Section outline

  • The first conference on Digital Humanities in Nordic countries was an exciting mind-widening and networking event, numbering over 220 participants from research and infrastructure environments.

    Five parallel sessions were held during most of the conference, on topics ranging from linking cultural heritage in the semantic web (introduced in a keynote by Francesca Tomasi), digitisation, visualisation, media, history, literary studies, musicology, infrastructure, social web, spatial humanities, corpus linguistics, maps, art history, text mining, to education in digital humanities. The book of abstracts is freely available. The keynote on the prospects of Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries by Patrik Svensson is video recorded and from the website.

    What's in it for us at LNU? The LNU´s Digital Humanities Initiative was promoted in the form of leaflets distributed to all the conference participants, as well as discussions with the keynote speakers, representatives of digital humanities units from Oslo, Helsinki, and infrastructures like the Swedish
    National Data Service, Digisam (Swedish secretariat for national coordination of digitisation of cultural heritage), Swedish National Library, the US Library of Congress and a number of others (including my first ever Digital Humanities librarian).

    Many have expressed the support for the cross-sector and cross-disciplinary nature of our initiative and further collaboration is planned. Some have already agreed to take on possible advisory and/or co-participatory roles in our future developments, including in establishment of Master modules / programmes (cf. http://blogs.helsinki.fi/mstolone/2015/08/17/digital-humanities-minor-subject-study-block-25-credits-university-of-helsinki-faculty-of-arts-2015-16/), participation at the workshop at the end of 2016 and related events, as well as potential projects in specific areas of the digital humanities arena.

    Apart from further engagement with major players in the Nordic / international fields, both in teaching/research and infrastructure, concrete action plans are to join the EU network DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) for the Arts and Humanities in e-Science. For LNU this would provide access to several hundreds of scholars and dozens of research facilities in currently 17 European countries. DARIAH provides know-how in digital tools, organises learning opportunities for digital research methods, like workshops and summer schools, and offers training materials for Digital Humanities. The DARIAH community also works together in working groups, with subjects ranging from the assessment of digital tools to the development of standards and the long term accessibility of research materials. Last but not the least, this would prominently position LNU in Sweden as well, being the first Swedish institution to join DARIAH.

    In addition, while the topics like digital story telling, gaming and interactivity are well accepted topics in the world of Digital Humanities, these were lacking at the Nordic conference. Therefore, an opportunity for LNU and its partners stands open and an idea is to suggest a pre-conference at LNU with focus on these topics at LNU to the following year´s Digital Humanities in Nordic Countries, already scheduled to be hosted by Gothenburg University.