The Digital Arts and Humanities Lab (DAHL) is situated in the Arts Faculty at the University of Warwick (Warwickshire, England). It provides short and long sessions, on-campus, online, and recorded, for all of our students, staff, and alumni. It undertakes research and development projects to grow our understanding of and capabilities for digitally-enhanced arts and humanities.
The Faculty (despite its name) includes almost the full range of humanities and arts disciplines, including languages, and some innovative interdisciplinary centres. There has been a growing focus on creative practice, along with the inevitable expansion in the use of digital technologies.
Until recently, digital has developed in an ad hoc. and fragmented manner. This has not made it easy for students and staff to navigate its complexities, or for support services to understand and address gaps in provision. The DAHL aims to address this with a framework for describing DAH activities (in a way that fits with the Faculty’s needs), and by providing learning and project opportunities to help Faculty members develop their practice and capabilities. These pages outline the framework, with examples, along with identifying tools and techniques that we can collectively adopt. Students and academics can use this to be clearer about their focus in using DAH and developing themselves and their colleagues – including in designing projects and curricula. Support professionals can use this to understand how they can contribute to the development of DAH.
Scope
There are three main types of digitally enhanced arts and humanities (DAH) research, three themes in the application of technology (sometimes blended together in projects):
- Discover, analyse, and interpret patterns in large real-world datasets (present or historical).
- Discover, communicate, analyse, and interpret human stories in close-up.
- Undertake, analyse, and interpret creative practice and experimentation.
We give more details of these, and DAHL activities relating to them, in subsequent pages.
Note how this definition goes a little further than conventional “digital humanities” so as to more explicitly include creative practices in the interdisciplinary mix.
These forms of research activity often overlap, or lead into each other. For example, sometimes we find patterns in big data and want to “zoom in” on the human stories behind the data. Other times it works the other way around. Creative experiments might uncover emerging possibilities, and we can use the other methods to see how those new trends are appearing beyond the studio. Research is often most effective when it uses each of these methods to explore aspects of a single theme in a well-integrated approach.
DAH research is also often focussed on exploring the impacts (positive and negative) of past, current, and future technological innovations – including (reflexively) the impact of DAH in changing academia and education. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler was a key figure in this branch of research (this article by Bryan Norton gives an excellent introduction to his work). For example, if we consider artificial intelligence as applied to large data sets, we have to balance positive potential (massive increased in speed and scale, reduction in workload, removal of technical barriers) against negative impacts (researchers losing close familiarity with the materials, bias in invisible algorithms, deskilling, dependency on big tech).
Tools and techniques
Different tools and techniques are used in each of these. Often the same tools and techniques that are powering innovation in other fields: design, creative digital, social media, entertainment, software development, and AI. Tools like the programming platform R Studio are used across disciplines beyond arts and humanities – for example in geoscience (with its ability to plot records from a database onto maps). This enables rich interdisciplinary collaborations.
Transferable capabilities
DAH practice draws from the best available tools and techniques for an important and widely transferable set of tasks. By engaging in DAH, students and academics at all levels can develop these capabilities:
- Discover, understand, critique, and use existing (digital) research.
- Design and manage your work and projects, including collaborations.
- Ensure your data, processing, and results are preserved and available for future researchers.
- Communicate your work outwards, to students, academics, and to the wider public.
- Manage the development of your own capabilities and careers.
- Support the development of others.
- Engage in critical reflection on (digital) arts and humanities methods, projects, goals, and values.
Go deeper…
Next, explore the three types of research, and the digital tools and techniques we use for them, and learn about the opportunities for each provided by DAHL. Our sessions are often recorded, so that we have an archive relevant to each of these.
Patterns in large real-world datasets | Human stories in close-up | Creative practice and experimentation
We also run (and record) sessions that cover the transferable capabilities.