DARIAH-EU’s CEO Mike Mertens is part of a pannel on „Digital Humanities“ at RLUK’s DCDC Conference.
DARIAH-EU’s CEO Mike Mertens is part of panel 9 „Digital Humanities“ at Research Libraries UK’s (RLUK) DCDC 15 Conference. Mike speaks on „Heritage Collections and the Sustainability of the Digital Humanities“. You’ll find an abstract below this post. The conference’s hashtag is: #DCDC15
Abstract: „Heritage Collections and the Sustainability of the Digital Humanities“
Certain disciplines in the Arts and Humanities have been using computational techniques and tools for some 50 years. In this sense, ‘Digital Humanities’ is nothing new. Regardless of where they are situated, academics will now also be using generic digital means of communicating and publishing their outputs.
If Digital Humanities as a research method is not new, the more recent and now seemingly unstoppable penetration of society by algorithms, mobile devices, computers and smartwatches certainly is.
What will academic research really signify, for example, in a world based on the Internet of Things, in which even common household appliances share data between themselves, and interact with the Web? How will the Digital Humanities and the academy have a sustainable impact in this environment?
One way of securing the sustainability of the Digital Humanities is to connect the subject more and more to heritage collections as places of digital transformation and digital translation, from data to information. Heritage collections can act as a bridge or common space between the increasingly digital public and researchers.
This paper will explore where and how the Digital Humanities can both provide the academy with a unique impact route via the use of heritage collections, going beyond the campus walls, and how DARIAH-EU, the European Digital Humanities infrastructure, is taking such work forward.
