IRELAND
Irish Times
September 6, 2018
By Olive Keogh
New fields are benefiting from a dynamic search function that allows for an astonishing level of specific detail
The emerging field of digital humanities is the latest discipline to benefit from big data analysis and in an unusual arts-Stem collaboration, academics at UCD have used it to reveal new insights into the 2009 Ryan report on institutional child abuse.
The cross-disciplinary team behind Industrial Memories are Emilie Pine, associate professor of modern drama at UCD, Prof Mark Keane of UCD’s insight centre for data analytics, and research fellow Susan Leavy who began work on the project in 2015. In Emilie Pine’s view, the Ryan report is “probably the most important publication in the history of the State, yet we’re not reading it. A lot of the material is witness testimony in the form of letters, diaries, memos and record keeping books. To me, it’s the most important part of the report and I wanted to be able to read it and make it accessible to others. However, that’s not so easy with a report that runs to 2,600 pages.”
Digital humanities bring artificial intelligence and text analytics to bear on traditional arts and humanities scholarship. These techniques are already in use in business where big data applications enable companies gain insights into consumer behaviour patterns, for example. But now they are being applied to the humanities and what’s emerging is a new way of probing texts that uncovers things you cannot see or appreciate from a traditional surface read.
In the case of the Ryan report, the techniques enabled Pine to sift forensically through material and to make connections that had remained invisible during normal perusal of the text. For example, she was able to track and tag every interaction between all of those involved. Individually these interactions looked isolated and innocuous, but when they were all drawn together in one place it became clear that there had been deep and widespread awareness of the abuse.
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