{"id":7033,"date":"2022-03-02T07:17:04","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T07:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/escience.sdu.dk\/?post_type=news&p=7033"},"modified":"2022-03-02T07:17:04","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T07:17:04","slug":"digital-humanities","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"http:\/\/escience.sdu.dk\/index.php\/news\/digital-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Researchers within the field of humanities are typically not heavy users of HPC (High Performance Computing) or cloud computing. However, a book, once digitalized, is actually quite a big data set. Assistant Professor at the department of Design and Communication, Zhiru Sun, tells us how she has been helping researchers from the Faculty of Humanities at SDU solve their research problems through digital methods and how using computing resources such as UCloud, also called DeiC Interactive HPC, can be a highly viable option if your project e.g. involves looking for patterns and similarities in digitalized texts.<\/em><\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students’ online learning behavior and digital humanities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assistant Professor Zhiru Sun has been employed at SDU since 2019. In her own research, she uses data science techniques to study individual and collaborative learning processes in digital learning environments, especially on online learning platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn these type of platforms, we can get some students\u2019 behaviour data, which can help us understand when, where, and possibly why the students have difficulties in learning, so the teacher can provide target feedback and support to help them overcome the difficulties,\u201d Sun explains.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This type of research has become especially relevant during the past two years of on and off online teaching due to COVID-19. However, Sun stresses that the topic of her research is not spawned by the global pandemic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been having an interest in online learning for a long time \u2013 long before COVID-19. My master\u2019s thesis is in educational psychology and my PhD is in educational technology, and I\u2019ve been combining these two subjects for a while.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In addition to her own research and teaching, Zhiru Sun is the local SDU representative in the digital curriculum and digital literacy support team. Here, she helps colleagues at SDU who participate in the digital curriculum or digital literacy programmes with text analysis, statistical analysis and general IT support. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I have a strong interest in digital humanities, where I explore various ways to represent, analyze and communicate ideas and data in humanities through computational tools and techniques,\u201d Sun explains.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The term \u201cdigital humanities\u201d refers both the digitalization of material \u2013 library books, photographs, maps, literature, historical texts and the like \u2013 as well as to the use of digital methods and tools within the field of humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sun is furthermore the representative from the Faculty of Humanities in the SDU eScience Center\u2019s Operational Board.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collaboration with the Hans Christian Andersen Centre<\/strong> at SDU<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the projects where Zhiru Sun has been applying her digital skills to assist a humanist project is a collaboration with Nils Holger Berg and Ane Grum-Schwensen from the Hans Christian Andersen Centre<\/a> at SDU. The project is called Detecting text reuse in H.C. Andersen\u2019s work<\/em> and is part of a larger publication project, Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s Fairy Tales and Stories \u2013 the digital manuscript edition, <\/em>which aims to digitalize and publish all the preserved manuscripts of Hans Christian Andersen in an online, genetic edition (If you are interested in knowing more about the digital edition, it is described in more detail at http:\/\/andersen.sdu.dk\/ms<\/a>. The updated description is in Danish, but an older English version is available at http:\/\/beta.auh.sdu.dk\/en\/<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collaboration came about when Holger Berg participated in a digital literacy seminar, looking for digital methods to solve a problem. In 2019, one of his colleagues from Odense City Museums, senior researcher Ejnar Stig Askgaard, had started comparing Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s notes, written between approximately 1833 \u2013 1875, with the 162 fairy tales, novels and autobiographies. This had led to the discovery that Hans Christian Andersen liked to use symbols such as cross marks or deletions in his notes to indicate that the note had been reused in his fairytales. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, Berg wanted to find out where each note had been reused. Earlier research had managed to manually identify where 278 notes had been reused in Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s published work, but this had been a time-consuming effort, taking many months of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Because comparing the texts manually was taking such a long time, Holger came to me and asked whether we could do something using digital methods instead,” Sun explains. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As 861 of the notes had been digitalized, Sun was able to apply a method called Natural Language Processing to find similarities between the notes and Hans Christian Anderson\u2019s work. This method generated a number of tables, which indicated how similar a specific note is to a specific fairytale.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It only took me around 8 hours to generate these tables and find a good indication of where all the 861 digitalized notes had been reused.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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