TY - GEN
T1 - Digitised Historical Sources and Non-digital Humanists
T2 - 1st International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, AISoLA 2023
AU - Le Roux, Maelle
AU - Gasperini, Anna
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - The digitisation of sources has opened new perspectives for humanities scholars. Digitisation allowed a larger access to sources, removing some financial and geographical limits, and the use of digital tools provided new perspectives for humanities scholars, who are able to read the sources differently. However, working with digitised sources also created new challenges that humanities scholars are not always equipped to overcome. The ‘MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child Health’ (MILC) project uses historical medical books for a non-specialist audience to analyse discourses on children’s health in England, France and Italy between 1850 and 1914. Despite being born a non-digital humanities project, with a focus on manual qualitative analysis and a combination of history and literature methods, it took a digital turn when using digitised sources, with issues of digitisation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) among others. The team working on the project is composed of three humanities scholars, with limited computer science skills. This required us to find digital humanities and in general IT tools adapted to our skillset, and suited to our needs. These tools did not always fit all our needs, and often presented issues in terms of accessibility and compatibility with the general standards of digital humanities. Using examples from the issues faced by this project, and from the solutions found, this paper will argue that the challenges encountered by humanities scholars are interdisciplinary, not only because they overcome the traditional disciplinary boundaries inside the humanities, but also because they mirror challenges that computer scientists are working to solve. This paper will also argue that collaboration is a necessity which would benefit both humanities scholars and computer scientists in their work on the improvement and development of new tools, with the help of AI for example. Using the work done by a team of non-digital humanities scholars, it will argue that accessibility is a central issue in digital humanities and in the creation of IT tools, which needs to be addressed.
AB - The digitisation of sources has opened new perspectives for humanities scholars. Digitisation allowed a larger access to sources, removing some financial and geographical limits, and the use of digital tools provided new perspectives for humanities scholars, who are able to read the sources differently. However, working with digitised sources also created new challenges that humanities scholars are not always equipped to overcome. The ‘MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child Health’ (MILC) project uses historical medical books for a non-specialist audience to analyse discourses on children’s health in England, France and Italy between 1850 and 1914. Despite being born a non-digital humanities project, with a focus on manual qualitative analysis and a combination of history and literature methods, it took a digital turn when using digitised sources, with issues of digitisation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) among others. The team working on the project is composed of three humanities scholars, with limited computer science skills. This required us to find digital humanities and in general IT tools adapted to our skillset, and suited to our needs. These tools did not always fit all our needs, and often presented issues in terms of accessibility and compatibility with the general standards of digital humanities. Using examples from the issues faced by this project, and from the solutions found, this paper will argue that the challenges encountered by humanities scholars are interdisciplinary, not only because they overcome the traditional disciplinary boundaries inside the humanities, but also because they mirror challenges that computer scientists are working to solve. This paper will also argue that collaboration is a necessity which would benefit both humanities scholars and computer scientists in their work on the improvement and development of new tools, with the help of AI for example. Using the work done by a team of non-digital humanities scholars, it will argue that accessibility is a central issue in digital humanities and in the creation of IT tools, which needs to be addressed.
KW - Accessibility
KW - Digital Humanities
KW - Digitised Sources
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85208616518
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-73741-1_8
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-73741-1_8
M3 - Conference Publication
AN - SCOPUS:85208616518
SN - 9783031737404
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 119
EP - 131
BT - Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality - 1st International Conference, AISoLA 2023, Selected Papers
A2 - Steffen, Bernhard
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 23 October 2023 through 28 October 2023
ER -