How Specific Can Local DH Be?

The analysis of DH in Ireland provided by O’Sullivan, Murphy, and Day (“Emergence of the Digital Humanities”) highlights the importance of the local context in assessing the emergence of the field. Yet in discussing the development of DH in Poland, a country which was hardly a pioneer in digital methods, it is difficult to capture the regional specificity of digital research practices. This is because the emergence of the field was influenced by both the regional context and the somewhat better-established “global” DH.

But let us first ask what actually constitutes global DH. In this task, it would be particularly helpful to take a look at Susan Schreibman’s account of constructing a conceptual framework for the first Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth), a book which has had an immense impact on galvanizing the field globally (this is also due to its open-access distribution):

It was felt that to make this a truly interdisciplinary volume, we would need to provide scholars with a point of departure that created an explicit trajectory from their traditional practice into a more computer-mediated one. While we considered other points of departure, for example, linguistic or national, these approaches were abandoned as being too divisive (how to justify including Japanese but not French, Germany but not Australia) given the size of the volume and its scope. (Schreibman, “Digital Humanities,” 47–48)

Hence national or linguistic diversity was purposefully excluded for the sake of conceptual clarity in setting up a guidebook for the emerging field. This was obviously a reasonable decision in order to end up with a coherent overview, rather than a set of diverse approaches. Schreibman’s point of departure in the article cited here is to ask who constitutes the field: the center of opinion makers or peripheries pressing from the outside (Schreibman, “Digital Humanities,” 46)? The answer is evident if we consider that the Companion was submitted to the publishers with inputs “from seven countries: in order of the number of contributions per country, they were from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Denmark” (51–52). Not much room for perspectives beyond the Anglophone realm.

Roughly around the same time—early enough to use the term “Humanities Computing” instead of “Digital Humanities” as posited by the Companion—Melissa Terras was assessing the emerging field on the basis of the conference abstracts for the Association for Computers and the Humanities/Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ACH/ALLC), noting that 77 percent of the presenters were “from countries where English is the native tongue” (Terras, “Disciplined,” 238). She noted that both language constraints and access to expensive infrastructures may have been factors excluding scholars from other countries. Another potentially excluding factor was the high conference fees. Today, more than a decade later, the geographical distribution of delegates at the main global DH conference has not changed much, according to the recent analysis of DH2017 Montreal (Pino-Díaz and Fiormonte, “Geopólitica de las humanidades digitales”). The authors conclude that the event confirmed the “hegemonic” role of the Global North, especially the Anglo-Saxon countries.2

Investigating the particularity of local or regional DH thus requires a double perspective, which could assess how both local specificity and global DH influence digital research practices in different countries. So, the question “Who is part of the DH community?” which Terras tried to answer by measuring the attendance at international conferences and membership of professional associations, should also be examined locally in national or regional contexts.

To give due importance to this specificity, Roopika Risam proposes a framework based on a theory of “accent,” which “recognizes both local specificity and global coherence in DH” (Risam, “Other Worlds, Other DHs,” 378). This seems potentially more productive than the division between center and peripheries adopted by Schreibman (“Digital Humanities”). Yet if we take a closer look, the notion of “accent” becomes troubling, as it implies there is only one root with some local variations, as Risam’s explicit reference to scholarship on Global Englishes and English language learning may suggest (“Other Worlds, Other DHs,” 380). The concept of DH accent indicates that there may be only one “proper” DH, with regional variations. However, one can imagine regional DH projects which flourish without any connection with global DH, based solely on available technologies. For instance, the Polish Literary Bibliography has developed its customized ORACLE database for over a decade without any contact with DH scholars (Maryl and Wciślik, “Remediations of Polish Literary Bibliography”). Moreover, Risam’s notion of accent seems unable to account for local specificity beyond the mere use of particular tools. Hence the DH accent comes to mean only a shared conviction of a particular DH community about the specific practical needs of its digital projects (Risam 382).

Taking an alternative route in this chapter, I will analyze the process of becoming digital—that is, adopting digital methods and practices by scholars in the humanities through a conceptual framework of “three waves” of digital humanities: (1) remediation of traditional methods of scholarly inquiry (cf. Svensson, “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities”); (2) taking advantage of the new medium to create new methods and genres (Davidson, “Humanities 2.0”; Presner, “Digital Humanities 2.0”; Svensson, “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities”); and (3) critical scrutiny of the epistemic constraints of the digital medium, affecting the humanistic inquiry (Berry, “Computational Turn”; Rogers, Digital Methods). Those waves, although sometimes understood chronologically, are here considered as coextant in the DH community. Scholarly activities conducted in the field will be assigned to one or other of these waves, in a manner corresponding to Risam’s “DH accent.”

The results of the DARIAH European survey on digital methods and tools in the humanities, conducted in 2014–2015, show that the application of the “digital” in the “humanities” is gradual (cf. Dallas et al., “European Survey on Scholarly Practices”). Although some basic tools like word processors, web search engines, and various online resources (digital libraries, archives, journals) are widely adopted, slightly more advanced services like bibliography managers or note-taking applications are relatively less popular. And there are still some types of applications—databases, content-management systems, or use of social media in scholarly practices—which are employed only by a small group of scholars (Dallas et al., “European Survey on Scholarly Practices,” 5). Thus being a digital humanist means placing oneself on a scale ranging from the use of basic tools, as by nearly all scholars in the field, to the most advanced stage where new methods and software capacities allow for posing utterly novel research questions or answering the old ones in a fundamentally different manner. Let us keep those remarks in mind while discussing the specificities of DH in Poland, focusing on two surveys conducted among Polish researchers in 2014 and 2015. Both studies helped to assess the community and its needs while also providing an overview of the state of play.

DH Community Assessment

The first survey, “Humanistyczne projekty cyfrowe w Polsce” (Digital humanities projects in Poland), was conducted online between June 9 and 20, 2014, among scholars and institutions interested in establishing the Polish chapter of the DARIAH consortium (Werla and Maryl, Humanistyczne Projekty Cyfrowe w Polsce [Digital humanities projects in Poland]). The survey was prepared by the Poznań Supercomputer and Networking Center and the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Its primary goal was to chart the field of Polish DH for the first time and provide an overview of the existing work, resources, and competencies, to help build an agenda for the proposed consortium.

Respondents were asked to provide information about their digital activities, such as the project title, website, dates, funding source, institutions, and people involved. They had to mark the project’s status (finished, ongoing, planned), type (research, education, etc.), and the result (research tool, collection, etc.). They were also asked to provide a project description, explaining the outcome, any software that had been developed, and connections with other Polish or international projects. There was also a “matchmaking” component: we asked about the project’s principal investigator and contact person, the vision for its development, and the profile of potential future collaborators.

Since the survey was conducted only among scholars invested in creating DARIAH-PL, the results were hardly representative. However, we managed to obtain eighty detailed project descriptions, which provide some valuable insights into this phase of institution building. First of all, we can learn something about the disciplinary shape of Polish DH, with linguistics, literary studies, and history as the forerunners (see Table 7.1). It should be noted that the survey did not ask directly for a particular discipline and these were inferred by myself from the descriptions of the projects. Hence, the category “humanities” was created for large multidisciplinary projects (e.g., the massive digitization endeavors undertaken by the Polish National Library).

If we look at the project outcomes (respondents could name more than one per project), we see that they consist mostly in developing software and research tools, together with databases and repositories (see Table 7.2).

Based on these descriptions, the projects were divided into four categories that captured the main differences (see Table 7.3). The largest group consisted of research tools or infrastructure (twenty-nine projects, 36 percent of the total)—endeavors leading to the development of specific research software (tools for linguistic analysis, textual transcription, etc.), or a laboratory to enable further research. The second group (twenty-four projects, 30 percent of the total) were projects using the digital medium solely to publish the research results in a standardized format (lexicons, dictionaries, corpora, etc.), enabling its further exploration by users. The third group (fourteen projects, 18 percent of the total) entailed repositories, namely full-text databases for certain types of texts. Unlike in the previous group, those repositories archived work that had been already published, not generated through the research project. Finally, the last group, digital research projects (thirteen projects, 16 percent of the total), featured research conducted within the digital domain or with the use of digital tools.

The survey results show that the primary focus of Polish DH has been on developing infrastructure and resources in the broadest possible sense of the word, which could enable further research including data collection as the output of a research project. We may look forward to more advanced, digitally driven research possible in the future.

The second survey I will discuss is the Polish translation of the DARIAH-EU survey on digital methods, conducted by the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) Working Group of DARIAH-EU in 2015. Although Poland was not a DARIAH member at that time, a Polish version of the survey was prepared and distributed by the Digital Humanities Center at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center. We managed to collect 152 responses through snowball sampling, again mostly among scholars interested in joining DARIAH-PL. Although we cannot claim that all Polish scholars using digital methods had an equal chance to participate in the survey, we may assert that using every possible means, it reached the individuals and institutions most active among the digital humanities community in Poland.3

Quite surprisingly (or perhaps not), the Polish sample did not differ in any important way from the European, with regard to the digital tools applied by scholars. Polish scholars may use bibliography managers or personal databases less often, but the results seemed to be fairly consistent with the European sample. This, in turn, shows that Polish DH, although developed outside the major digital humanities networks, evinces similar patterns of growth.

As for the discipline-wise overview, the Polish sample (with 152 respondents) consisted mainly of linguists (32.2 percent), literary scholars (28.2 percent), historians (16.8 percent), and cultural studies researchers (8.1 percent), while the remaining 14.7 percent were quite evenly distributed among other disciplines like anthropology and ethnology, arts, archaeology, medieval studies, music, philosophy, sociology, and others (see Figure 7.1). This distribution was consistent with the findings of the project survey presented earlier in this chapter, and with the European sample (1,782 respondents), in that the three main disciplines were the same; but the order was slightly different. The relative overrepresentation of linguists may be attributed to the fact that at the time of the survey, researchers in linguistics, who had already been collaborating for some time within the CLARIN-PL consortium, were the most organized digital humanities group in Poland.

Regarding affiliation, only 24.3 percent of respondents from the consolidated European sample were linked with a research center, as compared to 38.4 percent of Polish respondents. This difference probably stemmed from the fact that several institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Institutes of Arts, Computer Science, History, Literary Research, and Slavic Studies) are active participants of the Polish DH community. It is also vital for our discussion, as those institutions have historically invested in long-term research projects including bibliographies, scholarly editions, and lexicons, which may now serve as material and motivation for digital endeavors.

Another interesting difference lay in the professional status of the respondents (see Figure 7.2). Most of the respondents were assistant professors or lecturers (29.6 percent); or full or associate professors, readers, or senior researchers (22.5 percent). Interestingly, the proportions in the European sample were different, with a majority (26.6 percent) of full or associate professors, and 17.2 percent made up of assistant professors, readers, etc. If we also consider PhD students (26.1 percent in the Polish sample and 24.9 percent in the consolidated one), this would be a clear sign that digital humanities in Poland is driven considerably more by younger or less-established scholars. What further supports this claim is that Polish respondents tended to be younger and less experienced in terms of years in research than their European colleagues. We can clearly see more Polish respondents in the two following groups: scholars with three to ten years’ research experience (34.9 percent in Poland against 29 percent in the consolidated European sample), and twenty-six to thirty-five years old (41.5 percent against 30.4 percent).

Specificities Revisited

The specificities of local DH are often discussed in terms of institutions and language (Fiormonte, “Towards a Cultural Critique”; Galina Russell, “Geographical and Linguistic Diversity”). Indeed, the lack of visibility of particular communities sometimes stems from merely linguistic and cultural barriers: if you work on a scholarly edition of an eminent Polish writer, your audience will be smaller than for English or French subjects, and your exchanges with DH peers will be limited to particularities of software or your markup decisions rather than the joys of the text. The recognition accorded to a DH project is hard to separate from the international standing of particular national humanities and the popularity of a given culture.

The issue of language is also connected to technical capacities: the lack of specialist tools dedicated to particular languages may hinder the development of digital research. For instance, Polish is highly inflected, hence the need for dedicated software performing lemmatization, which would make possible further operations like topic modeling or sentiment analysis. CLARIN-PL (https://clarin-pl.eu/index.php/en/services/) has been bridging this gap since 2013, creating linguistic tools to enable Polish scholars to conduct more sophisticated research. Special care was given to adapt the services to users without extensive knowledge of computing and linguistics (Maryl, Piasecki, and Walkowiak, “Literary Exploration Machine”). The process of becoming digital seems to involve a certain amount of self-assessment, institutionalization, and consolidation of resources. Currently, the thinking is in favor of a greater federation of resources, so as to link and make available the heterogeneous content of various databases for diachronic linguistics (Pastuch et al., “Digital Humanities in Poland”): databases with data on culture (https://lab.dariah.pl/en/), dictionaries (http://lexp-dev.clarin-pl.eu/), or bibliographies (Kozłowski, “Humanistyka oparta na danych” [“Data-driven humanities”]). The idea is to group these resources with tools and papers explaining best practices, so that they might be more accessible to less DH-savvy colleagues.

The results of both surveys seem to confirm that Polish DH is currently in the phase of building the core tools and resources to enable digital research on Polish material. It is somewhat telling that there are two large DH consortia in Poland but no association for digital humanities (although Polish representatives have been quite active in the European Association for Digital Humanities, EADH, and in ADHO). Thus instead of associations of scholars, we have more institutional bodies with a mission to build infrastructure and set standards for the development of DH projects. CLARIN-PL has already provided robust linguistic services, aligned with the European-level resources offered by CLARIN-ERIC. DARIAH-PL is still developing its agenda. Owing to a somewhat open membership policy, the Polish DARIAH is one of the largest in Europe, encompassing some eighteen institutions. DARIAH-PL has established working groups focused chiefly on textual scholarship, linguistics, images, musicology, and archeology (see http://dariah.pl/en/workgroups/). Serving as platforms for scholars from participating institutions, these working groups are planning further, researcher-driven infrastructure-development programs. At the time of writing, DARIAH-PL is working on developing its services and integrating existing resources under the DARIAH Lab project (https://lab.dariah.pl/en/; 2021–23).

Interestingly, a similar pattern can be seen in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Regional projects and initiatives in digital humanities tend to focus on regionally important topics and specific documentation practices to address them. The European Union–funded project COURAGE created a digital registry (http://cultural-opposition.eu/) of collections of the legacy of dissent. Under the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), a COST Action on Distant Reading (https://www.distant-reading.net/) works on the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), with large input from CEE scholars. Finally, another COST Action, NEP4DISSENT (https://nep4dissent.eu/), surveys the digital needs of contemporary historians and provides training. There is also a regional DARIAH Central European Hub (http://elte-dh.hu/dariah-ceh/), serving as a strategic platform to enable DH training in the countries of the Visegrád Group.

This turn toward localization is also strengthened by recent developments in scholarly communication. The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (https://www.helsinki-initiative.org/en), launched in 2019, advocates greater support for infrastructures handling scholarly communication in local languages, as they bring diversity to scholarship. Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS) is a newly founded infrastructure that streamlines the existing initiatives and focuses on providing support for genres specific to scholarly communication in those disciplines, like monographs or scholarly editions (Maryl et al., “Case for an Inclusive Scholarly Communication Infrastructure”).

As we have seen, the task of creating tools and resources seems to take priority in Polish DH. But is it the case only in Poland, or in DH as such? Since digital projects usually start before any institutionalization takes place, it is often the very first step to conduct a survey of existing initiatives on the institutional, national, or regional level. This process of assessment and consolidation is precisely how we are becoming digital and creating local DH fields. Perhaps a genuinely global DH should have a comprehensive database of such projects like the one posited by Galina Russell (“Geographical and Linguistic Diversity”), which would serve as a platform for the exchange of information and knowhow, granting visibility to all players. Such a database would also provide empirical material for discussions on the issue of locality of DH.

Notes

This work was partly supported by the project DARIAH-PL No. POIR.04.02.00-00-D006/20 under Polish Smart Growth Operational Programme 2014–2020.

1. This is true of other countries as well. The Versology Team at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences dwells on this tradition in its digital work.

   Return to note reference.

2. Scott B. Weingart has compiled a short bibliography of the field-mapping papers in his blog, http://scottbot.net/dh-quantified/.

   Return to note reference.

3. For more details on the Polish sample see Maryl, “Kim Są Polscy Humaniści Cyfrowi?”

   Return to note reference.

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