"To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism." Evgeny Morozov. Allen Lane. March 2013. --- Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement – but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate why and how we are using it. Alison Powell finds that although the final chapter of this book provides some examples of thoughtful ways that technology could be used as a way of thinking through problems rather than as a panacea, Morozov does not develop his critique much beyond the superficial “it’s not all about the internet.”

Book review: To save everything click here: the folly of technological solutionism

"Big Data" is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in this examination of data and scholarly research, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. In many cases, there are no data -- because relevant data don't exist, cannot be found, or are not available. Moreover, data sharing is difficult, incentives to do so are minimal, and data practices vary widely across disciplines. Borgman, an often-cited authority on scholarly communication, argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure -- an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. After laying out the premises of her investigation -- six "provocations" meant to inspire discussion about the uses of data in scholarship -- Borgman offers case studies of data practices in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and then considers the implications of her findings for scholarly practice and research policy. To manage and exploit data over the long term, Borgman argues, requires massive investment in knowledge infrastructures; at stake is the future of scholarship.

Big data, little data, no data : scholarship in the networkedworld

Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur ?

Despite widespread support from policy makers, funding agencies, and scientific journals, academic researchers rarely make their research data available to others. At the same time, data sharing in research is attributed a vast potential for scientific progress. It allows the reproducibility of study results and the reuse of old data for new research questions. Based on a systematic review of 98 scholarly papers and an empirical survey among 603 secondary data users, we develop a conceptual framework that explains the process of data sharing from the primary researcher’s point of view. We show that this process can be divided into six descriptive categories: Data donor, research organization, research community, norms, data infrastructure, and data recipients. Drawing from our findings, we discuss theoretical implications regarding knowledge creation and dissemination as well as research policy measures to foster academic collaboration. We conclude that research data cannot be regarded a knowledge commons, but research policies that better incentivize data sharing are needed to improve the quality of research results and foster scientific progress.

What Drives Academic Data Sharing

Scope-based carbon footprint analysis of U.S. residential and commercial buildings: An input–output hybrid life cycle assessment approach

The Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Roman van Walewein (‘Romance of Gawain’) is attributed in the text itself to two authors, Penninc and Vostaert. Very little quantitative research into this dual authorship has been done. This article describes our progress in applying different non-traditional authorship attribution methods to the text of Walewein. After providing an introduction to the romance and an overview of earlier research, we evaluate previous statements on authorship and stylistics by applying both Yule's measure of lexical richness and Burrows's Delta. To find out whether these new methods would confirm or even enhance our present knowledge about the differences between the two authors, we applied an adapted version of John Burrows's Delta procedure. The adapted version seems to be able to distinguish the double authorship of the romance. It also helps us to confirm some and to reject other earlier statements about the position in the text where the second author started his work.

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Delta for middle dutch-author and copyist distinction in Walewein

This paper presents project 'Alfalab'. Alfalab is a collaborative frame work project of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). It explores the success and fail factors for virtual research collaboration and supporting digital infrastructure in the Humanities. It does so by delivering a virtual research environment engineered through a virtual R&D collaborative and by drawing in use cases and feedback from Humanities researchers from two research fields: textual historical text research and historical GIS-application. The motivation for the project is found in a number of commonly stated factors that seem to be inhibiting general application of virtualized research infrastructure in the Humanities. The paper outlines the project's motivation, key characteristics and implementation. One of the pilot applications is described in greater detail.

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Alfalab: Construction and Deconstruction of a Digital Humanities Experiment

Wenn Ihr baut, werden wir wohnen? Digitale Infrastrukturen gro- sen Masstabs als Sackgasse fur die Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften«. Pro- grams aiming to develop large scale digital infrastructure for the humanities motivate this development mostly by the wish to leverage methodological in- novation through digital and computational approaches. It is questionable, however, if large scale infrastructures are the right incubator model for bring- ing about such innovation. The necessary generalizations and standardizations, management and development processes that large infrastructures need to ap- ply to cater to wholesale humanities are at odds with well-known aspects of innovation. Moreover, such generalizations close off many possibilities for ex- ploring new modeling and computing approaches. I argue that methodological innovation and advancing the modeling of humanities data and heuristics is better served by flexible small-scale research focused development practices. It will also be shown that modeling highly specific distributed web services is a more promising avenue for sustainability of highly heterogeneous humanities digital data than standards enforcement and current encoding practices.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/41636603.pdf

If You Build It, Will We Come? Large Scale Digital Infrastructures as a Dead End for Digital Humanities.

Interoperability is the key term within the framework of the European-funded research project Interedition,[1][1] whose aim is ‘to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods’. The tools developed by Interedition’s ‘Prototyping’ working group were tested by other research teams, which formulate strategic recommendations. To this purpose, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (The Hague), and the University of Wurzburg have been working together within the framework of Interedition. One of the concrete results of collaboration is the development and fine-tuning of the text collation tool CollateX.[2][2] In this article, we would like to investigate how the architecture of a digital archive containing modern manuscripts can be designed in such a way that users can autonomously collate textual units of their choice with the help of the collation tool CollateX and thus decide for themselves how efficiently this digital architecture functions—as an archive, as a genetic dossier, or as an edition. The first part introduces CollateX and its internal concepts and heuristics as a tool for digitally supported collation. How this tool can be integrated in the infrastructure of an electronic edition is discussed in part two. The third and final part examines the possibility of deploying CollateX for the collation of modern manuscripts by means of a test case: the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project ([www.beckettarchive.org][3]).

 [1]: #fn-1
 [2]: #fn-2
 [3]: http://www.beckettarchive.org

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Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Hermeneutics is the theory of text interpretation. From classical times until now it has been a central tenet of scholarly research, informed by both philology and philosophy. Hermeneutics as a theory concerns itself with the nature of interpretation, its subjectivity, historicity, multi-perspectivity, and its dependence on context. It is precisely these interpretative aspects of humanities research that are often felt as being at odds with the perceived scientific empirical paradigm found in computer science and software design. The digital humanities is a field where this clear tension between hermeneutical narrative and quantified patterns surfaces. This tension calls urgently for a fundamental dialog between humanities and computer science about the status of a hermeneutics as an imperative to humanities research, and about a humanities-informed hermeneutics of code, algorithms, and quantification.

Joris van Zundert

Papers

Delta for middle dutch-author and copyist distinction in Walewein

Alfalab: Construction and Deconstruction of a Digital Humanities Experiment

If You Build It, Will We Come? Large Scale Digital Infrastructures as a Dead End for Digital Humanities.

Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Screwmeneutics and Hermenumericals: The Computationality of Hermeneutics