News release
12 June 2012
How does big data change the research landscape for the humanities and social
sciences?
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) today issued the first
public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant
programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council.
Their findings are presented in One Culture, along with a series of
recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic
publishers, research libraries, and funding agencies. The recommendations are
“urgent, pointed, and even disruptive,” write the authors. “To address them, we
must recognize the impediments of tradition that hinder the contemporary
university’s ability to adapt to, support, or sustain this emerging research
over time.”
Read the report http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub151
The Digging into Data Challenge was launched in 2009 to better understand how
'big data' changes the research landscape for the humanities and social
sciences. Scholars in these disciplines now use massive databases of materials
that range from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data
such as web searches, sensor data, or mobile phone records. The Challenge seeks
to discover what new, computationally based research methods might be applied
to these sources.
In its first year, the Digging into Data Challenge made awards to eight teams
of scholars, librarians, and computer and information scientists. Over the
following two years, report authors Christa Williford and Charles Henry
conducted site visits, interviews, and focus groups to understand how these
complex international projects were being managed, what challenges they faced,
and what project teams were learning from the experience.
Brett Bobley, chief information officer and director of the NEH Office of
Digital Humanities, heads the Digging into Data Challenge. Do we have big data
in the humanities and social sciences? Yes—buckets of it,” he says. “But our
ability to produce huge quantities of digital data has outstripped our ability
to analyze and understand it. One Culture helps us to see not only why we would
want a computer to assist us with our work, but how big data is changing the
very nature of traditional humanistic research.
Co-author and CLIR president Charles Henry said, This report discloses the
complexity and sophistication of humanities and social sciences research in a
digital era. It underscores the excitement and potential of new discovery
through deep collaboration across disciplines and affirms the continuity of
traditional values and perspectives of scholarly communication in a
data-dependent milieu. The report also seeks to animate a collective
responsibility to more concertedly appreciate, extend, fund, and provide
adequate services to sustain this remarkable research.
In 2011, four additional funding bodies joined the four original cooperating
agencies in support of fourteen new international collaborative research
projects. These funders include the Institute of Museum and Library Services
(US); the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK); the Economic and Social
Research Council (UK); and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
Stuart Dempster, director at JISC, said, “We are proud to be a partner in this
trans-Atlantic endeavour which aims to assist individual researchers, academic
departments, and research institutions to succeed with the ‘data deluge’ in the
humanities. For the UK to continue to punch above its weight in terms of
digital scholarship and research it is vital for it to collaborate in ‘smart
partnerships,’ which foster innovation in the development of tools, skills, and
new research findings. This report shows that success in action.”
“The CLIR report is an excellent assessment of this unique and exciting
international partnership,” said Gisèle Yasmeen, Vice-President, Research, at
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. “The Digging into Data
Challenge project is generating innovative computation and data analysis
techniques to better advance research and we look forward to its continued
success.”
NSF has found the Digging into Data Challenge to be an excellent mechanism for
enabling collaborative, data-intensive research in the social sciences and
humanities, said Elizabeth Tran, programme officer in NSF's Office of
International Science and Engineering. It has significantly reduced some the
key barriers to conducting research across borders and has resulted in a number
of truly international outstanding research projects.
The report is available online in pdf format; an extended version with case
studies is also available in html format. Print copies are available for
ordering through the website:
