Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Track Summary

Roberto Theron & Eveline Wandl-Vogt. (2018). Uncertainty in Digital Humanities track summary. http://doi.org/10.1145/3284179.3284317, Conference: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM’18), Salamanca, October, 24-26, 2018 (Session: Uncertainty in Digital Humanities).

Abstract

Digital humanities methods and techniques have been applied to a wide spectrum of disciplines with results there were not attainable otherwise. However, uncertainty is present in any DH endeavour, in various types and degrees, due to the very nature of both humanist research and the intervention of computers to enable such kind of research methodologies. On the one hand, information sources need to be converted into digital form and, on the other hand, the resulting digital objects are processed to obtain summaries, geographic and temporal distributions, networks, patterns, etc., that are presented to and interpreted by the researchers or users of the DH projects. From the digitalization to the interpretation, both the computational and cognitive steps involved are subject to uncertainty. The track “Uncertainty in Digital Humanities” of the Sixth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM 2018), tries to bring together researchers in Digital Humanities and reflect on the opportunities and challenges related to the way in which uncertainty can be better understood and pave the way towards appropriate methods and tools of dealing with uncertainty that improve the support to humanists when generating new knowledge.