The Challenges and Opportunities of e-Science in the Arts and Humanities
Sheila Anderson, Arts and Humanities Data Service
sheila.anderson@ahds.ac.uk

Over the last two decades, ICT and Arts and Humanities research practice has been broadly complementary. That was a happy accident, based on the fact that most computing software developments were programme/machine specific, cheaper memory contributed to the development of computing methodologies for the arts and humanities, and the network functionality was on the basis of an active/passive relationship of server-client. That agenda is now changing. E-science is about programming power and about pro-active relationships as between server to server and programme to programme and (in the Access Grid) research practitioner to research practitioner. These are all tools that will be of key significance to what arts and humanities researchers are going to be doing over the next ten years.

The community now finds itself in the position of having access to an unprecedented amount of digital materials, in the form of texts, images, moving image and audio materials, and datasets. While the creation, management and preservation of digital resources continue to present challenges that require ongoing support and engagement, the question of how best to provide support for researchers who wish to creatively engage with this body of material for advanced scholarship has become critical. In order to share data, collaborate creatively on research, and to develop new research methodologies, the community will increasingly have to turn to grid technologies to support large-scale data management and sharing.

Advanced methods that support the discovery of, and engagement with, digital resources will require collaboration with the scientific, computer science and engineering communities, and collaboration within the e-science framework is therefore a crucial step towards building such partnerships. It is also important to understand that this sort of engagement with digital resources for advanced scholarship is not a by-product of digitisation, but a key component in the digital “life-cycle” that should be addressed at the very outset of digitisation projects.

This paper will reflect on some of these issues and outline a programme that is being co-funded in the UK by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Research as social activity: designing a collaborative e-Research space for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Ian Johnson, University of Sydney
johnson@acl.arts.usyd.edu.au

One of the major problems with the deluge of new digital tools and sources of information on the Internet, as well as on our desktops, is the fragmentation of our information. How do we keep track of all the different web sites, tools, databases, notes and so forth that we create or use? How do we remember all the passwords we create? How do we annotate resources to which we have no write access? How do we backup information if we have it scattered across several systems, some of which we may not own (such as free or subscription blogg and wiki servers)? And how do we find out about new tools or models of research without hours of frustrating Googling?

As part of the Sydney Humanities and Social Sciences e-Research Initiative my lab is currently developing a web-based community system which we are calling a Collaborative Knowledge Space (CKS). One of the main features of the CKS is a system providing a consistent index to conventional bibliographic entries, web bookmarks and personal notes, allowing annotation to be linked to any physical or digital resource. Through the use of social bookmarking we hope to facilitate communities of interest, highlighting key resources in a particular domain. The CKS will also include annotated guides to the digital humanities, a one-stop-shop for server-based digital tools maintained within the University, and the facility to archive research in the University's digital repository.

I believe our CKS will provide a model for overcoming the dangers and wasted effort associated with the current fragmentation of digital tools and resources. Such a model could be implemented at either an institutional level or within a community of practice. The critical issue is identification of an appropriate scale for such a system.

Time Period Directories
Michael K. Buckland, Matt Meiske & Vivien Petras, University of California, Berkeley
Presented by: Kimberly Carl, University of California, Berkeley
buckland@sims.berkeley.edu , kcarl@berkeley.edu

Social life is pervasively organized into periods. In texts and in speech, their is a strong tendency to refer to periods by name rather than by calendar dates. These names carry more meaning than ranges of dates do, e.g. “Grand siècle,” “Third Reich,” or “Victorian.” The use of named time periods resembles the use of place names. The dual terminology of place (cultural) and space (physical) are handled by the well-established genre of gazetteers relating place names to spatial references (longitude and latitude) and, thereby, to each other and to map visualizations. An Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative project has developed an analogous treatment of period (cultural) and time (physical) in the form of a “Time Period Directory” relating named time periods to calendar dates and, thereby, to each other, and, thereby, to each other and visualization as chronologies or timelines.

A web-accessible “time period directory” using 2,000 named time periods derived from chronological subdivisions used in the Library of Congress Subject Headings will be presented. Design, implementation, and expected uses of Time Period Directories will be described.