Providing collections, tools and services for digital humanities A national library perspective Clément Oury Head of Digital Legal Deposit Bibliothèque nationale de

Summary Defining digital humanities Role and opportunities for national libraries Building digital collections Publishing on the web Digital humanities as a driver for new relationships with researchers

A practical definition of digital humanities

What are digital humanities? Humanities… Literature, History, Social sciences …with digital methods? Using computing technologies Where is the innovation? E. Le Roy Ladurie, 1973: “Either the historians of tomorrow will be programmers or there won’t be any historians left” A too narrow point of view? Digital humanities do not only focus on the tools Digital humanities are is not “humanities computing” nor “digitized humanities”!

So… what are digital humanities? Manifesto for the Digital Humanities Published at the DH conference in Paris, 2010 A larger ambition: address all questions of “changes due to society’s digital turn” Encompass the whole field of traditional “humanities”… with the new perspective of digital technologies A “transdiscipline”: every stakeholder is welcome And national libraries have a decisive role to play

Role and opportunities for national libraries National libraries have digital collections

Digital collections in national libraries Digitization Books, periodicals, engravings, audio and video… Focus on out-of-copyright collections Digital legal deposit Deposit of born-digital books and periodicals Web archiving Focused harvests of topical collections Broad harvests of entire national domains (.dk,.uk…) intended to collect a representative sample of a nation’s digital production Databases and other acquired digital material Giving access is just the beginning!

Role and opportunities for national libraries National libraries have digital collections

Role and opportunities for national libraries National libraries have datasets

Providing datasets for digital humanities “Distant reading” : analyzing a large amount of documents by computing technologies Mining textual documents N-gram search: identify terms frequency Named Entity Recognition Mining linked documents Mapping corpora on the web Analyzing image, audio or video documents Automated image recognition…

Analyzing textual content in digitized documents

Analyzing textual content in web archives

Named Entity Recognition in web archives

Mapping web corpora

Strengths and weaknesses of national libraries National libraries have large-scale collections (“big data”) 3 million documents in Gallica (BnF digital library) 21 billions files in BnF web archives National libraries have a legal mandate to collect digital heritage But access to copyrighted material is restricted National libraries describe their collections Structured metadata available Well defined and published collection policies

Role and opportunities for national libraries “Digital humanities is about building”

Role and opportunities for national libraries “Digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing”

Leveraging the web to improve collections usage National libraries can open their data In order to let others re-using it National libraries can link their data In order to re-use what others published National libraries can use the web to promote their collections And find users on the social networks

Opening the data May 27th 2014Digital Humanities: A National Library Perspective - Clément Oury - CENL meeting in Moscow 21

Linking the data May 27th 2014Digital Humanities: A National Library Perspective - Clément Oury - CENL meeting in Moscow 22

Publishing research on the web May 27th 2014Digital Humanities: A National Library Perspective - Clément Oury - CENL meeting in Moscow 23

Interacting with users May 27th 2014Digital Humanities: A National Library Perspective - Clément Oury - CENL meeting in Moscow 24

Role and opportunities for national libraries Building new relationships with digital humanists

The national library as a large- scale research infrastructure National libraries can provide content National libraries can provide expertise National libraries can host content Hosting research data after the end of the original funding National libraries can participate to networks and consortia Such as DARIAH Finding legal and technical ways to engage with researchers

Big UK Domain Data for Arts and Humanities Collaboration between the Institution of Historical Research, Oxford Internet Institute, British Library and Aarhus University Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as one of the 21 “Big Data” projects The corpus: UK web space from 1996 to 2013 Develop theoretical and methodological framework for the study of web archives Also an online training course and peer- reviewed journal articles.

The future of digital heritage of the World War I Cooperation between BnF, a research library (BDIC) and a research laboratory (Telecom- ParisTech) Understanding the use of digital heritage Taking the use of digitized documents about WWI as example Analyzing digitized and born-digital heritage Building a corpus: “WWI on the web” Mapping the corpus to reveal its features Identify the use of Gallica documents within that corpus Study in parallel usage statistics of Gallica Research performed in BnF premises for legal reasons

To conclude…

What is new in digital humanities? New objects Digitized documents Born digital documents New methods and tools Statistical analysis Data and text mining Link mining… New ways of publishing and sharing content National libraries can benefit from all these new approaches And play a major role in their maturation

Digital humanities as a driver for change? National libraries can build on there own strengths… Legal mandate and long-term commitment Technical expertise for collection building and preservation … to invent new ways of cooperating with digital humanists By linking and opening their data By capitalizing on trust

Thank you for your attention!