Tobias Blanke

Rule-based curation and preservation of data: A data grid approach using iRODS

Research is generating large quantities of digital material, much of it irreplaceable, and there is a pressing need to maintain long-term access to it. Not only is the quantity of data growing in size, it is becoming much more diverse and complex, significantly complicating the issues around its curation. Automation of curation is key if a scalable solution is to be found. We describe an approach to automation in which digital curation policies and strategies are represented as rules, which are implemented in data grids based on the iRODS middleware.

Arts and Humanities e-Science From Ad Hoc Experimentation to Systematic Investigation

This paper will explain the role, activities, and context of the arts and humanities e-science initiative in the UK, which is funded by the AHRC, EPSRC and JISC. It will firstly present last years pioneering phase with ad hoc experiments by the early adopters. Secondly, the award holding projects for the major funding scheme for Arts and Humanities e-Science will be described, as they start their work in autumn 2007. This second phase can be seen as one of systematic investigations where specific experimentations will deliver parts of an e-Infrastructure for the arts and humanities.

Management and preservation of research data with iRODS

This paper presents first steps towards implementing a data layer to support a semi-automated preservation management system for research data in the arts and humanities. We suggest to use e-Science technology and grid middleware to implement a virtualised storage system for research data. We will outline how iRODS (Rule-Oriented Data management System)can be used within an architecture to implement complex,automated,scalable digital preservation strategies.

Deploying general-purpose virtual research environments for humanities research

Several virtual research environments (VREs) have been developed to address specific tasks or application domains. Building on the experiences and use cases coming out of these projects, this paper addresses the creation of more general-purpose VREs for the humanities, which move beyond specific, focused tasks, and instead provide services and environments that support more general-purpose humanities research activities. Specifically, we are investigating use cases related to the organization and integration of the dispersed and heterogeneous information on which such research is based. These use cases are highly interactive, interpretative and researcher centric, addressing topics such as annotation environments and support for ‘active-reading’ processes and scholarly dialogues. We present the background to our work and the technical approach taken, and report the results obtained so far.

Arts and humanities e-science-Current practices and future challenges

This article offers an analysis of UK arts and humanities e-Science practices in order to identify current trends. It also considers challenges of how arts and humanities disciplines fit into the overall e-Science agenda. We will discuss a first phase of early experimentation projects in 2007 and continue with a second phase since 2007, which more systematically investigates methodologies and technologies that could provide answers to grand challenges in digital arts and humanities research.

The (Big) Data-security assemblage: Knowledge and critique

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in information and computer science and reinterpret their debates to develop a critical intervention into the public controversies concerning data-driven security and digital surveillance. The paper offers a two-pronged contribution: on the one hand, we challenge the credibility of security professionals’ discourses in light of the knowledge that they supposedly mobilize; on the other, we argue for a series of conceptual moves around data, human–computer relations, and algorithms to address some of the limitations of existing engagements with the Big Data-security assemblage.

Hacking the social life of Big Data

This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.

Preparing DARIAH

This paper analyses the results of the technical and scientific work in the DARIAH preparatory phase, a European infrastructure for digital arts and humanities. We were looking for an infrastructure model that would allow for the integration of services built around communities. To this end, DARIAH will be developed as a social marketplace for services. The paper presents the design decision we made and our proof-of-concept demonstrators and experiments.

Back to our data — Experiments with NoSQL technologies in the Humanities

In this short paper we discuss our work on developing a data infrastructure for Holocaust research. Faced with the challenge of integrating data with widely varying characteristics, we decided to pursue an approach based on the property graph model and corresponding graph databases. These provide intuitive modelling capabilities and the ability to fluently evolve in structure to meet the needs of the data but require more basic implementation work, as the technology is less mature.

Methodological commons: arts and humanities e-Science fundamentals

The application of e-Science technologies to disciplines in the arts and humanities raises major questions as to how those technologies can be most usefully exploited, what tools and infrastructures are needed for that exploitation, and what new research approaches can be generated. This paper reviews a number of activities in the UK and Europe in the last 5 years which have sought to address these questions through processes of experimentation and targeted infrastructure development. In the UK, the AHeSSC (Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre) has played a coordinating role for seven projects funded by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. In Europe, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) has sought to develop a deeper understanding of research information and communication in the arts and humanities, and to inform the development of e-infrastructures accordingly. Both sets of activity have indicated a common requirement: to construct a framework which consistently describes the methods and functions of scholarly activity which underlie digital arts and humanities research, and the relationships between them. Such a ‘methodological commons’ has been formulated in the field of the digital humanities. This paper describes the application of this approach to arts and humanities e-Science, with reference to the early work of DARIAH and AHeSSC.