=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3232/paper44
|storemode=property
|title=Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries - A Living Bibliography
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3232/paper44.pdf
|volume=Vol-3232
|authors=Annika Rockenberger
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/dhn/Rockenberger22
}}
==Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries - A Living Bibliography==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3232/paper44.pdf
Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries
- A Living Bibliography
Annika Rockenberger1
1
University of Oslo Library, Moltke Moes vei 39, Oslo, 0851, Norway
Abstract
This poster describes the creation and publication of a curated, cumulative, open – living – bibliography
of the organisation Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB). It recounts how
the bibliographic material - conference abstracts, posters, peer-reviewed papers, journal articles, but
also news items about the conferences, blog posts, forum posts - has been collected in a Zotero library.
It discusses ways of documenting and archiving the bibliography both as a set of research data in a
Dataverse repository and as an open Zotero group library. The poster concludes with the prospect of
opening up the bibliography to become a community driven project that will be expanded and maintained
by the DHNB community and made explorable for research both as a live bibliography and as a data set
for further analyses.
Keywords
Bibliography, Research Data, Community, DHNB
1. Origins
1.1. From Idea to Action
In late 2019 and in the advent of the 5-year anniversary of the Association of Digital Humanities
in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) in April 2020, I started collecting material on DHNB
as an organisation, a community of researchers and practitioners, and a central facilitator of
digital humanities knowledge in the Nordic and Baltic Countries and beyond. Even though
DHNB was at that time only a couple of years old, I already met many obstacles collecting its
conference outputs: The main medium of DHNB community building and publication. Gathering
information about how the Nordic-Baltic, the international Digital Humanities community,
and the wider Humanities and Social Sciences communities received the organisation and its
conferences proved even more difficult. Web pages for previous conferences had died,1 books of
abstracts - both digital or in print - were hard to come by, and blog posts, tweets, newsletters, and
The 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022), Uppsala, Sweden, March 15-18,
2022
Envelope-Open annika.rockenberger@ub.uio.no (A. Rockenberger)
GLOBE https://www.ub.uio.no/english/about/people/uhs/uhsfagstudier/annikar/ (A. Rockenberger)
Orcid 0000-0001-9515-8262 (A. Rockenberger)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its author. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
1
‘Link rot’ is an unfortunate, but rather common phenomenon. See the collection of studies on link rot and the
half-life of URLs in the Wikipedia article [1]
438
other forms of web-based publications and social media posts2 about DHNB and its conferences
were disappearing quickly.
1.2. A Race Against Time
I felt that time was running out and if I wanted to record the history of DHNB, I had to take
action. So I decided to initiate a living archive of sorts for DHNB and its community. I began
collecting all DHNB related materials on the Web,3 starting with the central area of its activity:
the DHNB conferences and their abstracts in books of abstracts (BoA), papers and posters in
conference proceedings (CP), special issues of journals, and other publication outlets. I chose4
to use Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) and manually as well as semi-automatically added
publications wherever I could find them. For the abstracts and papers, I have retrieved the
full-texts for almost all items. For other web content, I have saved URLs and pruned metadata
to be meaningful and citable. Where technically possible, I archived a time-stamped version of
all web pages using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine https://archive.org/web/.
1.3. Opening Up the Archive
After manually adding the outputs of DHN2020 pre-and post-conference proceedings, I made the
decision to prepare the bibliography to become an open community resource and transferred my
private Zotero collection into a public Zotero group (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2503578/
dhnb-bibliography).
2. The DHNB conferences and main publications
2.1. Conferences
When DHN was founded in April 2015 the annual conferences were conceptualised as its main
activity and served both as an outlet for Nordic Digital Humanities publications5 and digital
humanities research which didn’t yet have a ‘home’, and as a forum for the widespread and
scattered community to meet, to socialise, to exchange ideas, and to initiate collaborations,
cross-institutionally and internationally.
In Table 1, I have created an overview of the DHNB conferences: When they were held,
where in the Nordic and Baltic countries they were held, and how many presentations we have
had. The columns “Link”, “BoA”, and “CP” show whether the conference website is still active,
2
Most Social Media communication about and by DHNB and the conferences is done via Twitter. In previous
years, Facebook has been used for conferences, too, however, to a much lesser degree and by significantly less
community members.
3
I have been using the Google search service and a selection of ad-hoc search terms and keywords like ‘DHN2016’,
‘DHN2020 + conference’, or ‘Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries’ etc.
4
For two reasons mainly: Firstly, I am a routined Zotero user for larger bibliographic projects and secondly
because Zotero can be used as cloud service, enabling me to work on the project remotely and making collaboration
easier.
5
At the first conference in Oslo, apart from English, a large number of presentations were held in Norwegian,
Swedish, and Danish, though there were none in Finnish or Icelandic.
439
Table 1
Overview of DHNB Conferences, 2016-2022
Name Date Location Country Link BoA CP Presentations
DHN2016 2016-03-15/17 Oslo Norway Y Y N 94
DHN2017 2017-03-14/16 Gothenburg Sweden N Y N 78
DHN2018 2018-03-07/09 Helsinki Finland Y Y Y 149
DHN2019 2019-03-06/08 Copenhagen Denmark Y Y Y 87
DHN2020 2020-10-20/23 Riga Latvia Y Y Y 94
DHNB2022 2022-03-16/18 Uppsala Sweden Y N/A Y 108
Table 2
Overview of DHNB Conference Proceedings with CEUR, 2018-2020
Name Year Location Country Link Papers
DHN2018 2018 Helsinki Finland http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2084/ 51
DHN2019 2019 Copenhagen Denmark http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/ 45
DHN2020pre 2020 Riga Latvia http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2612/ 38
DHNB2020post 2022 Riga Latvia http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/ 28
whether there was a book of abstracts accompanying the conference, and whether there were
conference proceedings published.
2.2. Publication of Conference Proceedings
When the first conference in Oslo in 2015/2016 was prepared, there was no plan to publish full
papers in conjunction with the conference. The organisers collected, published, and printed the
abstracts in a book of abstracts [2]. It was up to the individual presenters to convert their talks
and presentations into full articles and submit them to journals of their choice. I am, however,
not aware of any presentation in Oslo 2016 having been made into an article.
One year later at the Gothenburg conference, the local organisation team and the program
committee suggested the publication of a selection of conference presentations for a special
issue6 of the Swedish open access journal Human IT.
From DHN2018 in Helsinki onward, CPs became an integral part of the conferences and
the official conference proceedings [4, 5] were published with CEUR Workshop Proceedings7 .
For the postponed and moved-to-online DHN2020 conference in Riga, the program committee
suggested the publication of pre- and post conference proceedings,[6, 7] making it possible for
researchers to get their papers out as soon as possible and allowing for late coming research to
find a publication outlet, too.
6
Nordic Digital Resources and Practices. Ed. by Jenny Bergenmar. Special Issue of Human IT, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2019.
The Special Issue contains five DHN2017 presentations that have been reworked into articles and underwent peer-
review as well as a guest editorial by Bergenmar [3]. Consult the entire volume: https://humanit.hb.se/issue/view/91.
7
The peer-reviewed proceedings appear as individual numbers in the overall CEUR series and are edited by the
conference organisers or the chairs of the organising committee, respectively. See http://ceur-ws.org/.
440
3. Publications about DHNB and its conferences
I have taken particular care about gathering and archiving digital publications about the DHNB
conferences and about DHNB as an association. These publications are mainly conference
announcements and conference reports in the form of blog posts, newsletters, and forum posts.
In addition, I have gathered information from institutional and personal websites, including
texts and audiovisual media.
Why are such publications and media of interest in a DHNB bibliography? Because they, too,
demarcate the DHNB community: those who attend our conferences, but perhaps don’t present;
those that communicate their participation at a DHNB conference to others who have not been
there; those who connect DHNB to other venues and communities by drawing connections and
highlighting shared topics and special traits of Nordic-Baltic Digital Humanities.
4. Future plans
For the future, I think the following goals will be achievable for the DHNB living bibliography:
• Incrementally update the bibliography with all DHNB abstracts from BoAs, all articles
published in CPs, and special issues of journals (annually or as often as the conferences
are held).
• Incrementally update with news items, newsletters, blog posts, and other smaller pieces
of text and media reporting about DHNB, including conference reports, workshop reports,
reviews, opinion pieces (annually, 1x after the conference, 1x in the fall).
• Categorising the DHNB publications using TaDiRAH – Taxonomy of Digital Research
Activities in the Humanities (https://tadirah.info/) by creating and assigning tags for the
Zotero group library.
• Supplying the bibliography with full-text versions of all abstracts, papers, and posters (as
long as this is doable with regards to copyright and other licenses).
• Preserving all links to websites containing DHNB-related material to the Internet Archive
or similar services.
• Systematically harvesting Twitter for DHNB-related hashtags and archiving tweets as a
version-controlled data package, e.g. on Dataverse.no (https://dataverse.no/)
• Systematically harvesting Facebook and Instagram for DHNB-related hashtags and posts.
• Establishing a workflow for feeding DHNB conference data into the Index of Digital
Humanities Conferences (https://dh-abstracts.library.cmu.edu/).
I want to ensure that this resource becomes a trustworthy and sustainable community
resource: created by a community member, opened up and documented, and maintained by the
ever evolving DHNB community. I call the DHNB community to help collect relevant material
in the Zotero group library and an open repository. Together, let’s make the collection of DHNB
publications and accompanying data openly available for the community to use, re-use, share,
and build on!
441
References
[1] Link rot, 2022. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Link_rot&oldid=
1071645487, page Version ID: 1071645487.
[2] E. S. Ore (Ed.), DHN2016 Book of Abstracts, University of Oslo, Dept. of Linguistics and Scan-
dinavian Studies, Oslo, 2016. URL: https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/networks/
digital-humanities/news-and-events/events/2016/pdf/bofab.pdf.
[3] J. Bergenmar, Nordic Digital Resources and Practices: Guest Editorial, Human IT: Journal
for Information Technology Studies as a Human Science 14 (2018). URL: https://humanit.hb.
se/article/view/802, number: 2.
[4] E. Mäkelä, M. Tolonen, J. Tuominen (Eds.), DHN2018 – Digital Humanities in the Nordic
Countries 3rd Conference. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries
3rd Conference. Helsinki, Finland, March 7-9, 2018., number 2084 in CEUR Workshop
Proceedings, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 2018. URL: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2084/,
urn:nbn:de:0074-2084-4.
[5] C. Navarretta, B. Maegaard, M. Agirrezabal (Eds.), DHN2019 – Digital Humanities in the
Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th
Conference. Copenhagen, Denmark, March 5-8, 2019., number 2364 in CEUR Workshop Pro-
ceedings, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 2019. URL: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/.
[6] S. Reinsone, I. Skadiņa, A. Baklāne, J. Daugavietis (Eds.), DHN 2020. Proceedings of the
Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 5th Conference, number 2612 in CEUR Workshop
Proceedings, Riga, 2020. URL: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2612/.
[7] A. Baklāne, S. Reinsone, I. Skadiņa, J. Daugavietis (Eds.), DHN 2020. Digital Humanities in
the Nordic Countries 2020. Post-Proceedings of the 5th Conference Digital Humanities in
the Nordic Countries (DHN 2020), Riga, Latvia, October 21-23, 2020, number 2865 in CEUR
Workshop Proceedings, National Library of Latvia, Riga, 2021. URL: http://ceur-ws.org/
Vol-2865/.
5. Online Resources
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
• https://www.zotero.org/
• https://archive.org/web/
• https://www.zotero.org/groups/2503578/dhnb-bibliography
• https://humanit.hb.se/issue/view/91
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2084/
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2612/
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/
• https://tadirah.info/
• https://dataverse.no/
• https://dh-abstracts.library.cmu.edu/
All URLs were active and accessible on June 1, 2022.
442