse what we see before attempting to analyze and understand it […]." 36 This is exactly why DH is a genuinely interdisciplinary endeavor making use of two things: digitization, or technologization, and hermeneutic interpretation. New digital technology transforms how we perceive and store information. It changes the ways of (social) interaction and communication. It allows access to vast amounts of information that need new ways of organization. And although these new technologies seem to be constantly evolving and becoming more and more important, it is equally important to make sense of these changes, to gain a new perspective, and to stay in touch with these developments in order to maintain a grip on them. In short: "[A]s digital technologies become increasingly pervasive, the work and skills of Digital Humanists become increasingly important."37

### **3. Digital research perspectives in the humanities**

While it seems to be almost impossible to separate computing *for* the humanities from computing *in* the humanities, the contributions in this volume focus on the implementation of digital methods in different humanities disciplines. By discussing the chances and challenges posed by this methodological endeavor, the contributors also touch on questions of the impact that working with digital tools has on the research practices of their respective fields. Their contributions are accompanied by three articles written by members of the project team INF trying to frame the setting of our collaborative work at Bielefeld University.

Helene Schlicht and Anna Maria Neubert deal with two important aspects of the general setup of our collaborative work within the Research Center in their respective articles. Helene Schlicht focuses on questions of "Open Source, Open Data, and Open Software". She analyzes the "role of Open Science in the research landscape of the humanities in general and DH in particular".38 At present, questions of open access play a prominent role in

36 Ibid*.*, 287.

37 *M. Terras*, Peering inside the Big Tent, 270.

38 See Schlicht, "Open Access, Open Data, Open Sof tware? Proprietary Tools and Their Restrictions" in this volume.

political discussions about and within the humanities. In DH the implementation of open science solutions is much farther along. Schlicht argues that the contention of the two fields might help the advancement of both them. One of the problems she points out is the possible conf lict between disciplines in DH. Anna Maria Neubert also discusses chances and challenges of interdisciplinary work in her contribution explicitly focusing on "Navigating Disciplinary Differences […] Through Project Management".39 While it is not specific to DH projects, project management certainly helps with their organization and execution. It is especially important to take into account the possibly different research interests of the disciplinary groups participating in the projects as well as the different pace in research and publication. Neubert also discusses most of the software tools we used for the organizational side of our collaboration.

In their contribution on "From Text to Data. Digitization, Text Analysis, and Corpus Linguistics",40 Patrick Jentsch and Stephan Porada describe the technical workf lows that we implemented for the collaboration. The main piece of the article deals with the digitization pipeline that was used to render the historic source material machine readable. Including this article into the volume demonstrates how important it is to include computer scientists into DH teams and also to take their research interests seriously. Only then does the collaboration rise to its full potential. It is also elementary to a volume focusing on digital methods to be transparent about every part of those methods and give credit where credit is due.

The contributions in this volume come from the fields of Computer Science, History, Literary Studies, and Art History. They represent the dif ferent approaches to research, dif ferent views and takes on text and interpretation.

One of the biggest challenges for the implementation of digital methods is the availability of digital source material – especially for historically oriented projects. Malte Lorenzen's contribution deals with the chances offered and challenges posed by dirty OCR as a means to test the efficiency of digital methods for periodical studies from a Literary Studies' point of

39 See Neubert, "Navigating Disciplinary Dif ferences in (Digital) Research Projects Through Project Management" in this volume.

40 See Jentsch and Porada, "From Text to Data. Digitization, Text Analysis, and Corpus Linguistics" in this volume.

view. In his own words, his article has "experimental character"41 and shows how exploring digital tools can further humanities research. He argues for a combination of close and distant reading that is necessary to integrate both quantitative digital methods and hermeneutic methods in the humanities, which is a position that can be found in many of the articles. Similar in the general trajectory of his interest in the chances and challenges posed by methods of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and its use for historically oriented research is Joris C. Heyder's article on "Challenging the *Copia*".42 He, also, wants to analyze great amounts of data, which is why a well-functioning OCR is crucial. While Malte Lorenzen uses the digital toolkit Voyant Tools to look for single terms and their usage in his material, Joris C. Heyder uses AntConc and its Concordance Tool to sort through the available material in search for the most interesting texts, building a corpus for his analysis from there.43 Both articles use what we would call big data, but with different research questions and assumptions. Both explore the data with the help of digital tools arriving at different conclusions since they address the data on different levels – Lorenzen looks at the lexical level, whereas Heyder concentrates on the document level. Comparing the two articles demonstrates the manifold applications of digital methods in the humanities. What they have in common is the interest in "quick and dirty" digitization as a means to sort through large amounts of data.44 They go about this task by testing the hypotheses they already have in mind after using traditional hermeneutic methods in designing their projects. Christine Peters follows a similar approach in her article on Alexander von Humboldt and his travel writings.45 Alexander von Humboldt is probably one of the most well-known historical figures in world literature, and beyond. Christine Peters takes on the task of trying to find new perspectives on his travel writings in her contribution.

43 See the discussion of these tools above.

41 See Lorenzen, "Testing Hypotheses with Dirty OCR and Web-Based Tools in Periodical Studies" in this volume.

42 See Heyder, "Challenging the *Copia*. Ways to a Successful Big Data Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Magazines and Treatises on Art Connoisseurship" in this volume.

44 See Heyder, "Challenging the *Copia*. Ways to a Successful Big Data Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Magazines and Treatises on Art Connoisseurship" in this volume.

45 See Peters, "Text Mining, Travel Writing, and the Semantics of the Global. An AntConc Analysis of Alexander von Humboldt's *Reise in die Aequinoktal-Gegenden des Neuen Kontinents*" in this volume.

She combines methods of distant and close reading and develops new techniques for keyword in context searches that render visible what has not yet been seen in Humboldt's travelogue. In doing so the contribution stresses the necessary combination of both digital and humanities methods in text mining. Peters also addresses the question of our own practices of comparing as humanities researchers and sees new opportunities for these in working with digital methods. She applies this combination of methods not only to test them against her own hypotheses but finds new insights into Humboldt's travel writings along the way.

Anna Dönecke focuses more directly on the question of data modeling in historical research.46 In her contribution she assumes that data modeling as a basic operation in Digital Humanities can alter the perspective of historians on their sources. Creating a relational database with information from eighteenth-century court records requires a different understanding of their contents, shifting the focus from content information to features and patterns. Her examples show that implementing methods from computer science such as data modeling produces a genuine surplus for historical research. This is especially true when implementing methods of pattern recognition, Dönecke argues, because this explicitly changes the perspective of the researcher towards his or her source material. Using data models and relational databases forces us to dissect the documents we are interested in into tiny bits of information and to attribute meaning to the common features that can be detected by looking at this information rather than by reading the documents as text. It is this way of interacting with textual sources that poses the biggest challenge to our daily work of interpretation as humanities researchers. The contribution by Marcus Hartner, Ralf Schneider, and Anne Lappert demonstrates this nicely.47 Representing the field of British Literary Studies, the authors went about their project with a clear question in mind. They are interested in the way that the emerging middle class in eighteenth-century Britain represented itself through their morality in contemporary novels. Using Voyant Tools, Hartner et al. look for textual evidence of their hypotheses, but find only little. Their discussion of

46 See Dönecke, "From Serial Sources to Modeled Data. Changing Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Court Records from French Pondicherry" in this volume.

47 See Hartner et al., "Looking for Textual Evidence: Digital Humanities, Middling-Class Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel" in this volume.

this alleged failure is very enlightening for the relationship of digital and traditional methods. Since their research interest rested with a concept instead of a certain term or phrase in the beginning, the authors test several search strategies to find textual evidence matching their presuppositions. They engage with what has been called "screwmeneutics" diving into the digital tools as a means of explorative hermeneutics.48

Digitally enhanced text analysis does not only get more difficult the more complex the task of interpretation is but also the more complex the linguistic structures are that one is looking for. In order to teach sentence structure and the meaning of temporal comparisons to the computer, the tasks of annotating, parsing, and tagging must be applied. The contribution by Willibald Steinmetz, Kirill Postoutenko, Olga Sabelfeld, and Michael Götzelmann discusses the results achieved through tagging in different corpora processed with different taggers, and poses the question whether or not the task of preprocessing is worthwhile when reading and interpreting would do the job at least as fast as the tested taggers did.49 What takes time is building the models that serve as a basis for (semantic) tagging. And while it is necessary and reasonable to think about the ratio of effort and gain in every project design, the contributions in this volume show that engaging with the digital is worthwhile for the humanities.

## **Bibliography**

48 The term was coined by *Ramsay, Stephen*, The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books, in: Kevin Kee (ed.), Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014 [2010].

49 See Steinmetz et al., "The Historical Semantics of Temporal Comparisons Through the Lens of Digital Humanities: Promises and Pitfalls" in this volume.

**I. Challenges for the Humanities**

# **Open Access, Open Data, Open Software?** Proprietary Tools and Their Restrictions

*Helene Schlicht*

# **Open Science and the (Digital) Humanities**

The goal of this article is to popularize Open Science principles and shed light on the role of Open Science in the research landscape of the humanities in general and Digital Humanities (DH) in particular. The commitment to Open Science is widespread among digital humanists but has not yet gained a similar foothold in the research culture of the humanities in general. Despite there being a lot of proprietary solutions of fered for scholars conducting research with the aid of digital methods in the humanities, many digital humanists deem it important to choose only open formats to ensure as much inclusivity as possible (on various levels). It is my intention to make an argument for pushing the implementation of Open Science principles in the humanities and explain why it is crucial – even if it makes work more dif ficult sometimes. As Siemens suggests, I want to explore "the digital humanities' positive role in the process of the humanities' digital self-determination in the digital realm."1

At first the topics discussed in this article may seem to be disparate but I aim to show how they are interwoven and can benefit from and stimulate each other. Open Science principles, if taken seriously, determine the priorities in tool development and usage. As a result, aspects have to be taken into account that would otherwise not have been considered, and a different prioritization of tools and programs needs to come

1 *Siemens, Ray*, Communities of practice, the methodological commons, and digital self-determination in the Humanities., in: Digital Studies/Le champ numérique (2016). http://doi. org/10.16995/dscn.31.

to effect.2 However, the implementation of Open Science principles does not happen without stakeholders who actively advance and enforce them – the implementation of these principles largely depends on the relevance attributed to them by the respective fields and researchers. In my contribution, I want to illustrate how the frictions between Digital Humanities and the broader humanities can be utilized to come to a mutual understanding about the implementation of Open Science principles.

To discuss the topic of Open Science, I will draw on concepts of Open Access because this part of Open Science has already been widely discussed, and from there on broaden the subject to other elements of Open Science. Subsequently, I will link this to the relationship of the humanities and Digital Humanities and its potential for extending the practices of humanities research. Here I also want to point out the noteworthy role of funding agencies and universities in driving this development forward.

### **Why do we need Digital Humanities?**

There is an ongoing discussion about what Digital Humanities is or should be. For this article I will operate with a minimal definition of Digital Humanities and beyond that only address those aspects of Digital Humanities that explain why so many digital humanists emphasize the importance of Open Science. "Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods."3 Although Digital Humanities is still a part of the humanities which is regarded with some suspicion and sometimes only understood as a service provider for research and for the application of tools, as Sahle remarks4 , its

2 This can for example mean to weigh inclusivity and functionality against each other to negotiate if some cutbacks in seamless functioning are worth the enhanced inclusivity and access for other researchers.

3 *Svensson, Patrik*, The Landscape of Digital Humanities, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 4 (2010). http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html.

4 *Sahle, Patrick*, Digital Humanities? Gibt's doch gar nicht!, in: Constanze Baum/Thomas Stäcker (eds.), Grenzen und Möglichkeiten der Digital Humanities (= Sonderband der Zeitschrif t für digitale Geschichtswissenschaf ten, 1), 2015. https://doi.org/10.17175sb001\_004.

resources can be used in a productive way to broaden the methodological (and intellectual) framework of the humanities as a whole.

Sahle points out that "[t]he Digital Humanities […] are embedded in an extensive infrastructure in regard to organization, information, and communication and build upon long traditions in various areas of research. Furthermore, as a link between the humanities and computer science, the field seems to be highly attractive, not only to these areas, but also to neighboring disciplines as well as to the research funding agencies."5

The problem remains that "[w]hen we do try to define [digital humanities] in a way that can lead to action, especially at a local level within an institutional structure, we tend to arrive at institutional- or discipline-specific definitions; these do have some sort of gain in that you can frame digital humanities in the terms of extant structures, but ultimately there's a loss via disciplinarity's constraint in light of current and future growth, narrowing potential collaborative opportunities and limiting the vision of what the intersection points between the humanities and digital could lead to."6 Instead of focusing on disciplinary boundaries I want to direct the focus on a different aspect. Siemens shifts the discussion from questioning Digital Humanities to asking about the role of the humanities at large in the digital age: "How do the humanities fit in a digital age, ref lecting and engaging not only its own traditions but, further, those of other disciplines implicated in, drawn in, partnered with, and fully incorporated and embraced by the methods utilized by the digital humanities. Does it do so by situating itself outside the humanities, outside of the very context that makes digital *humanities* different from other computational enterprises? I'd think not; I'd think we'd ideally work to situate it well within the humanities." 7

This changes the focus inasmuch as it implicitly asserts the necessity for the humanities at large to adjust to changing general conditions of doing research. To attune to the digital age and the changes it inevitably brings, the humanities should make use of the shared practices tested over generations and find a way to best transpose them into the digital realm. Digital Humanities can be of discipline-specific as well as infrastructural aid in the process of translation. One way to do so could be to look at the methodolog-

7 Ibid.

5 Ibid*.*

6 *R. Siemens*, Communities of Practice.

ical commonalities of the (digital) humanities in a sense that "[…] the notion of the community of practice here offers us a framework to consider and understand *who* we are via *what* it is we do, *where* we do what we do, and *why* we do it in the way that we do it. What is most unique about this frame is how it focuses us on the set of practices we share, who we share the practices with and where, on what we apply them, and to what end we do so."8

This is crucial because it helps us ref lect on what would be essential in developing new (software) tools and solutions to encompass shared practices of humanistic inquiry. It is important to keep in mind that software is not neutral, that the digitization is not neutral and that research cannot be transposed into the digital realm without repercussions we need to ref lect on. "[E]ach stage in the digitization […] has, among other things, semiotic, social, cultural and political implications."9 As researchers in the humanities we need to ref lect on those implications of the digitization from different vantage points but also keep our own desiderata in mind. We need to know the requirements of working with digital tools to figure out how to implement them into digital technologies. "If we are interested in creating in our work with digital technologies the subjective, inf lected, and annotated processes central to humanistic inquiry, we must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for our future work. Nothing less than the way we understand knowledge and our tasks as scholars are at stake. Software and hardware only put into effect the models structured into their design."10 As Drucker describes, trying to put processes of humanistic research into practice in tool design requires the participation of those working in the fields of the humanities. Furthermore, trying to integrate Open Science principles into tool development and implementation brings about changes in emphasis. Different aspects of tools become important. The consideration of Open Science principles thereby leads to questions regarding fairness and inclusivity. I will discuss the entanglement of these topics, but first I need to lay the groundwork for this discussion by elaborating on the state of Open Science.

8 Ibid.

9 *Fiormonte, Domenico/Numerico, Teresa/Tomasi, Francesca (eds.)*, The Digital Humanist. A Critical Inquiry, trans. by Desmond Schmidt with Christopher Ferguson, New York: Punctum Books 2015, 17.

10 *Drucker, Johanna*, Blind Spots: Humanists must plan their digital future, in: The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (2009), B6-B8. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Blind-Spots/9348. [Paywalled]

### **Open Science, Open Access, Open Data**

"Open Science is an umbrella term encompassing a multitude of assumptions about the future of knowledge creation and dissemination", as Fecher and Friesecke point out.11 As such, the term Open Science merges a diverse set of ideas and initiatives: Open Access and Open Data Initiatives, Open Scholarship or the demand for Open Educational Resources, Open Source Software, Open Review, Open Metrics, and demands for Open Methodology all get subsumed under Open Science. To define the idea behind Open Science more specifically, the definition of the Open Knowledge Foundation proves helpful and can serve as a minimal consensus: "Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)."12 How this minimal consensus is put into practice in individual cases, differs quite drastically. The furthest implementation and greatest acceptance can be attributed to Open Access (OA). Therefore, I use OA as an example to point out the relevance of Open Science principles for the humanities as well as for our specific situation in a collaborative research center. Among the many positive features of Open Access are, for example, a higher visibility, free access for every user – regardless of the researchers' affiliation –, better retrievability, and a faster dissemination of research results.13 The OA movement is described as having "[…] two different, alternative, converging histories: the history of the economics of recent academic journal publishing and the history of the free culture movement, which has its roots in the world of computer software."14

11 *Fecher, Benedikt/Friesike, Sascha*, Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought, in: Sönke Bartling/Sascha Friesike (eds.), Opening Science. The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, Cham: Springer Open 2014, 17.

12 *Kleineberg, Michael/Kaden, Ben*, Open Humanities? ExpertInnenmeinungen über Open Access in den Geisteswissenschaf ten, in: LIBREAS. Library Ideas 32 (2017), https://libreas. eu/ausgabe32/kleineberg/.

13 *Arbeitsgruppe Open Access in der Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaf tsorganisationen*, Open Access: Positionen, Prozesse, Perspektiven, Bonn: Köllen Druck + Verlag GmbH, 2009, 3. http://doi.org/10.2312/allianzoa.001.

14 *Eve, Martin Paul*, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 12. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO<PHONE_NUMBER>012.

This might in part explain why the ideals of Open Science and Open Access are more widespread in the DH community than in the broader field of the humanities at the moment.

The debate about Open Access started in the 1990s, when the first inf luential commitments to Open Access were formulated by a bunch of initiatives, from the Budapest Open Access Initiative15 to the Bethesda Statement16 and the Berlin Declaration17 – to name just the most inf luential –, all drafted by different stakeholders but demanding similar policies and practices. Humanities scholars were involved in the formulation of all of these statements and hence have been part of the debate from the start.18 The Berlin Declaration, for example, was drafted at the end of a conference held by the Max-Planck-Society and the project European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) and signed by all big scientific organizations in Germany as well as several universities, academies and other research and cultural institutes.19

The Bethesda Statement formulates two criteria Open Access publications have to meet, which can also be found in the almost exact same wording – only minor details are added – in the Berlin Declaration:

"1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

15 *Budapest Open Access Initiative*, Budapest Open Access Initiative, https://www.budapest openaccessinitiative.org/ [accessed: 17.05.2019].

16 *Suber, Peter et al.*, The Bethesda Statement on Open-Access Publishing, (Jun 20, 2003), http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm [accessed: 01.09.2019].

17 *Max-Planck-Gesellschaf t*, Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (Oct 22, 2003), https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berliner-Erklaerung [accessed: 01.09.2019].

18 *M. P. Eve*, Open Access and the Humanities, 24.

19 One of the aims of this conference was to think about web-based research environments and the future of scientific publishing online. The conference announcement is available at: *Max-Planck-Gesellschaf t*, Berlin-Konferenzen, https://openaccess.mpg.de/ BerlinOA [accessed: 09.05.2019].

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and longterm archiving […]."20

From the beginning OA initiatives demanded, as I want to point out, a change in the practices of all stakeholders involved.

Though there also have been critical voices raising concerns about academic freedom21 and about different logics of publishing between the sciences and the humanities22 (some of whom I will reference later), there were a lot less counter-initiatives.23

Alongside these first declarations there is a wide array of initiatives to make the case for a wider acceptance of Open Access in all parts of academia. In several countries state-led initiatives build regulatory foundations in various ways to fasten the implementation of Open Access. In Germany, the most important research funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), expects researchers to publish their work Open Access if it is funded

20 *P. Suber et al.*, The Bethesda Statement.

21 The two biggest concerns regarding academic freedom are first that mandatory Open Access leaves no room to discuss what the role of academic labor is and whom its merits are granted to and second that it will restrict the authors' ability to say how, where, and by whom her work could be reused. See: *Golumbia, David*, Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities: Turning Academic Labor Against Itself, in: Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28 (2016), 74–114, esp. pp. 100–101.; *Anderson, Rick*, Open Access and Academic Freedom (Dec 15, 2015), https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/15/mandato ry-open-access-publishing-can-impair-academic-freedom-essay [accessed: 31.08.2019].

22 Rosenzweig argues that scholarly societies play a big role in publishing in the humanities and that mandatory Open Access could threaten the societies and their journals because they need the money coming in through journal subscriptions. *Rosenzweig, Roy*, Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?, in: Roy Rosenzweig, Clio wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age, New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011, 119–120.

23 The Heidelberger Appell is an example for an initiative spawn out of a humanities perspective: *Reuß, Roland*, Heidelberger Appell: Für Publikationsfreiheit und die Wahrung der Urheberrechte (Mar 22, 2009), http://www.textkritik.de/urheberrecht/appell.pdf [accessed: 01.09.2019].

by the DFG, a purposive policy was approved in 2006.24 Similar principles were implemented for the whole of Europe through Horizon 2020 and will be adopted and amplified through its successor program Horizon Europe in line with "cOAlition S" and "Plan S". Those plans were devised by Science Europe, an association of European research funding organizations,25 together with the European Commission. Their mission is to accelerate "the transition to full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications"26 to reach a Europe-wide mandatory implementation of OA for research funded by the EU. The Member States of the EU believe "that free access to all scientific publications from publicly funded research is a moral right of citizens" and in 2016 jointly "committed to achieve this goal by 2020."27 "Plan S" and "cOAlition S" mean an intensification of previous OA policies. Whereas under the regulations of Horizon 2020 green OA and even hybrid OA28 met the requirements on Open Access publication, "Plan S" expects of research funders to "[…] mandate that access to research publications that are generated through research grants that they allocate, must be fully and immediately open and cannot be monetised in any way."29 This means that publication in hybrid form does not meet the proposed criteria. In an additional statement it is clarified that pre-prints "will satisfy open access requirements" but that "Article Processing Charges will be eligible for purely open access publishing venues (e. g. not 'hybrid' journals)." 30 Horizon Europe also intensifies the

26 *European Commission*, 'Plan S' and 'cOAlition S' – Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications (Sep 4, 2018), https://ec.europa.eu/commis sion/commissioners/2014-2019/moedas/announcements/plan-s-and-coalition-s-acceler ating-transition-full-and-immediate-open-access-scientific\_en [accessed: 01.09.2019].

27 Ibid*.*

29 *Science Europe*, Science Without Publication Paywalls. Preamble to: cOAlition S for the Realisation of Full and Immediate Open Access (Sep 2018), https://www.scienceeurope. org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cOAlitionS.pdf [accessed: 01.09.2019].

30 *European Commission*, Horizon Europe Impact Assessment. Staf f Working Document 307, Part 2 of 3 (Jun 7, 2018), 106. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/swd\_2018\_307\_f1\_ impact\_assesment\_en\_v6\_p2\_977548.pdf [accessed: 01.09.2019].

24 *Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf t*, FAQ: Open Access, (last modified Jan 10, 2017), https:// www.dfg.de/foerderung/faq/open\_access\_faq/index.html [accessed: 01.09.2019].

25 *Science Europe*, About Us, https://www.scienceeurope.org/ [accessed: 17.05.2019].

28 Both terms will be explained on pp. 5–6. In short: Green OA means the permission of self-archiving whereas hybrid OA means publishing OA in an otherwise subscription-based journal.

regulations on research data as well as other research related output.31 Science Europe raises the pressure on researchers and publishers alike by stating that "our collective duty of care is for the science system as a whole, and researchers must realise that they are doing a gross disservice to the institution of science if they continue to report their outcomes in publications that will be locked behind paywalls. We also understand that researchers may be driven to do so by a misdirected reward system which puts emphasis on the wrong indicators (e. g., journal impact factor). We therefore commit to fundamentally revise the incentive and reward system of science […]." 32 This indicates that the goal of these programs is not only an extensive policy shift but a deep impact on today's research landscape accompanied by and calling for a change in publication practices.

Furthermore, there are joint initiatives to establish nationwide license agreements with big publishers – the German initiative is called Projekt Deal33 – to secure access to the whole portfolio of e-journals, especially subscription based journals, with the goal to establish better deals and to pressure big publishers into transitioning to OA and publishing all articles of all participating institutions Open Access.34

Widening the scope of Open Access and ensuring a wider implementation of Open Science principles are guidelines that were developed for the treatment of research data. The FAIR Guiding principles for scientific data management, for example, consist of four cornerstones that should be con-

31 Ibid.

32 *Science Europe*, Science Without Publication Paywalls.

33 *Projekt Deal*, Über DEAL, https://www.projekt-deal.de/aktuelles/ [accessed: 17.05.2019].

34 A lot is happening in this field right now. While Projekt DEAL established an agreement with Wiley in January, the University of California canceled its subscription to Elsevier in February af ter unsuccessful negotiations. As UC California is the largest public university system in America, a big impact was expected. Lastly, around Easter, Norway was the first country to strike a deal with Elsevier that allows access to all Elsevier publications and OA publication for Norwegian researchers for a two-year pilot phase. (See: *Projekt DEAL*, Veröf fentlichung des Deal-Wiley Agreements, https://www.projekt-deal.de/ver tragsverof fentlichung-des-deal-wiley-agreements/ [accessed: 17.05.2019]. *Gaind, Nisha*, Huge US university cancels subscription with Elsevier, in: Nature 567 (2019), 15–16. https:// www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00758-x. *Elsevier*, Norway and Elsevier agree on pilot national license for research access and publishing (Apr 23, 2019), https://www.else vier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/norway-and-elsevier-agree-on-pilot-nationallicence-for-research-access-and-publishing [accessed: 01.09.2019].

sidered: the organization of data should be executed in a way that data is *F*indable, *A*ccessible, *I*nteroperable, and *R*eusable.35 These principles for data management are not crafted in a way to focus solely on human scholars but instead "[…] put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data […]" and with the intention that "[…] the principles apply not only to 'data' in the conventional sense, but also to the algorithms, tools, and workflows that led to that data." 36 Guidelines on how to store research data and make it accessible increasingly become part of regulatory efforts.

Other initiatives, like DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, focus on other parts of Open Science – in this case on Open Metrics. The goal of DORA is to "improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties." 37 Their goal is to establish new forms of evaluating the quality of research output as alternatives to the f lawed Journal Impact Factor.

For more information on the benefits of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) see the article "From text to Data."

Before I go on to explain different variants of OA, I need to elaborate further on the term "open" as such. Although I am a proponent of Open Science, I want to make clear that the notion of "open" that is taken up in Open Science principles is in no way unambiguous. As I mentioned earlier, the concept has its roots in movements evolving around computer culture and the free software movement. And this is where its ambiguity stems from. As Evgeny Morozov points out in an extensive essay, "[f]ew words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open.'" 38 He goes on to elaborate that it was a process of active rebranding that led the free software movement to shift from "free" to "open". "Profiting from the term's ambiguity, O'Reilly and his collaborators likened the 'openness' of open source

35 *Wilkinson, Mark et al.*, The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, in: Scientific Data 3 (2016): 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

36 Ibid*.*

37 *SFDORA*, San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, https://sfdora.org/read/ [accessed: 20.05.2019].

38 *Morozov, Evgeny*, The Meme Hustler: Tim O'Reilly's crazy talk, in: The Baf fler 22 (2013), http://thebaf fler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler [accessed: 01.09.2019].

software to the 'openness' of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech. 'Open' thus could mean virtually anything, from 'open to intellectual exchange' […] to 'open to competition'." 39 This ambiguity also shows in the concept of and discussions around Open Access, making it difficult to fully embrace this concept without falling for its ambiguities.

### **Variants of Open Access**

I want to elaborate very brief ly on the dif ferent forms of Open Access. One dif ferentiation is made between the so-called green OA and gold OA Standards. Green OA means that research is published in a subscription journal but the researcher retains the right to publish their work in a repository as a pre-print or af ter a set embargo period, whereas publications under gold standard are published OA right away. The costs of OA publications are normally shif ted towards the side of the author in the form of article processing charges (APC)40 – if APCs are charged at all. This can mean that the author has to pay for making OA available, but normally the cost for publication is eligible for funding – which is mostly explicitly stated by funding agencies.41 Journals can also decide to waive article fees if the author does not have funding.42 Another form of OA is hybrid OA, which means that research is published Open Access but in a subscription journal. This practice is highly controversial because it means that article processing charges are imposed for publishing OA while at the same time subscription fees are levied, a practice referred to as "double dipping". Hybrid Journals are therefore not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a directory indexing peer reviewed Open Access research journals and their metadata.43 Introduced in 2013, diamond OA is a relatively recent form of OA publish-

39 Ibid*.*

40 The alternative term for this, "author processing fees" and variants thereof are misleading as Suber points out because the fees are rarely paid by the author herself since they are eligible for funding. *P. Suber et al.*, The Bethesda Statement, 138.

41 E. g., *Science Europe*, 10 Principles, https://www.coalition-s.org/10-principles/ [accessed: 20.05.2019].

42 *M. P. Eve*, Open Access and the Humanities, 59.

43 *Directory of Open Access Journals*, FAQ: What is DOAJ, https://doaj.org/faq#definition [accessed: 20.05.2019].

ing.44 It was defined as a reaction to the trend of gold OA becoming a business model, which the authors trace back to the taking over of the distinction of gold and green through Horizon 2020s research funding program.45 They fear that this "[…] broad definition of gold OAJs ideologically disguises the differences between for-profit and non-profit models and invites ideological abuse of this category by for-profit publishers […]" which will in turn foster predatory Open Access Journals.46 In contrast, "[i]n the *Diamond Open Access Model, not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use*." 47 Using statistics provided by DOAJ, Fuchs and Sandoval point out that "[…] in September 2013, out of a total of 9891 journals listed in the DOAJ, 6527 (66.0 %) had no article processing charges […]" – with an especially low rate of APCbased journals in the humanities (between 2.3 % in History and 28.1 % in Business and Management).48

All aforementioned variations of OA deal with venues of distribution. Another dif ferentiation that primarily af fects the user's rights or freedom is made between gratis and libre OA. Gratis in this case means the removal of price barriers alone, while libre OA is defined as removing price barriers and a varying range of permission barriers. Suber transposed the terms gratis and libre from software development, where they are used to express the same distinction.49 Both green and gold OA can be gratis as well as libre, but to obtain libre OA is usually easier for gold OA publications,50 while diamond-OA is automatically libre. Authors who want to publish their work libre OA need to waive some of their copyrights. This is well regulated through open licenses, e. g., the Creative Commons licenses, which even allow for different gradients of usage approval, while publishing in subscription

44 *Fuchs, Christian/Sandoval, Marisol*, The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious, in: triple(C) 13 (2013), 428–443.

45 Ibid., 433.

46 Ibid., 436.

47 Ibid., 438.

48 Ibid., 434.

49 *P. Suber et al.*, The Bethesda Statement, 65–66.

50 Ibid., 67.

journals mostly means completely waiving the copyrights of a publication in favor of the publisher. Creative Commons licensing "[…] leaves authors with permanent ownership of their work and lets them reprint that work without seeking permission or paying fees." 51 The dif ferent versions of Creative Commons offer different versions of rights clearance: "Creative Commons offers CC0 (CC-Zero) for copyright holders who want to assign their work to the public domain. The CC Attribution license (CC-BY) describes the least restrictive sort of libre OA after the public domain. It allows any use, provided the user attributes the work to the original author." 52 Then there are different versions of restricting CC-BY licenses: using CC-BY-NC53 forbids commercial usage while CC-BY-ND54 restricts editing, to name just the most known. The regulations made through "Plan S" make some kind of open licensing, preferably CC-BY mandatory.55 This type of license has been criticized for restricting academic freedom because it "ef fectively assigns all of the exclusive prerogatives of the copyright holder to the general public, allowing anyone who so desires to copy, distribute, translate, create derivate works, etc., even for commercial purposes, as long as the author is given credit as creator of the original work",56 which is especially relevant in the humanities. Critics have also pointed out that it is "[…] wise to be cautious of the fact that the motivation of many governments pursuing open access is to allow industry to take the fruits of (often public) scientific research and to re-enclose it for commercial benefit." 57 As I already mentioned, "Plan S" also forbids the monetization of research, but this policy only regulates the researcher. Still, these arguments can not be attributed

55 *Science Europe*, 10 Principles.

57 *M. P. Eve*, Open Access and the Humanities, 23.

51 *Anderson, Talea/Squires, David*, Open Access and the Theological Imagination, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 (2017), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/4/0003 40/000340.html.

52 *P. Suber et al.*, The Bethesda Statement, 69.

53 For more information check: *Creative Commons*, Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC 3.0 DE), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/de/deed.en [accessed: 20.05.2019].

54 For more information check: *Creative Commons*, Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany (CC BY-ND 3.0 DE), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/de/deed.en [accessed: 20.05.2019].

56 *R. Anderson*, Open Access and Academic Freedom.

to the licensing itself and it is important to note that open licenses explicitly allow data mining and other forms of digital analysis while traditional publication forms normally do not – which is important for everyone wanting to conduct digital research.

# **Why Open Access?**

Discussions on Open Access have gained momentum because of the so called "Journal crisis", which worsened over the last 30 years. The subscription fees of natural science journals have risen and continue to rise because of the formation of large publishing houses through mergers, which led to a quasi-monopolization. At the same time, the measurement of the quality and importance of a journal through impact factors prevailed. A high impact factor means high reputation for the journal but also for every scientist publishing in it because "[t]he JIF, which measures journals' average citations per article, is often incorrectly used to assess the impact of individual articles." 58 It mostly also implies high publication and subscription fees.

This also had an impact on the humanities because the risen subscription fees left libraries with less money to buy monographs.59 The severity of the problem became obvious for the broader public when Harvard's Faculty Advisory Council signaled that the university's library could no longer afford the rising cost of subscription fees. The council reported a price increase of about 145 % over the past six years, leading them to encourage the "[…] faculty to consider open access publishing as one means of alleviating the high cost of journal subscriptions."60 Anderson and Squires point to this as a key moment in the debate because firstly Harvard has the biggest budget of all American universities and secondly it generated publicity.61 The overall effect of the journal crisis is shown in various studies based on statistics from the

58 *Priem, Jason*, Altmetrics: A manifesto (October 26, 2010), http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ [accessed: 01.09.2019].

59 *Hagner, Michael*, #Open Access: Wie der akademische Kapitalismus die Wissenschaf ten verändert, in: Geschichte der Gegenwart (Sep 26, 2016), https://geschichtedergegenwart. ch/open\_access-wie-der-akademische-kapitalismus-die-wissenschaf ten-veraendert/.

60 *T. Anderson*, Open Access and the Theological Imagination.

61 Ibid.

Association of Research Libraries. They show that subscription costs "[…] outstripped inf lation by over 300 % since 1986." 62

The effects on the humanities were profound: "From 1986 to 1997, the unit cost of serials rose 169 percent compared with 62 percent for book monographs. Research libraries' expenditures for serials thus rose 142 percent compared with only 30 percent for monographs. In 1986 these libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals." 63 Thus, the journal crisis was followed by a monograph crisis that is mostly felt in the humanities64 because of the role monographs play in its research culture.

## **Problems of inclusivity**

Another problem that arises for libraries when they subscribe to journals is that when they "[…] pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don't buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers' copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment […]." 65 This forces the libraries to carefully negotiate what is at stake in each individual case. I point that out because I see a similar model of dependency growing in the world of software that does not seem to be widely discussed until now. The subscription model of licensing is on the rise in software as well. The fee of software relevant for research processes is paid by the universities, and students and staff can use the programs. Software like *Citavi* has operated on this model for years but it also became more common for other programs formerly using models of perpetual licensing like the *Microsof t Of fice Suite* or *InDesign*. Also, a lot of proprietary programs in Digital Humanities or digi-

62 *M. P. Eve*, Open Access and the Humanities, 13.

63 *McPherson, James M.*, A Crisis in Scholarly Publishing, in: Perspectives on History 57 (Oct 2003), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-histo ry/october-2003/a-crisis-in-scholarly-publishing.

64 *P. Suber et al.*, The Bethesda Statement, 33.

65 Ibid*.*, 34.

tal social sciences operate on equivalent modes. This leads to new forms of exclusivity and exclusion not yet widely problematized by important stakeholders like universities or funding agencies. This university-wide licensing is normally limited to people having at least some affiliation with said university. Thus, universities demand Open Access while at the same time aggravating the problem of access through software licenses. The arguments raised for Open Access are also relevant for this case. Students and researchers get trained in using certain software they might no longer have access to once they leave university. Then they must choose between buying said software or searching for open source alternatives and learning anew how to use them. Training on open source software is still rarely provided at universities. The awareness of the importance of implementing FOSS at university level is still not fully developed but noticeably on the rise – mostly due to questions surrounding data security, protection and sovereignty. But although this problem should be tackled through open science policies and raising awareness, the focus, even of the DH community, seems to lie primarily on workf lows instead of the broader implications: "More than causing personal frustration, this reliance on proprietary tools and formats has longterm negative implications for the academic community. In such an environment, journals must outsource typesetting, alienating authors from the material contexts of publication and adding further unnecessary barriers to the unfettered circulation of knowledge." 66 The argument here is that the reliance on proprietary solutions for scholarly production makes it necessary to outsource parts of the publication process because the scholars cannot do them on their own. I would add that the problem is less the alienation than the business interests of other parties involved (as in the case of the journal crisis). Gil and Ortega add that "[t]he culture of 'user friendly' interfaces that has helped popularize computers for almost three decades now, and which underlines the dominant role of .docx, .pdf, and .epub files today, has also led to some basic misunderstandings of what computers can and should do. In the case of writing, the expectation that you should get what you see continues to distance producers from their tools. As with any human tool, we need to understand computers a bit more intimately if we're going to use

66 *Tenen, Dennis/Wythof f, Grant*, Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown, The Programming Historian (Mar 19, 2014), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo. 1477854.

them with any degree of critical awareness […]. [W]hat has remained invisible or grossly misunderstood to producers of scholarship in certain parts of the world are the material conditions of their own knowledge production – digital and analog – with noxious effects for labor and ecological practices."67 This argument points to the heart of the problem: Proprietary programs raise the expectation that software should do most of the work themselves and as seamless as possible. Compatibility problems that still often arise when working with FOSS solutions are attributed to the Open Source solution because all worked fine when not using open source – not considering that proprietary programs have a commercial interest in sustaining incompatibilities. The dependencies created by proprietary programs are linked to exclusion mechanisms created through incompatibilities. The problem of inclusivity is still only marginally addressed in the Digital Humanities but is slowly being popularized by DH initiatives like the minimal computing group of go::dh,68 transform DH69 or Micro DH.70

It remains necessary to continuously raise awareness for the importance of the work that is done in tool development by on the one hand pointing out the restrictions proprietary programs impose on researchers – or sometimes even false assumptions about those programs71 – and on the other hand disclosing that there are issues of academic freedom and inclusivity involved in making oneself dependent on proprietary programs. Fiormonte,

67 *Gil, Alex/Ortega, Élika*, Global outlooks in digital humanities: Multilingual practices and minimal computing, in: Constance Crompton/Richard J. Lane/Ray Siemens, Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, London/New York: Routledge 2016, 30.

68 *GO::DH Minimal Computing working group*, About: What is Minimal Computing, http://godh.github.io/mincomp/about/ [accessed: 20.05.2019].

69 *#transform DH*, About #transform DH, https://transformdh.org/about-transformdh/ [accessed: 20.05.2019].

70 *Risam, Roopika/Edwards, Susan*, Micro DH: Digital Humanities at the Small Scale, in: Digital Humanities 2017 (2017), http://works.bepress.com/roopika-risam/27/ [accessed: 01.09.2019].

71 In a blog article Thomas Lumley for example responds to a twitter comment of an undisclosed poster complaining about R having no warranties. He responds by citing license agreements of popular proprietary solutions that also do not of fer warranties relating to user errors, pointing to this assumption as "a clear symptom of not having read licence [sic] agreements for other statistical sof tware." *Lumley, Thomas*, Absolutely no warranty? (Feb 18, 2019), https://notstatschat.rbind.io/2019/02/18/absolutely-no-warranty/ [accessed: 01.09.2019].

Numerico, and Tomasi argue "[…] that humanists need to engage in not only the development of online content but also with ethical issues around computing, especially issues around language, search engines, open access and censorship." 72

Hence, in our collaboration we decided to use open source software and solutions wherever possible. As a result, we implemented open source software and tools whenever possible, for other workf lows the conversion to open source would be too complicated at the moment because it would produce compatibility issues in a research environment that still mainly uses the Windows operating system. On the other hand, working with Linux based operating systems is in no way trivial. A lot of processes we are by now used to being automated in Windows have to be performed manually, which requires more technological expertise of all parties involved and cannot be implemented without additional training.

A lot needs to be done to raise awareness for the role of the individual researcher as well as universities as driving forces in either perpetuating the dependencies being fostered by using proprietary sof tware or overcoming them. Regarding the implementation of Open Source Sof tware we are still at the beginning. The Open Access movement has a pioneering role now but hopefully paves the way to generate acceptance for the necessary changes in research practices – even if it is more dif ficult at first. There is no denying that Open Source Sof tware still does not run as smoothly as proprietary programs, but the example of Open Access shows how joint initiatives of important stakeholders can not only shif t a discussion but also lead to important policy changes and redirections of money, which, in ef fect, leads to the emergence of new tools and solutions simplifying the process of OA publishing. Similar ef fects could be achieved by using the same mechanisms in implementing FOSS and other variants of Open Science. It is important to note that "[…] by making intelligent investments

72 Now this points to even broader aspects of the discussed problem: While I follow a line of argument that is fitted for a European context, problems of inclusivity and academic freedom have of course broader and much more serious implications that go beyond the scope of my article. A lot of those problems (from censorship to environmental issues to participation to reducing barriers of all sorts to working conditions) are addressed in the DH initiatives mentioned in Footnotes 67, 68, and 69. D. *Fiormonte/T. Numerico/F. Tomasi (eds.)*, The Digital Humanist., X.

in its information infrastructure, the academia could regain some of its autonomy."73

To achieve this, Open Science principles need to gain a bigger foothold in the overall research culture of the humanities. The Digital Humanities are well suited to be of aid here because there the relevance of the different aspects of Open Science shows regularly in daily endeavors. Therefore, I want to point to discussions on Digital Humanities and its role in the overall humanities research landscape to show how the frictions between both can be utilized not only to prepare the humanities for the demands of the digital age but also to use the critical potential of the humanities for overall changes in its research culture.

# **Frictions in research cultures as starting points for policy changes and metareflections**

The research landscape of Digital Humanities differs in some relevant ways from the established research landscape in the humanities. In part this is due to the questions digital humanists are confronted with in their daily endeavors and the different approaches to the research objects prevalent in the Digital Humanities. "Examples of how and why 'we' have to play an active role in the design of the scholarly environments of the future abound in the experience of digital humanists – and are more common in the daily experience of scholars trying to perform basic research and writing tasks than many realize. […] What version of a work should be digitized as representative of a work?" 74 Or translated into our context: What can be digitized without infringing copyrights? What data can be published? What *is* research data in the humanities? How can it be published? How can the context of the research be made visible – the material used, its enrichment, the methodology, the people working on making its enrichment possible? Questions that are not at the forefront of humanist thinking constitute the daily endeavors of digital humanists and lead to the recognition of friction points in digital humanities research.

73 *Fecher, Benedikt/Wagner, Gert G*., Open access or the re-conquest of autonomy, in: encore (2016), 79, https://www.hiig.de/encore2016.

74 *J. Drucker*, Blind Spots.

The importance of cooperation in Digital Humanities (and in Open Science Initiatives, for that matter) shows clearly that the transformation of research practices leads to the recognition of new voids and the development or adaption of new practices. I will illustrate this with three examples.

The metrics of attribution that are used up until now (and are criticized for various reasons75) are not suited for assessing cooperative practices. It became important to find new ways of making the different roles involved in DH cooperations visible by, e. g., developing new ways of highlighting and making attributable the work of researchers involved in programming or maintaining digital research environments. Also, different forms of technology-enabled academic outreach prominent in DH like (micro-)blogging are not accounted for. Therefore, the striving for Open Access also includes new ways of impact measurement trying to depict forms of scientific inquiry that are not accounted for until now – and going a lot further than the DORA-principles. Open Access supporters argue "[…] the case for an alternative and faster impact measurement that includes other forms of publication and the social web coverage of a scientific contribution. The general credo is: As the scholarly workflow is [sic] migrates increasingly to the web, formerly hidden uses like reading, bookmarking, sharing, discussing, and rating are leaving traces online and offer a new basis by which to measure scientific impact. The umbrella term for these new impact measurements

75 And, as I want to add, valid reasons. I can not fully encapsulate the discussion but I try to give a very brief description of the main points of criticism: The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) that was originally meant to measure the impact of a journal is of ten used to derive the (presumed) impact of individual articles, which is in itself an invalid practice. This is in turn employed to assess objectifiable criteria that are used to evaluate the employability of individual researchers. This is a criticizable practice and even worsened by being built on misused parameters. While it is positive that because of new means of academic outreach new forms of impact assessment have been created that can supersede the old, flawed forms of impact measurement, this leaves aside the fundamental discussion on the problems of condensing academic work and impact into quantifiable aspects. For more information see: *Callaway, Ewen*, Beat it, impact factor! Publishing elite turns against controversial metric, in: Nature 535 (2016), 210–211. https://doi.org/10.1038/ nature.2016.20224. *Fenner, Martin*, Altmetrics and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact, in: Sönke Bartling/Sascha Friesike (eds.), Opening science: The evolving guide on how the internet is changing research, collaboration and scholarly publishing, Cham: Springer Open, 2014, 179–189. *Lariviere, Vincent/Sugimoto, Cassidy R.*, The Journal Impact Factor: A brief history, critique, and discussion of adverse ef fects (Jan 26, 2018), http:// arxiv.org/pdf/1801.08992v2.

is altmetrics."76 Altmetrics are also suitable to comply with other forms of Open Science that gained inf luence in recent years like Open Research Data or other forms of "raw science". But they are only one part of the so called scientometrics, focusing on the web, interconnected tools, and social media as new sources for impact measurement. "Altmetrics can help researchers demonstrate the impact of their research, in particular if the research outputs are not journal articles, but datasets, software, etc., and if the impact is best demonstrated in metrics other than citations."77

Furthermore, as Niebisch points out, practices integral for software development and project management like agility78 or versioning are more and more incorporated into the methodology of Digital Humanities because of the role of cooperative practices.79 He compares the practices used in the development of digital objects to practices prevalent in philology, differentiating them into the role of versioning and the option of continuous development and points to the potential these practices can unfold in the humanities. He argues that the need for continuous development of software leads to the imperative of thorough documentation. This is what enables cooperative work on a project. Also, because software needs to be maintained and improved continuously, different versions of a program emerge over time. So software development does not create a static product but a historized and archived output. This can be compared to practices used in philology because in both cases texts are enriched by certain criteria. But whereas in philology the final product is a finished edition (at least up until now), in software development there is no final product but a continuous need for improvement – hence the need for versioning.80 And through the change of practices facilitated by the Digital Humanities, these practices will take root in the humanities.

76 *B. Fecher /S. Friesike*, Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought, 40.

77 *M. Fenner*, Altmetrics and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact, 183.

78 Agile sof tware development is a diverse set of methods and practices developed to handle work in collaborative self-organizing and cross-functional teams.

79 *Niebisch, Arndt*, Agilität, Versionierung und Open Source: Sof twareentwicklung und Praktiken der Geisteswissenschaf ten, in: Wie Digitalität die Geisteswissenschaf ten verändert: Neue Forschungsgegenstände und Methoden (=Sonderband der Zeitschrif t für digitale Geisteswissenschaf ten) 3 (2018). https://doi.org/10.17175/SB003\_009. http:// www.zfdg.de/sb003\_009.

80 Ibid.

Digital Humanities products are characterized by a collaborative structure that vehemently dif fers from the research methodologies in the humanities. This structure can potentially transform practices in the humanities. As Liu suggests "[…] the appropriate, unique contribution that the digital humanities can make to cultural criticism at the present time is to use the tools, paradigms, and concepts of digital technologies to help rethink the idea of instrumentality. […] The goal is to rethink instrumentality so that it includes both humanistic and stem (science, technology engineering and mathematics) fields in a culturally broad, and not just narrowly purposive, ideal of service."81 The humanities should utilize the critical attitude with which they approach their objects of research for a critical self-examination regarding their own methods and results. This would be a great starting point to evaluate which questions should be addressed and what would be important in tool development. Humanists should take a continuous part in tool development because they could ensure that the diverse iterations during the development contribute to advance the implementation of humanistic paradigms of knowledge and inquiry.

As a third example, the problems of attributing credentials especially for software development in the Digital Humanities spawned the development of principles for software citation. Laurence Anthony, whose tool AntConc was used in our collaboration, suggests forms of citation for the tools he develops on their websites.82 Besides, several other parties suggest a citation format, among these are the APA,83 the software sustainability institute84

81 *Liu, Alan*, Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?, in: Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the digital humanities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 501–502.

82 Laurence Anthony suggests the following citation for AntConc: Anthony, L. (YEAR OF RELEASE). AntConc (Version VERSION NUMBER) [Computer Sof tware]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/sof tware.

83 See *Purdue University Online Writing Lab*, Reference List: Electronic Sources, https://owl. purdue.edu/owl/research\_and\_citation/apa\_style/apa\_formatting\_and\_style\_guide/ reference\_list\_electronic\_sources.html [accessed: 21.05.2019].

84 *Sof tware Sustainability Institute*, How to cite and describe the sof tware you used in your research – top ten tips, by Mike Jackson (Jun 22, 2012), https://www.sof tware.ac.uk/ blog/2016-10-07-how-cite-and-describe-sof tware-you-used-your-research-top-tentips.

and the FORCE 11 group, whose principles for software citation were published in 2016.85 In this instance, the humanities were not inf luenced by computational methods, but rather – via working on a way to incorporate principles of Open Science into the system of attributing credentials – yielded changes in practices of the computational sciences.

These are just a few examples to illustrate how the frictions between the research cultures of traditional humanities and Digital Humanities can be productive by initiating critical ref lections on how the landscape of research could evolve. Liu sums up the point I want to make quite nicely when he states that

"[…] digital technology is on the threshold of making a fundamental dif ference in the humanities because it indeed serves as the vector that imports alien paradigms of knowledge. In terms of objects of inquiry, it brings into play whole new classes or levels of phenomena – e. g. quantitatively defined structures, forms, and cycles. In terms of analytical procedures, digital technology introduces modeling and other kinds of activities to complement interpretation. And in terms of the output or product of knowledge, digital technology expands the repertory of the monograph, essay, and talk (the staples of the humanities) to include programs, databases, visualizations, graphs, maps, etc."86

After having discussed the principles of Open Science with a specific focus on Open Access, the remainder of this text will focus on the role Digital Humanities could play in disseminating these principles across the broader culture of the humanities. The discourses and questions prevalent in Digital Humanities could be of aid when addressing the questions the humanities have to solve in order to adjust their research practices to the demands of the digital age. I will continue with describing aspects of how we tried to tackle these questions in our collaboration and how collaborative research centers in general can be a great facilitator in this process.

85 *Smith, Arfon M./Katz, Daniel S./Niemeyer/Kyle E.*, Sof tware citation principles, in: PeerJ Computer Science 2 (2016), e86. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86.

86 *Liu, Alan*, Digital Humanities and Academic Change, in: English Language Notes 47 (2009), 27.

### **Examples for the implementation of Open Science principles**

The role of collaborative research centers in the humanities should not be underestimated because "[a]t their best, humanities centers and cross-disciplinary institutes are catalysts for humanities-wide perspectives and change."87 Woodward asserts that humanities centers "[…] have served as sites for innovation, as laboratories for incubating emerging modes of knowledge and investigating new objects of study in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts."88 Liu claims that a big advantage of collaborative research centers is that they evolve intellectually around a shared topic.89 This opens up new possibilities for discussion. As I already pointed out, one big opportunity of collaborative research centers seems to be the option of reciprocal stimulation of research cultures. To gain mutual understanding it is necessary to make explicit and verbalize aspects of research cultures that are assumed to be self-evident. There is great potential in this.

I do not have to explain much regarding our cooperation because Anna Maria Neubert's contribution to this publication explains it in depth. I just want to sum up that we are part of a large collaborative research center that deals with questions surrounding aspects of practices of comparing, and our teams is responsible for bringing digital research and data management into the research alliance. The collaborative research center consists of eighteen subprojects. Six of them collaborate closely with us and contributed to this book. The projects were originally not designed to conduct digital research – planning how digital methods could be of aid in their research projects was part of the process of constituting our teamwork.

Before I outline which tools we chose to implement, I want to point out that, as is the case with Open Access, the sustainable implementation of open source sof tware and other principles of Open Science needs the engagement of universities and other important research institutions and funding agencies. In some respects this seems to have gained momentum in recent years. The rectorate of Bielefeld University decided to regulate the

87 *P. Svensson*, The Landscape of Digital Humanities.

88 *Woodward, Kathleen*, The Future of the Humanities – In the Present & in Public, in: Daedalus 138 (2009): 113.

89 *A. Liu*, Digital Humanities and Academic Change, 22.

usage of at least some proprietary sof tware on university computers90 as well as the usage of cloud storage – especially in connection with sensitive data because of uncertainties in data sovereignty.91 In addition to that, the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia was the first in Germany to roll out a cloud storage solution for universities and research institutes called *Sciebo*, 92 which makes the data stored there subject to the German Federal Data Protection Act. A similar Europe-wide initiative is on its way in form of the European Open Science Cloud.93 The next step forward for Sciebo is to extend its use cases by making it the basis for a new integrated solution for research data management and adding features that support collaborative work practices. In January of 2019, the universities of Münster, Bielefeld, and Duisburg-Essen started a joint venture financed by the DFG to achieve just that.94 Again, there is a similar Europe-wide pilot initiative, the EC Open Research Data Pilot called OpenAIRE. It obliges projects it funds to develop (and keep updated) a Data Management Plan and to provide open access to research data, if possible.95 Initiatives like that require the realignment of research data management practices and of programs facilitating the research process that are used on a daily basis. As pointed out before, this is something that is not yet conclusively resolved in the humanities. Research data management in the humanities begins with discussing what research data in the humanities could consist of. As part of our collaboration, we conducted workshops dedicated to this question,

90 *Universität Bielefeld*, IT-Sicherheitsrichtlinie zur Nutzung von Skype. Version 1.0 (Jun 21, 2012), http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/informationssicherheit/Regelungen/IT-Sicherheits richtlinie\_Skype\_2012-06-21.pdf [accessed: 01.09.2019].

91 *Universität Bielefeld*, IT-Sicherheitsrichtlinie zur Nutzung von Netzlaufwerken und Cloud-Speicher-Diensten. Version 1.0 (Nov 13, 2015), http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/infor mationssicherheit/Regelungen/IT-Sicherheitsrichtlinie\_Cloud-Speicher\_2015-11-17.pdf [accessed: 01.09.2019].

92 *Sciebo*, Das Projekt, https://www.sciebo.de/projekt/index.html [accessed: 13.03.2019].

93 *European Commission*, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), https://ec.europa.eu/re search/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloud [accessed: 20.05.2019].

94 *Universität Bielefeld*, Blog: uni-intern (8 Jan 8, 2019), https://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/ uniintern/entry/geb%C3%Bcndelte\_expertise\_f%C3%Bcr\_effizientes\_forschungsda ten [accessed: 01.09.2019].

95 *OpenAIRE*, Factsheet H2020 Open Data Pilot, https://www.openaire.eu/factsheet-h2020 odp [accessed: 20.05.2019].

and Silke Schwandt held a keynote lecture on this question at a conference in Paderborn in 2018.96

To make the matter even more complex, implementing principles of open data in the humanities is far from easy because most of its research objects are subject to copyright law, which is one of the reasons why Open Access receives such broad support in the DH community. Our solution is far from perfect because different tasks as of yet have to be accomplished on different platforms but it is a starting point we can build on since we are still at the beginning of our collaboration. We wanted to publish as much of the data we enriched as possible so we chose DKAN,97 a free and open source data platform, to collect and publish the gathered research data. DKAN allows for the management of diverse data sets, which includes different gradients of accessibility rights – important in dealing with research data that cannot be published due to copyrights. So some of the data we uploaded will be open for the public, other data will only be accessible by the researcher working with it.

We decided to use Redmine for project management and documentation for the whole collaborative research center and initially used the already existing platform Sciebo to transfer files for further processing. We implemented a pipeline for digitization and natural language processing that is explained further in the article "From Text to Data." The enriched data generated in this pipeline was then analyzed with several tools depending on the research questions. All of these tools are explained in the introduction to this volume and in Anna Maria Neubert's article.

A remaining problem of product development within the contexts of Digital Humanities is that "[t]he user interface for many digital projects often seems developed as an afterthought, thrown together after completing the core functionality. However, a truly good user interface requires significant investment in design and development that needs to be integrated into

96 *Schwandt, Silke*, Quellen, Daten, Interpretationen: Heterogene Forschungsdaten und ihre Publikation als Herausforderung in der Geschichtswissenschaf t, Paper presented at Forschungsdaten in der Geschichtswissenschaf t, Jun, 7-8, 2018, Paderborn University, https://kw.uni-paderborn.de/historisches-institut/zeitgeschichte/veranstaltungen/ tagung-forschungsdaten/.

97 *DKAN*, "DKAN Open Data Portal, https://docs.getdkan.com/en/latest/ [accessed: 20.05.2019].

the project timeline and budget." 98 It can be argued that until now Digital Humanities has neglected to think about interface design and the linked approachability. McGann points out that "[d]igital instruments are only as good as the interfaces by which we think through them." 99 One unsolved problem that also showed in our cooperation is that tools become increasingly difficult to handle with growing functionality.

Therefore, humanists and digital humanists should join forces in the process of implementing and developing digital tools because "[t]he task of modeling an environment for scholarship (not just individual projects, but an environment, with a suite of tools for access, use, and research activity) is not a responsibility that can be off loaded onto libraries or technical staffs. […] *The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task*."100 This is not to be underestimated. "The scope of the task ahead is nothing short of modeling scholarly activity anew in digital media."101 But if we are not involved in this process of "designing the working environments of our digital future, we will find ourselves in a future that doesn't work, without the methods and materials essential to our undertakings."102

A finding that the survey of Gibbs and Owens points to is that humanists would be interested in tools that produce interesting results in a short time – an experience we also made in our cooperation. So perhaps "such rough and ready use should be a more explicit aim of digital humanities tool development. […] [T]he fundamental barrier to wider adoption of digital tools seems to lie now in quality interfaces, accessible documentation and expectations management."103

We try to take this suggestion seriously for the next step of our collaboration, which will be the implementation of a Virtual Research Environment (all of it Open Source, of course).

98 *Gibbs, Fred/Owens, Trevor*, Building Better Digital Humanities Tools: Toward broader audiences and user-centered designs, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2012). http:// digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/6/2/000136/000136.html.

99 *McGann, Jerome*, The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006, 156–157. Cited af ter: *Svennson, Patrick*, Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 (2009), http://www.digitalhu manities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065/000065.html.

100 *J. Drucker*, Blind Spots.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 *F. Gibbs/T. Owens*, Building Better Digital Humanities Tools.

## **Conclusion**

Developing, broadening, and popularizing Open Science principles is one of the next big tasks the scientific community must address. The humanities in particular have to find their own tailor-made solutions for the specific requirements of the research processes in the humanities. I have discussed aspects that should be considered in this process of transforming research practices to meet the demands of the digital realm. The digital humanities community has pointed out the specific requirements. Their suggestions could serve as a good starting point for the necessary discussion. As I have shown by taking the example of Open Science, focal points in future tool development must be negotiated. These focal points will in turn determine which questions need to be addressed and which aspects of a tool will be important besides "mere" functionality. This works especially well in cooperative projects because of the option of mutual cross-pollination of research cultures. Furthermore, the discussions facilitated through interdisciplinary cooperations can make the needs of involved research cultures more explicit because they have to be verbalized for the sake of a mutual understanding.

# **Bibliography**

https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/open\_access-wie-der-akademischekapitalismus-die-wissenschaften-veraendert/.

*McPherson, James M.*, A Crisis in Scholarly Publishing, in: Perspectives on History 57 (Oct 2003), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directo ries/perspectives-on-history/october-2003/a-crisis-in-scholarly-publishing.

*Science Europe*, About Us, https://www.scienceeurope.org/ [accessed: 17.05.2019].

# **Navigating Disciplinary Differences in (Digital) Research Projects Through Project Management**

*Anna Maria Neubert*

## **Introduction**

In this article I survey our approach to implementing digital research in a collaborative research center by navigating disciplinary dif ferences through tools and methods deriving from project management. I argue that by providing a clear framework and making regulations in cooperative work as well as acknowledging each individual contribution, interdisciplinary collaboration especially in the digital humanities can – even in a short time – produce meaningful and satisfying research results. This article is an account of our strategy to tackle challenges and opportunities that arose during our cooperation in combining the 'humanities' and the 'digital'. It shows where ef fort paid of f and where failures required us to tackle problems and solve them. I conclude by recommending an approach to a new and dif ferent recognition of research results and their applicability within disciplinary boundaries that supports a better understanding within interdisciplinary collaborations.

# **1. Implementing digital research in a collaborative research center**

Not only has funding of 'big' projects1 in the humanities constantly been growing over the past years,2 researchers themselves turn to collaboration to explore increasingly complex questions and create large-scale projects. They aim to implement new forms of methodologies that would be either too large or too complex to be completed by a single researcher and therefore are "in need of expertise available from other disciplines."3 This increase in quality, depth and scope of research requires a departure from traditional disciplinary boundaries to a more open and f luid concept of humanities research.

Especially in large research collaborations where digital innovations are tested within a humanities environment, the concept of interdisciplinarity is exemplified and tested with each new cooperation on a daily basis. So, "as interdisciplinary collaborations are becoming more common, aligning the interests of computer scientists and humanities scholars requires the formulation of a collaborative infrastructure for research where the approaches, methodologies, pedagogies, and intellectual innovations merge." 4 Digital humanities (DH) as a field that combines digital concepts with humanities research is an ideal example of challenges, approaches and benefits when disciplinary boundaries are conquered, and collaboration turns out to be a fruitful endeavor for all professions involved. These digital research projects – mostly initiated and "taken on by humanists […] require manage-

1 Cf. for example an article on the emergence of 'Big Science': *Weinberg Alvin M.*, Large-Scale Science on the United States, in: Science, New Series, Vol. 134, No. 3473 (Jul. 21, 1961), 161– 164, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1708292 [accessed:01.04.2019].

2 Cf. for only one account from past years: *Allington, Daniel*, The Managerial Humanities; or, Why the Digital Humanities Don't Exist. (31 Mar. 2013), http://www.danielallington. net/2013/03/the-managerial-humanities-or-why-the-digital-humanities-dont-exist/ [accessed: 01.04.2019].

ment"5 . Thus, "regardless of size, scope, and budget, projects members must coordinate tasks, responsibilities, budgets and achieve objectives."6 All those jobs can be tackled and coordinated with tools and methods deriving from project management (PM) that help to issue tasks and responsibilities to eventually achieve satisfying and meaningful (research) results. Unfortunately, the complexity of planning, managing and executing DH projects is still not acknowledged in its entirety and "is usually presented from a beginner's perspective, offering merely 'basic principles,' 'tips and tricks,' or 'topten lists'."7 However, combining humanistic inquiry with digital approaches allows for a huge variety in questions, implementations and outcomes that all need specific attention and precisely fitting management.

In this article I outline our approach to managing six different digital research projects as part of a pilot phase tasked with evaluating digital methods in various humanities disciplines. The Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1288 "Practices of Comparing" at Bielefeld University8 unites 14 humanities research projects – organized within three sections (A, B and C) –, and three central projects that deal with administration (Z), science communication (Ö) and data infrastructure as well as digital humanities (INF). Subproject INF9 which coordinated the outlined collaborations in this volume is responsible for providing "data infrastructure and digital humanities" to other projects involved and initiates different forms of digital research over the ongoing first funding period (2017–2020). During the first year of the CRC, INF started a pilot phase to implement digital research methods in existing research projects to augment, extend or renew already existing research questions; thereby questioning how digital research methods can be implemented in existing humanities research and which parameters need altering in order to be able to carry out research that produces valuable results.

5 *Ermolaev, Natalia et al*., Abstract: Project Management for the Digital Humanisties, DH2018, Mexico City, https://dh2018.adho.org/project-management-for-the-digital-hu manities/ [accessed: 01.04.2019].

6 *Boyd, Jason/Siemens, Lynne*, Project Management, DHSI@Congress 2014.

7 *Tabak, Edin*, A Hybrid Model for Managing DH Projects, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 (2017), http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/11/1/000284/000284.html [accessed: 01.04.2019].

8 Cf. http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/sfb1288/index.html [accessed: 01.04.2019].

9 Cf. http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/sfb1288/projekte/inf.html [accessed: 01.04.2019].

The pilot phase was planned in advance and provides a number of basic conditions, such as a fixed time frame – one year – and basic defaults and standards about research material that needed digitization. From the beginning it was obvious that good (project) management would be required to deal with mechanics and people10 throughout the whole process and in order to coordinate requests, challenges and the on-going tasks at hand.

The initial idea that arose at the beginning was that project management can be used as a neutral tool for productive implementation of each of the individual goals. As a basis for collaborative work within and outside of disciplinary boundaries, tools, techniques and methods from project management supported team INF in controlling procedures, keeping the work within deadlines and bringing it to a successful end.

In this article I survey our approach to steer that pilot phase for digital research methods in humanities disciplines ranging from History to Art History to English and German Literature by acknowledging various approaches to research. The contribution at hand is guided by the following questions: How can explicit, mutual expectations in interdisciplinary digital humanities projects be met and managed productively within each disciplinary tradition? Which methods, tools and techniques deriving from project management help to acknowledge individual ideas, pace of work and overall goals? As well as: Can already established benefits from collaborative work such as gaining new skills or new knowledge help pushing cooperation in research projects?

# **2. Definitions: interdisciplinary (research) project(s) in Digital Humanities**

As Anthony Paré – Professor Emeritus for Language & Literacy Education at McGill University – points out in a recent blog post, "knowledge-making is a social enterprise that depends on collaborative work."11 He thereby captures various topics from a long-lasting yet very current discussion that val-

10 *McBride, Melanie*, Project Management Basics, New York: Apress, 2016, 2.

11 *Paré, Anthony*, Scholarship as collaboration: Towards a generous rhetoric., https://doc toralwriting.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/scholarship-as-collaboration-towards-a-gen erous-rhetoric/#more-2322 [accessed: 01.04.2019].

ues cooperative scholarly work above research as an individual and isolated one-person endeavor and disagrees with the notion of 'survival of the fittest scholar' through competition.12 The collaborative research Paré refers to in his article cannot be carried out without a common understanding of what a group of scholars can achieve within a complex knowledge-making process. But how can a common ground be established, and mutual goals be accomplished in collaborations? And which insights are needed to actually cooperate and pull in the same direction?

Before turning to evaluating our experiences with the implementation of project management methods in a multi-disciplinary context, I am going to elaborate on some fundamental concepts and terminology which we used in planning and executing the pilot phase.

### **What defines a project?**

Although digital humanities research has already been carried out for many years and is in ever growing demand by funding agencies of all kind, the troubles of carrying out digital research within existing humanities environments continues to be a challenge. The difficulties emerge on levels of mechanics and people; for example, many humanities researchers still see tools, methods and theories originating in the field of DH as "neoliberal and uncritical"13 assaults. Another critique that often hinders successful collaboration is the attitude towards managerial protocols and the so-called 'managerial humanities' that are sometimes used as a synonym for digital humanities research.14 Nevertheless, it seems obvious, that some kind of management is necessary to do (not only digital, but generally) meaningful research and that fruitful thoughts for research in general often do originate in the planning of research between disciplinary boundaries or by combining disciplines and fields that were not linked beforehand.

In order for those managerial tasks to be carried out successfully, in most cases it helps to think in terms of a 'project' – "a temporary endeavour

12 Cf. ibid.

13 *Svensson, Patrik*, Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

14 Cf. *D. Allington,* The Managerial Humanities; or, Why the Digital Humanities Don't Exist.

undertaken to create a unique product, service or result."15 Parameters such as time, scope and scale help to grasp a better understanding of the endeavor and support coordinating tasks and responsibilities as well as achieving scheduled and planned objectives. However,

"projects are [also] the way in which human creativity is most ef fectively harnessed to achieve tangible, lasting results. In the past they may have been called something dif ferent, but building a pyramid, painting a ceiling, or funding a nation all required vision, planning and coordinated ef fort – the essential features of what we now call a project."16

So, when taking this citation seriously, every action done in an academic environment can be seen as a project, even if it is not described as such – from presentations in the first semester to larger tasks such as essays, assignments or dissertations. Research projects, however, require additional attention, as they are comprised of a complex combination of actors and interests. Thus, a research project can be understood as a

15 *Project Management Institute*, What is Project Management?, https://www.pmi.org/ about/learn-about-pmi/what-is-project-management [accessed: 01.04.2019].

16 *Hobbs, Peter*, Project Management (Essential Managers), London: Dorling Kindersley, 2016, 6.

17 *DBpedia*, Project Management, http://dbpedia.org/ontology/ResearchProject [accessed: 01.04.2019].

18 *OECD*, Project Management, https://web.archive.org/web/20070219233912/http://stats. oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=2312 [accessed: 01.04.2019].

19 *Merriam Webster*, Project Management, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ research [accessed: 01.04.2019].

Also, "projects [in academia] are both nouns and verbs: A project is a kind of scholarship that requires design, management, negotiation, and collaboration. It is also scholarship that projects, in the sense of futurity, as something which is not yet."20

All definitions provided above therefore describe aspects of doing (digital) humanities research. And not only do researchers work in these forms of special activities, they also manage those projects from the very early days on. If a scholar wants to submit a paper, a thesis, or a funding application, she already is coordinating tasks, responsibilities and her working process in order to meet deadline(s). In this light, doing digital research in the form of planned projects is nothing too new, however, the novelty lies in an unprecedented interdependence when collaborating with large numbers of researchers, librarians, research software engineers and other involved stakeholders. Digital Humanities are thus a field that is "most frequently characterized as data- and compute power-intensive, interdisciplinary and highly collaborative in nature."21 The underpinning of all projects is nonetheless a framework of specific, but also invariable processes that produce the artifacts and mechanics of project management.

### **Varieties of projects in the pilot phase**

Subproject INF's tasks were defined rather broadly in the grant application, and it later became clear that the best way to carry out digital research and introduce digital methods to other involved humanities projects within the CRC, was by forming subprojects that would be manageable and promising with regard to their successful implementation. Thus, after a call for projects, initially six projects22 from the collaborative research center were selected to take part in the pilot phase for applying and testing digital methods.23 These

20 *Burdick, Anne et al.*, Digital\_Humanities, Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 2012, 124.

21 *Blanke, Tobias/Hedges, Mark/Dunn, Stuart*, Arts and humanities e-science – Current practices and future challenges, in: Future Generation Computer Systems 25(2009), 474–480.

22 Involved projects were A04, B01, B03, B05, C01 and C03. More on each project and digital research approach can be found in this whole volume – in much more detail and put in perspective by the humanities researchers themselves.

23 One of the projects was not carried on as the result appeared not to be useful for supporting the research questions already asked.

projects were characterized by a variety and diversity of involved people, contents, material and inputs and their expectations about research goals and outputs. People included PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, Principal Investigators and research assistants who were unified by the fact that they were all humanities researchers, but with backgrounds in History, German Literature, Art History and English Literature. Team INF consisted of computer scientists, librarians, data scientists and digital humanists; consequently, a diverse set of expertise and knowledge was given from the start. However, the projects did not only differ with regard to the people coming from various academic hierarchies, they also differed in terms of contexts within which they were taken on. The individual case studies were either part of PhD projects, initiated questions for research projects within the respective research project in the scope of the CRC, or served as the basis for postdoctoral research projects. In terms of managing these projects, it is important to mention that each project counted as a case study but was always part of a bigger project that was conducted throughout the whole first funding period of the CRC until the end of 2020 of those researchers that tested digital methods in the pilot phase. Goals and intended output were different as well and relied on a variety of source material specific to each project.24 Nevertheless, as time and (wo)man-power were limited, we tried to offer a technical pipeline that each project could benefit from on different levels.25

During the first meetings it soon became obvious that interdisciplinary collaboration is not an easy task, as "it is not clear that all are accustomed to or trained for this type of work."26 However, by asking ourselves "Who is involved and brings which qualifications and which knowledge?" and "Which steps are necessary to be successful on the way and in the end?" we were able to recognize and acknowledge disciplinary perceptions for the time being.

24 Source materials included French magazines from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, English novels from the seventeenth century or parliamentary debates from twentieth and twenty-first century.

25 For more information on the technical and methodological pipeline that was implemented and the tools that were deployed, see the contribution by Jentsch, Patrick and Stephan Porada "From Text to Data" in this volume.

26 *L. Siemens*,'More Hands' means 'More Ideas': Collaboration in the Humanities, 353.

By combining humanities research and the digital, digital humanities collaboration

"requires the creation and deployment of tools for sharing that function to improve collaboration involving large–scale data repository analysis among multiple sites, academic disciplines, and participants through data sharing, sof tware sharing, and knowledge sharing practices."27