Talking Digital Humanities with Melissa Terras
Professor Melissa Terras is Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies at University College London. She’s visiting Australia now and is one of the featured speakers at eResearch Australasia 2014. She’ll also be giving a talk on the Great Parchment Book project while she’s in Melbourne. You can come along to see this talk at:
9:30 a.m., Friday 31st October, Linkway, 4th Floor John Medley Building, The University of Melbourne
Professor Terras has generously answered some questions for us at the Research Bazaar about her work and shared some of her thoughts about the Digital Humanities.
ResBaz: Your own background includes both Classics and engineering. How were you able to pursue both interests? Was it easy to combine them or did you feel pushed to specialise in one at the expense of the other?
MT: I certainly wasn’t pushed - I was following opportunities that arose. I did art history and english lit at Glasgow University, and my MA dissertation (in scotland, you do 4 year undergrad degrees) was in Classical Art. We got the chance to do it online - this was 1998, just as the WWW was really expanding, and it was the first time that course had run - as a multimedia presentation. I loved it, and something went “ding! computing!” and I did an MSc conversion course in computing science after that, then onto Oxford to do a doctorate in Engineering Science, looking at image processing and artificial intelligence to try and read damaged ancient documents. It was a natural progression for me - combining my love of culture and heritage, with a more natural ability and affinity with computational systems. I feel incredibly lucky to have been working in that space ever since - and I also am thankful for funding opportunities that arose at the time to allow me to undertake that path.
ResBaz: You’re active on Twitter and have a personal blog. How does your social media activity complement your roles at University College London? What do you like best about engaging online?
MT: I learn so much from twitter, especially. It suits my magpie nature, hearing a lot of what is going on, all over the world, in real time, in my discipline. It has speeded up the conversation, for sure! no longer do you have to wait 2 years for things to come out in publication to know about it. I’ve made great contacts, and friendships through it. And occasionally, when you get stuck, you can just ask, and people help! The quid pro quo is that you help others too. In general, its been a very positive experience, and its a platform I’m quite heavily invested in. I see my blog as complementing that - its for longer form pieces, and then you share them on twitter - but for a bit of conversation in the middle of the working day, or for catching up as you wait on your train on the platform, twitter is great.
ResBaz: You’ve included PhD Comics in the list of ‘essential reading’ on your blog roll, but apart from the brief appearance of Gerard, PhD Comics lacks a Humanities character. Do you think that the Humanities is at risk of being marginalised in digitally driven research?
MT: Lets take PhD comics first. My personal opinion is that Jorge Cham writes what he knows - he has a PhD in engineering sciences - although a lot of what he writes about is applicable to a whole range of PhD experience. I spent 4 years in an engineering department, so for me, that was the PhD experience! But I think he does a good case with Tajel, the anthropologist, in exploring non-science issues. What went wrong with Gerard, who only appears in a couple of strips, is that instead of laughing at the PhD process, he immediately fell into the laugh-at-the-humanities-subject, which gives the character very little place to go. That’s my tuppence on why Gerard didnt get fleshed out. But overall, I think Jorge Cham has done a terrific service to academia in normalising the PhD experience, and describing a lot of the stresses and psychological issues that people face, and going “yes! its not just me! its normal to feel like *insert funny graph of work and emotion here*“. I met him once when he was at UCL - I have utmost respect for what he has done both with and for the PhD experience.
But as for Humanities being marginalised - its true they have a lot less resources, and access to a lot less infrastructure, and that makes doing digital research hard. From my point of view, the best thing to do is to build strategic alliances between computer and engineering sciences and humanities, looked for shared resources, and opportunities. And the tools available to everyone, at low or no cost, are improving every year. So the barriers to those in the humanities (provided they have a computer and network, etc) are coming down significantly. It is a problem, it has been a problem, but I’m hopeful about things, moving forward.
ResBaz: It sometimes seems that students are expected to acquire digital skills by osmosis. Do you see a place for explicit teaching of digital tools and methods in Humanities undergraduate courses?
Yes, indeed. We’ve recently gone through that process at UCL - a requirements gathering for an option for all humanities undergraduates, and it may take a year or two to get on the books, but we see that digital tools and techniques should be something that all humanities students are at least given the basics on, not just for Digital Humanities research, but for an information literacy point of view. They should know about digital skills, and be taught how to find and manipulate data, and sources, in a structured way. The digital shift isn’t going away any time soon, and all humanities students really should have some element of digital skills taught, as part of a whole range of approaches and methods they are exposed to.
ResBaz: I’ve seen it suggested that Digital Humanities has a 'dark side’, in that it adds another set of skills Humanities graduates can be expected to acquire, while there are deeper problems in the academic job market and the funding of Humanities. Do you think there is a danger that Digital Humanities becomes an attempt to justify Humanities research to funders or employers in an increasingly competitive sector?
MT: Its not just the Digital Humanities that has problems - most of academia is a bit of a bottle neck, as far as PhD to Job goes, and there are huge issues in the USA with adjuncts, etc, doing a lot of teaching, and huge issues worldwide about privilege in the academy, and elitism, and gender issues, and race issues… so there is a lot in the academy that needs improving, and tackling. As for DH’s own bug bears, I sometimes think that a lot of these issues are brought up in relation to DH because there are so many people from DH talking openly online about all aspects of DH - but it doesn’t mean that these are “just” problems for DH. I see that a lot in discussions about DH - actually, it’s the whole academy which could be held up to account for these things, but DH seems to be getting a lot of flack for it. The issues are the same in many disciplines. And they are issues, which need tackling. Expecting people to get lots of skills to get jobs… well, there’s no getting away from it, if you want to work in Digital Humanities, you need to have an aptitude and an ability for both the Digital, and the Humanities. The academy has never been fair (although it has, at times, been fairer that others). I also don’t believe the Humanities are sinking - if you look at the 4humanities.org website you can see how vibrant the support for them is at the moment.
ResBaz: It seems we often focus on bringing technology to Humanities problems, but surely the benefits flow both ways. Do you see Humanities researchers bringing benefits to science or technology projects?
MT: Absolutely. The issues they bring are real world issues, which are often fuzzy in nature, and terribly hard to crack: we see that in our imaging work, that we are doing - it means that new solutions have to be found in computing science, which then can often help or change the trajectory of methods being applied to other problems. There is a large amount of DH that now takes off the shelves tools, but there are some of us working as equals with computing and engineering science - there is a new discipline currently forming called “Heritage Science” that works equally across these traditional boundaries - but it is intellectually stimulating for both sides of the academic divide to work in a cross-discplinary manner… if you find the right project, and right collaborators! (and often, we talk about disciplines, when really, it all comes down to the right individual project, and working with people who are open to this kind of work).
ResBaz: Do you think that, as digital tools and methods become more integrated into the toolbox of the Humanities researcher, we’ll stop talking about 'Digital Humanities’, or do you think we’ll continue to be explicit about its methodologies?
MT: I think when digital methods become embedded into the Humanities, a lot of the DH stuff will have done its work - we already see it with people using various tools for mapping or text analysis - but there is still a place for those further along the technology life cycle (or rather, right at the start of the technology life cycle) looking at various new opportunities that emerge, and saying “how can I use this in the humanities?” and questioning the use of technologies, and how applicable they are, and what it means to apply these - thats our job as humanists, to be critical of that. I spoke about this at length in my professorial inaugural this year, which scopes out the place for Digital Humanities, given that digital technologies are becoming ever more pervasive in our society. The tech will keep coming, and we have to keep questioning, building, applying, and reflecting. Thats not going to go away any time soon!
You can watch Prof. Terras’ lecture A Decade in Digital Humanities here
