DARIAH is pleased to announce the winner of our annual book bursary for the Open Access publication of early career researchers’ first monographs in Digital Humanities. The recipient of the first, introductory round of the bursary is:
Ulrike Henny-Krahmer, Junior Professor for Digital Humanities, Institute for German Studies, University of Rostock, author of the manuscript Genre Analysis and Corpus Design: 19th Century Spanish American Novels (1830-1910).
In her manuscript, Ulrike provides both theoretical and practical contributions to the concept of literary genre and subgenres through the design and analysis of a corpus of 19th-century Spanish American novels. Her research aims to relate literary theoretical genre concepts to the ones used in Digital Genre Stylistics as a subfield of Digital Humanities.
The book will be introduced in detail during the DARIAH Annual Event 2022 and upon its publication (expected date of publication: December 2022). In this post, we only highlight key values of the awarded manuscript that make the work especially relevant for DARIAH communities and resonate with DARIAH’s vision of how research is ideally to be designed, shared, and evaluated.
Key values of the awarded manuscript
1. Openness way beyond the PDF: an enhanced monograph
The awarded manuscript will be published in the SIDE Open Access publication series of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing. IDE is a non-profit scholarly network that has strong commitments to strengthen various types of DH resources such as digital scholarly editions, text collections and editing tools (see for instance the publication of RIDE, an Open Access review journal for digital editions and resources) and to align digital scholarly workflows with innovations in scholarly publishing.
“Recognizing and celebrating the complexities of humanistic and artistic research practices is at the heart of DARIAH as a research infrastructure,” said DARIAH Director Dr. Toma Tasovac. “We’re also really interested in the work of those who push the boundaries of what a scholarly monograph in the 21st century can look like“.
The monograph will accommodate all the research data accompanying the dissertation, including the TEI corpus, Python and XSLT scripts, as well as analysis results and visualizations that the author already published on GitHub and Zenodo, through excerpts in the text and links to all the data and scripts used.
“The awarded manuscript is exemplary for best practices in open humanities research,” said Dr. Maciej Maryl, Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and member of the award committee. “Its format allows for the thoughtful integration of the argument with the underlying data: TEI encodings, the programming code and the underlying corpus. This way, scholars can engage with the research beyond just following the argument: they can explore, check, test, adapt, readapt, replicate, or possibly even reproduce the methodological solutions of the dissertation in their own research fields. As such, excellence and innovation go hand in hand in the awarded manuscript.”
2. Multilingualism
Multilingualism is a key value in Digital Humanities endeavours. The awarded manuscript incorporates traditions of both digital and non-digital literary genre analysis and stylistics, as well as Spanish literary studies. To maximise audience and to better connect to the global Digital Humanities discourse, the manuscript has been written in English but it includes examples and quotations in Spanish and quotations in German and French. Ensuring that multilingual/native language publications or outputs of local or culturally-specific relevance can be rewarded to overcome the distortions favouring the anglophone publishers/topics is a value for DARIAH.
3. Relevance for DARIAH communities and connection with DARIAH-affiliated services
The awarded manuscript lays down a comprehensive, solid and replicable methodology for digital exploration of literary genres, which is a significant contribution to the Digital Humanities research that DARIAH aims to support and enrich. DARIAH serves Computational Literary Studies communities via involvement in European projects where research and research infrastructure building meet halfway, such as CLS Infra, and also via providing research analysis and publication services to them across Europe. The awarded dissertation refers to TextGrid, a flagship DARIAH service for the creation, curation and publication of TEI-encoded resources and to DraCor, another service closely associated with DARIAH that explores the concept of Programmable Corpora and makes multilingual drama corpora available for computational analyses. The latter is among the first initiatives to publish multilingual digital corpora for computational literary analysis of texts, including texts in Spanish. The work on textual metadata will be of interest to DARIAH communities invested in bibliographic data. As such, Genre Analysis and Corpus Design: 19th Century Spanish American Novels (1830-1910) also gives an account of the increasingly important role shared European infrastructures play – also in humanities research.
“For me, the process to build a corpus of more than 200 novels from 19th century Spanish America, collect and model the metadata and encode the texts in TEI was the most time-consuming and challenging part of the whole project,“ – said Ulrike Henny-Krahmer. “Joint efforts and infrastructures for the building, publication, and reuse of digital corpora are essential to promote the field of Computational Literary Studies. With the DARIAH Book Bursary, it becomes possible for me to publish the dissertation in a way that ensures it to be Open Access right away, which I consider fundamental for transparent, sustainable and inclusive research.”
About the review process
Submissions for the call for manuscripts have been reviewed by the committee of: Dr. Toma Tasovac, Director of DARIAH-EU and Dr. Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Open Science Officer of DARIAH-EU as internal members and Dr. Maciej Maryl, Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences as an external member.
The committee wishes to thank all applicants for their excellent submissions which made the final decision extremely difficult. While the reviewers agreed that the winning manuscript covered the areas most valuable for DARIAH, they unequivocally recognised the high-quality of remaining works and their relevance for DH community at large.
Next steps
DARIAH communities will hear more about the awarded manuscript during the DARIAH Annual Event 2022 and upon its publication.
In parallel, the 2022 DARIAH Open Access call for the first monograph in Digital Humanities will be launched soon. The bursary aims to serve as a modest but immediate contribution to ease the current anomalies in Open Access publication funds that are usually not inclusive of first monographs and support those who are less privileged in this respect but could possibly achieve the biggest change in academic culture and beyond.
