Friday 20 January 2012

Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities


You may remember I gathered some stats about Digital Humanities. Well, I turned them into an infographic, which is available in full technicolour and much higher res than blogger will allow, over at the UCLDH Flickr account.

Wait! You want a print version? Well, find a 300dpi CYMK version here.

I have to say, when I started this, I thought that there must be some software out there that turns statistics into these type of posters pretty easily - there are so many of these about, that have this look about them. I thought it would be a fun thing to do in class - and I've dabbled a fair bit in photoshop and the like - but it turns out that everyone is hiring graphic designers to turn their stats into posters that look "like infographics". So what they hey, we hired a graphic design firm that specialises in infographics. As a result, this is courtesy of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, as they paid for the graphic design.

We at UCLDH are going to get some printed up for to stick on walls -more about that soon, hopefully, once we figure out the costs on that.

Just a few words on the process. This was an inclusive, not an exclusive, attempt at trying to pull together available statistics on Digital Humanities. I'm aware there are a lot of things that dont appear on the infographic - major individual projects, for example. But it was the best that I could do, with the information available. I'm still collecting statistics, and interested in anything else that comes to light - I need to dig out the subscription numbers for LLC in the early 2000s, for example - but if you are not represented here, and are narked about it, or pleased to be included in any future iterations, let me know. Depending on reception, we may do an updated version of this.

Additionally, I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions on other things we can do in this vein to scope out and promote our field. Its been fun to put together - even if snow in Seattle stopped play for a week or so in the round of final edits with the designers - and after I've done some serious academic work, like write books and stuff, I plan on doing some more of these.

Hope you like it!

5 comments:

Lou Burnard said...

Quanitifying sounds fun. Does it involve a fine-toothed comb? (OK, I'll get me coat)

Matt Gold said...

Fantastic work, Melissa! Thanks very much for putting this beautiful poster together.

Melissa said...

on crikey, Lou. Good spot. Amended!

Alastair Dunning said...

Great stuff, well done. A few comments

1) Was it difficult to get hold of international data? Despite the map at the top the infographic looks very anglocentric; there must be more ways of representing activity in non-English speaking countries.

2) Is the JISC-NEH stuff drawn from the joint JISC-NEH Digitisation grants? Or does that include Digging into Data as well ?

3) In terms of the AHRC grants, I have a larger number of projects (488) but roughly the same funding figure (c.£124m) (http://www.peelingwall.org/ahrc.html) Can talk about this in more depth.

4) Um, no JISC-only contribution to the Digital Humanities at all ... ? We'll have to rectify that :-)

Melissa said...

Thanks, Alastair. yes, it was hard to get hold of international data - I did ask, but I think people didnt know what I was going to do with it - perhaps now others will provide. The stats here are very much based on my personal contacts: if we could have a more community based effort then we could maybe get a wider spread.

JISC data, erm... I got those stats from the NEH database, which you can query - so it probably doesnt include the JISC contribution, thinking about it... darned statistics.

Re: Jisc - yes, I think we have to think about what a contribution means - surely digitisation is a contribution, as well as the escience programme, other programs, etc... we need to rethink this whole section, I think. Still a worthwhile exercise in seeing what I could pull together in a month, total, I think... but there is always more work to do...