Event

Nov 24, 2020
Digital Humanities: Multilinguality, Non-Latin Scripts and the Library

More than 20 years have passed already, but Georg Steiner’s critique in 1998 about "Computers and databanks chatter in 'dialects' of an Anglo-American mother tongue" is still to be found a valid description of the digital monolingualism and power structures of the majority of research infrastructures in the world. Through this, English language hegemony not only poses a barrier for global academia's exchange in the digital age in general (e.g. lacking discoverability of and access to research in non-Anglophone languages and non-Latin scripts), but has also been accounted for producing cultural and technological biases in the humanities disciplines' prospering scholarly field of "Digital Humanities." Of special concern here is digital scholarship in and about non-Latin-scripts (NLS) as software, information systems and infrastructure allow for the use of NLS only to a limited extent or often not at all. Furthermore, because of the project character of much of NLS DH research, sustainability of both, technological solutions and staff expertise, is not secured. 

In our talk we will address the topic of "digital monolingualism" from a research librarian’s point of view aiming at rising awareness to this important field of action for digital knowledge infrastructure development for the (not only digital) humanities in general and for the field of area studies in particular. With the example of NLS DH we first highlight requirements for multilingually enabled DH infrastructures identified through recent workshops and community building activities. 

Drawing on experiences from the ongoing Change-management project "Wandel@FUBib" at the Freie Universität Berlin university library and from membership in the LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group we would then like to initiate a discussion on library-faculty collaboration in co-designing research infrastructures more broadly as well as with a special consideration of co-designing sustainable DH infrastructures.

Contact and Registration

Please email Research IT Group for the Zoom link.

All are welcome to attend, regardless of prior experience of the digital humanities. Registration is required for external participants. To register, and for further information on the Digital Humanities Brown Bag Lunch series email Research IT Group.

About This Series

Brown Bag Lunch is a bi-weekly meeting of researchers at the MPIWG who use or want to learn more about digital research methods, broadly encompassed by the term Digital Humanities. In the Brown Bag Lunch meetings, researchers can discuss tools, share ideas and experiences (good and bad), and learn from each other. Each session explores a new topic; workshops are usually interactive, and we often invite external speakers. Please feel free to bring your lunch, and a laptop or notebook in order to participate!

2020-11-24T12:00:00SAVE IN I-CAL 2020-11-24 12:00:00 2020-11-24 13:30:00 Digital Humanities: Multilinguality, Non-Latin Scripts and the Library More than 20 years have passed already, but Georg Steiner’s critique in 1998 about "Computers and databanks chatter in 'dialects' of an Anglo-American mother tongue" is still to be found a valid description of the digital monolingualism and power structures of the majority of research infrastructures in the world. Through this, English language hegemony not only poses a barrier for global academia's exchange in the digital age in general (e.g. lacking discoverability of and access to research in non-Anglophone languages and non-Latin scripts), but has also been accounted for producing cultural and technological biases in the humanities disciplines' prospering scholarly field of "Digital Humanities." Of special concern here is digital scholarship in and about non-Latin-scripts (NLS) as software, information systems and infrastructure allow for the use of NLS only to a limited extent or often not at all. Furthermore, because of the project character of much of NLS DH research, sustainability of both, technological solutions and staff expertise, is not secured.  In our talk we will address the topic of "digital monolingualism" from a research librarian’s point of view aiming at rising awareness to this important field of action for digital knowledge infrastructure development for the (not only digital) humanities in general and for the field of area studies in particular. With the example of NLS DH we first highlight requirements for multilingually enabled DH infrastructures identified through recent workshops and community building activities.  Drawing on experiences from the ongoing Change-management project "Wandel@FUBib" at the Freie Universität Berlin university library and from membership in the LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group we would then like to initiate a discussion on library-faculty collaboration in co-designing research infrastructures more broadly as well as with a special consideration of co-designing sustainable DH infrastructures. Shih-Pei ChenRobert CastiesDirk WintergrünPascal Belouin Shih-Pei ChenRobert CastiesDirk WintergrünPascal Belouin Europe/Berlin public