DZHW (German Centre for Higher Education and Research Studies)
Loughborough University
University of Cambridge
King's College London and The Alan Turing Institute
Dr Marcel Knöchelmann Sociologist, DZHW (German Centre for Higher Education and Research Studies)
Dr Marcel Knöchelmann is a sociologist with a focus on scholarly communication, inequities in education, and the production of knowledge. After a research stay at Yale University, he completed his PhD at University College London in 2021 with the thesis: Rationalities of Scholarly Discourse: A Cultural Sociological Analysis of Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities, funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. He currently works at the German Centre for Higher Education and Research Studies, DZHW Berlin. Prior to his research, he worked as a bookseller and at different publishing houses in the UK and Germany. He is a founding member of the network for higher education and science policy of German Social Democrats.
On the surface, Big Data seems an obvious and rewarding new frontier for historians, with digitisation offering new insights on a grand scale. However, as an observational rather than experimental discipline, and with datasets particularly prone to unfillable gaps owing to labyrinthine copyright claims and an uneven electronic public domain, data-driven historical research can appear either impossible or thoroughly undesirable. Yet, the sentiments behind open data and methodological reproducibility are part of the very fabric of the humanities, with its tradition of documented hermeneutics and thoroughly provenanced evidence. This talk will discuss the historiographical tradition of reproducibility and how we might build upon these rich traditions in an age of data-driven results.
Dr Melodee Wood (née Beals) , Loughborough University
Dr Melodee Beals is a Senior Lecturer in Digital History in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. Her research explores the ways in which the movement of peoples and ideas intersect and the practical traces of imagined communities within the Anglophone World. As an advocate of the Digital Humanities and Open Research, she works to develop and promote computer-aided methodologies through her roles as history editor for the Open Library of Humanities and Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. Her latest project, The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata brought together these two loves by tracing the history and nature of digitised newspapers collections around the world to help researcher build projects across national and linguistic borders.
The growing availability of born-digital and digital collections, and data-intensive methods present new infrastructural needs and opportunities for research in the humanities. In parallel, with the increasing adoption of Open Knowledge principles in research, new questions arise on the best practices for open humanities research. Data Publication is acquiring increasing visibility and interest, also thanks to the growing popularity of data journals, publishing venues devoted to peer-reviewed publications describing datasets and crediting their creators (data papers). In this talk I will present my experience of leading the Journal of Open Humanities Data, a data journals dedicated to humanities research and its role in supporting the community of Open Humanities researchers.
Dr Barbara McGillivray , King's College London and The Alan Turing Institute
Barbara McGillivray is Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation at King’s College London and Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, where she runs the Humanities and Data Science special interest group. She has a degree in Mathematics and one in Classics from the University of Firenze and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Pisa. Her current research focusses on computational models of meaning change in historical and contemporary texts and she is co-investigator of the Living with Machines project. She is also passionate about supporting open data in humanities research and has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data since 2019. Her most recent book is “Applying Language Technology in Humanities Research. Design, Application and the Underlying Logic” (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).