This volume brings together the proceedings of two workshops in the Twin Talks series: Twin Talks 2 at DHN 2020 and Twin Talks 3 at DH 2020. Both workshops have as their full title “Understanding Collaboration in Digital Humanities”. The first workshop in the series took place at DHN 2019 in Copenhagen, followed by a panel session dedicated to the same topic at DHBenelux 2019 in Liege. Twin Talks 2 was scheduled for March 2020 in Riga, but was first postponed to October and then also virtualized due to Covid-19. Twin Talks 3 was scheduled to take place in Ottawa in July 2020, but was virtualized. Both on-line workshops were run live from the CLARIN headquarters in Utrecht.
first the papers of the Twin Talks 2 workshop, followed by Twin Talks 3. For both workshops, the papers appear in the order they appeared in the workshop programme.
It is interesting to see that going through the papers many of the obstacles encountered by the authors are recurring, such as the lack of a common vocabulary, mismatch of expectations from both sides, and the lack of a shared understanding of the problem. Many of the recommendations refer to these issues, such as preparing projects in dialogue between the parties, having frequent project meetings, developing a common language and vocabulary, including specially tailored courses in the fundamentals of computer science in humanities curricula, managing expectations and being prepared to compromise.
A unique feature of TwinTalks workshop series is that the papers are submitted and presented in tandems of a humanities researcher and a digital expert. Due to the special circumstances created by the Covid-19, both our workshop editions had to be virtualized which required additional organizational effort but made it easier for the tandems as well as other participants to attend the events. The virtual workshops attracted 104 participants from 29 countries, who contributed to lively and rich discussions on a broad range of topics. One of the most prominent ones was the limited opportunities for the publication of the results of the collaboration that would ensure both parties to get proper academic credit for the paper. Humanities scholars may find it hard to get their digitally driven paper published in a traditional humanities journal if it is too technical for reviewers with no digital background or interest, while many computer science journals may find the solutions to humanities problems not attractive and advanced enough for publication. Fortunately, the number of national and international Digital Humanities conferences and journals is growing but, being interdisciplinary and relatively new, they may not be as highly rated as more traditional acclaimed publications from a narrow discipline. We hope that despite the special circumstances they were held in, the two new editions of the Twin Talks workshop series continue to contribute to creating the conditions where humanities scholars and technical experts can fruitfully collaborate in answering humanities research questions.
We would like to thank the members of the Programme Committee for both workshops (see below) for helping us to prepare the workshop and review the submissions.
We would also like to thank the organisers of the DHN and DH 2020 conferences for the effort they put in the preparations for the physical conference and its transformation into a very successful virtual event, and also the presenters at the workshops for adapting so eagerly to the new format.
Steven Krauwer and Darja Fišer
Utrecht and Ljubljana, 25 October 2020 2/143
The Twin Talks workshops are a joint initiative between CLARIN ERIC (http://www.clarin.eu), DARIAH ERIC (http://www.dariah.eu), with support from the SSHOC project (https://sshopencloud.eu/).
Programme chairs and main organisers - Steven Krauwer (CLARIN ERIC / Utrecht University; steven@clarin.eu) - Darja Fišer (CLARIN ERIC / SSHOC / University of Ljubljana;
darja.fiser@ff.uni-lj.si) Members of the programme committee for Twin Talks 2 and 3: - Bente Maegaard (CLARIN ERIC / University of Copenhagen, Denmark) - Eleni Gouli (Academy of Athens, Greece) - Franciska de Jong (CLARIN ERIC / SSHOC / Utrecht University, Netherlands) - Frank Fischer (DARIAH ERIC / SSHOC / Higher School of Economics, Moscow) - Frank Uiterwaal (EHRI / NIOD – KNAW, Netherlands) - Jennifer Edmond (DARIAH ERIC / SSHOC / Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) - Koenraad De Smedt (University of Bergen, Norway / CLARINO) - Krister Lindén (University of Helsinki, Finland / FIN-CLARIN) - Maciej Maryl (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland) - Maria Gavrilidou (SSHOC / ILSP – Athena RC, Athens, Greece) - Radim Hladik (Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) - Ulrike Wuttke (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany / RDMO)
Copyright © 2020 for all papers in this volume by the authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)