NeMO: NeDiMAH Methods
Ontology launched!
I’m delighted to announce the launch of NeMO,
The NeDiMAH Methods Ontology, a major new component of the international
digital humanities research infrastructure.
NeMO is the final research output of the European Science Foundation Network for
Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH).
It is a comprehensive ontological model of scholarly practice in the arts and
humanities. NeMO was developed by the Digital
Curation Unit (DCU), ATHENA RC in collaboration with the NeDiMAH
Ontology Working Group. For more information, please see: http://www.nedimah.eu/content/nedimah-methods-ontology-nemo.
The direct link to NeMo is http://nemo.dcu.gr.
Background: NeDiMAH, and
understanding Digital Humanities in Practice
NeDiMAH was
a ESF Research Networking Programme (RNP) funded from May 2011-May 2015. It was
a collaboration of 16 ESF Member organisations, and was co-Chaired by myself, Susan
Schreibman (University of Maynooth, Ireland) and Fotis Jannidis (University of Würzburg,
Germany, from 2011-14).
NeDiMAH brought into partnership the digital
humanities researchers of16 NeDiMAH Member countries (Bulgaria,
Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The
Network built a collaborative forum to research the practice of advanced digital methods
in the arts and humanities, via an extensive programme of activities. NeDiMAH explored key areas of
theory and practice in a number of methodological areas, via Working Groups. Areas of focus
included the analysis of time and space, visualization, linked data, large scale data analysis,
editing, manuscript imaging, temporal modeling, and scholarly communications.
The reach of these activities has been documented visually in a series of maps
of digital humanities activities across Europe:
Through our activities, the Network was able to
get a sense of the diversity of practice of digital humanities around Europe,
and to understand and demonstrate the collaborative and trans-national nature
of digital humanities, and to demonstrate the integration of digital approaches
into all aspects of the research lifecycle. Our objective was to understand
better the impact that digital methods have had on transforming scholarship in
the arts and humanities, and the potential for extending the benefits of digital
research to the creative industries, the commercial sector, and public policy
and planning. Collaboration has been key: with scientific and technical
disciplines; with data science; with libraries, archives and museums; with
existing European research infrastructures including Europeana, CLARIN and DARIAH. The essential complexity of the digital
environment means that individual researchers and small groups are less able to
exploit it effectively, so collaborative models are emerging as the norm.
The evidence gathered by NeDiMAH is an excellent
basis for understanding the impact of core elements of current digital
research: the seamless integration of data, and a critical engagement with its
management and preservation as part of the humanities research life-cycle; the
ability to scale up (and down) while working with heterogeneous data from
diverse sources; skills for the critical analysis and interpretation of data
created locally, and by commercial entities; and the experience of embedding
digital scholarship in cultural contents, and those that promote widest public
engagement.
At a time when attempts to define the digital
humanities can be contentious, NeDiMAH has provided a powerful example that the
digital humanities is essentially understood through practice, and that a
critical framework for digital research within the ‘big tent’ of digital
humanities must be based on a reflection of the diverse and rich work carried
out to date.
This work will be the basis for future knowledge
production in the humanities that takes advantage of digital tools, methods and
content. It has been consolidated in NeMo, the main and final output of
NeDiMAH. NeMo is a formal expression of the practice of digital humanities that
explores this richness and complexity, and provides a valuable resource for
critical and peer review of digital outputs. It also demonstrates directly the
scholarly ecosystem that underlies digital research in the arts and humanities
as a distinctive intellectual practice with considerable impact within and
without the Academy.
About NeMO
NeMO is a unique
resource that brings together the digital content, tools and methods that are
at the heart of the digital humanities. It brings together work developed by
our partners at the DCU, ATHENA RC, including past and current empirical work
on scholarly practices (developed in the context of Preparing
DARIAH, EHRI, and DARIAH-EU); their Scholarly
Research Activity Model (developed for DARIAH-GR);
and research into the need for expansion of existing digital humanities
taxonomies, such as the taxonomy underpinning arts-humanities.net and now the
basis for the classification of Digital Humanities
at Oxford. It was decided early on in the programme of NeDiMAH activities
that a taxonomy is not complex enough to explore the diversity of Digital
Humanities in practice, based on exemplars drawn from the NeDiMAH
Methodological Working Groups.
NeMO is a CIDOC CRM - compliant ontology which
explicitly addresses the interplay of factors of agency (actors and goals),
process (activities and methods) and resources (information resources, tools,
concepts) manifest in the scholarly process. In addition to providing a formal
ontology for Digital Humanities, it includes methods for classification and a
shared vocabulary.
Benefit of NeMO for the
Digital Research Community
Despite an enormous investment in the creation
of digital collections for research, very little funding has been invested into
discovering what scholars actually do with ‘all this digital stuff’: digital
content, but also the methods that enable us to discover, annotate, compare,
and analyze digital content; and the tools that make this work possible. The
first initiative to do this in a comprehensive way was the AHRC ICT Methods Network, based at
King’s College London, which I ran from 2005-8. This developed the taxonomy
that was the basis of arts humanities.net as a first attempt to formally
classify the ‘methodological commons’ of digital humanities.
NeDiMAH went beyond this, taking the research
into DH in practice into a European forum, and fostering the development of
NeMO. We hope this will help to formalize and codify the expression
of work in the digital arts and humanities, and make it possible to explore the
inter, multi, and trans disciplinarity that is at the heart of the most
exciting work in the digital humanities. It shows the human aspects of digital
infrastructure: the collaborations among people that make the integration of
content, tools and methods possible.
Having a means to formally describe the practice
of digital humanities will contribute to the development of a commonly
agreed nomenclature in Digital Humanities: something that typically happens
with the maturing and consolidation of disciplines / research domains, so this
is an important stage in the history of Digital Humanities.
Next Steps
The major next step is to populate the ontology
with more existing taxonomies, case studies and exemplars, and to develop the
community of researchers who use it.
While NeDiMAH funding has ended, an activity
within the DARIAH.EU
Virtual Comptency Centre 2 will continue to develop NeMO through the
establishment of the
Digital Methods and Projects Observatory (DiMPO). DIMPO will develop
and provide an evidence-based, up-to-date, and pragmatically useful account of
the emerging information practices, needs and attitudes of arts and humanities
researchers in the evolving European digital scholarly environment, for the
benefit of the digital humanities research community. It seeks to achieve this
objective through the inception of a longitudinal mixed methods research and
monitoring programme on the information practices and scholarly methods
employed in digitally-enabled arts and humanities work across Europe, and
through the digital dissemination, validation and enrichment of research
outcomes by the scholarly community.
Further to DiMPO, the NeMO team will seek to
collaborate with Europeana
Research, the newly-launched research portal of Europeana, supports and fosters
research in the humanities and social sciences through the meaningful re-use of
Europeana content and metadata. The work will be taken forward at a series of
workshops and case studies orgnaised by Europeana Research to further scope the
best way of developing NeMO as a methodological layer for the international
e-research community. This will maximise the value of national and international e-research initiatives by
developing a methodological layer that allows arts and humanities researchers
to develop, refine and share research methods that allow them to create and
make best use of digital collections, as well as methods.
For more information about NeMo, please contact
Lorna Hughes (Chair of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology Working Group), or Panos Constantopoulos, Agiatis Benardou, Costis Dallas (Digital Curation Unit,
ATHENA RC, who developed NeMo), via the contact form.
