The Knowledge Complexity Research
What did we do?
The Knowledge Complexity (or KPLEX) Project was funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 to bring a humanities dimension to the activities of the much larger, industry focussed Big Data Public/Private Partnership. Its success was inherently linked with how it drew on DARIAH networks and knowledge.
Why did we do it?
KPLEX produced high-caliber research outputs, as well as reaching a number of key non-academic audiences, including policymakers, industry and the general public, through its applied approach and focus on how the digital humanities might reach out to address new audiences and societal challenges.
Who did we do it for?
The audiences of the KPLEX results included digital humanities and science and technology studies research communities, as well as industry, policy and the wider public.
Rationale for and Overview of the Activity
The origins of the KPLEX project can be dated to the larger perspective that DARIAH integration provided to an earlier project, CENDARI (Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure). CENDARI was a very different sort of project from what KPLEX would ultimately become, with a clear focus on building research infrastructure for historians. However the project raised a significant number of meta-level questions regarding the limits of data federation, and the limits of knowledge creation within the context of a federated system. Interactions within the DARIAH network and through its services were able not only to confirm the wider validity of these reflections, but also propose some innovative mechanisms by which to extend these reflections into a wider, industry-facing project.
Description of the Impact
The project was integrated into a large number of European policy initiatives, including the Big Data PPP, Big Data Value Association (BDVA) and Big Data Value Ecosystem (BDVE), as well as the Advisory Board of the HubIT project for SSH integration into ICT research. These points of integration resulted in part from the initial positioning of the project as an ICT ‘sister’ project, a modality of project designed by the European Commission to bring an innovative SSH research perspective to the ICT programme topic areas. Humanities-led projects in this industry-driven space are rare, and the project ultimately had unique opportunities to contribute to debates about the development of big data research and innovation (such as through the project’s presentation at the Big Data Value Forum in Versailles, France, in 2017).
In spite of its limited duration (15 months) the project produced 4 major chapters or journal articles, a co-authored book, an open dataset, 3 policy reports, and 5 significant examples of public outreach. Many of these publications are seeing significant reuse, while the European Network of SSH National Contacts (Net4Society) featured the project as one of its ”Integration Success Stories”. Another reuse story of these publications was seen in the first workshop of the SHAPE-ID project on inter- and transdisciplinary humanities on the question of how Arts and Humanities disciplines can position themselves as leaders or equal partners in research addressing societal challenges.
Evidence of the Impact
Primary Scientific Publications
- (2022) Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy. The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-trouble-with-big-data-how-datafication-displaces-cultural-practices/
Usage statistics: Almost 4,000 views as of February 2023.
Reviewed in The Sociological Review as: “...a significant text for digital humanities and science, technology and society studies, or for anyone who is serious about understanding digital cultures in the post-truth era.” https://thesociologicalreview.org/reviews/the-trouble-with-big-data-by-jennifer-edmond-nicola-horsley-jorg-lehmann-and-mike-priddy/
- (2021) Jennifer Edmond, Jörg Lehmann Digital humanities, knowledge complexity, and the five ‘aporias’ of digital research. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 36, Issue Supplement_2, October 2021, Pages ii95–ii108, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab031
Usage statistics: +1500 views, in the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
- (2020) with Georgina Nugent-Folan “Digitising Cultural Complexity: Representing Rich Cultural Data in a Big Data Environment.” In: Rice, R., Yates, S. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Digital Technology and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Usage statistics: Unavailable
- (2018) Knowledge Complexity. Open Research Data. DANS. https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xe6-hpm5
- (2017) N. Horsley, "What can a knowledge complexity approach reveal about big data and archival practice?," 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Boston, MA, USA, 2017, pp. 2246-2250, doi: 10.1109/BigData.2017.8258176.
Usage statistics: 95 Full Text Views
- (2017) Edmond, J., Nugent Folan, G.. Data, Metadata, Narrative. Barriers to the Reuse of Cultural Sources. In: Garoufallou, E., Virkus, S., Siatri, R., Koutsomiha, D. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 755. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70863-8_25
Usage statistics: Accessed +1000 times
Policy and Industry Publications
- (2017) Knowledge Complexity and the Digital Humanities: Introducing the KPLEX Project.
ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) News: Number 111 October 2017, pp. 20-30
- (2018) Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Elisabeth Huber, Rihards Kalnins, Jörg Lehmann, Georgina Nugent Folan, Mike Priddy and Thomas Stodulka. Big Data and Complex Knowledge: Observations and Recommendations for Research from the Knowledge Complexity Project. Available at: https://kplexproject.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/trinity-big-data-report-jklr_04.pdf
- (2018) K-PLEX : a success story in SSH integration. Net4Society. https://kplexproject.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/ict_final_draft-1.pdf
- (2019) First SHAPE-ID Workshop Takes Place at Trinity College Dublin. https://www.shapeid.eu/first-shape-id-workshop-takes-place-at-trinity-college-dublin/
Public Outreach
- RTE Brainstorm Radio Programme, first broadcast 2nd December 2018. Available at: https://www.rte.ie/eile/brainstorm/2018/1203/1014763-brainstorm-on-the-radio-episode-1/
- Keynote Address, Fidelity Investments Data Meet-up. “Bias and Big Data: Watching our Mouths and Manners?” April 2018.
- RTE Brainstorm, “The Problem with Talking about Big Data.” March 2018. https://www.rte.ie/eile/brainstorm/2018/0110/932290-the-problem-with-talking-about-big-data/
- Feature Interview, ÖRF (Austrian National Radio). January 2018
- Feature interview, Der Standard (Viennese Daily Newspaper, circulation approx. 85,000) “Geisteswissenschaften und digitale Technologien sind kein Gegensatz.” January 2018 - https://derstandard.at/2000073402537/Geisteswissenschaften-und-digitale-Technologien-sind-kein-Gegensatz
Contributors
Lead Author: Jennifer Edmond
