Episode 91: Mixing Data with Politics with Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Senior Lecturer at The Australian National University
Terhi is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary experimentation into ways digital technologies can support and diversify research in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and in relation to public culture (including Web Science, and the cultural heritage sector). Her book "Linked Data for the Digital Humanities" is currently under review with Routledge. She’s currently working on Liberal Sydney, a project that investigates the development of liberalism as a movement in Australian politics. She will be taking up the Gale Asia-Pacific Digital Humanities Oxford Fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, UK in early 2023.
What is the Difference Between Standards of Liberal Arts Humanities Versus Digital Humanities?
Digital humanities can be defined as a two-fold area of investigation where o n the one hand, we have the opportunity to use digital tools, and computational methods to try and answer questions that fall quite firmly into that space of the traditional humanities but we ask them at a greater scale and speed. The other half of the digital humanities is applying the methods and skills and the approach from those traditional humanities to critically evaluate digital tools, resources, and computational methods. We take all the things that are beautiful about human endeavor. We take history, literature, art, music, and anything from archaeology or ancient history and throw computers at them.
What is Transactional Liberalism Project and How to use Metadata, Technology, and Tools to make the Connections?
In terms of transactional liberalism, Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller works with a historian who is an expert in the early political landscape in Australia in the late 1800s. Australian context means the opposite of what you normally believe. It was the political party that has its origins from a European or North American sense of liberalism but has become increasingly conservative as time has gone on. In the project, we look at the origins of this kind of idea of liberalism and the birth of the Australian Federation out of a bunch of colonies over a hundred years ago. This study is a part of Australian politics that has now repercussions and effects in a much larger area in the surrounding geography and the Australian landscape as well. In a lot of ways, this project of transactional liberalism is one of the prosopography and one of the social networks. We have historical people who are in a position of power, but they are still human beings and they will have to make decisions based on the policies of their political party but also based on conservations they might have had. We are trying to map these hidden social connections between fundamentally important people in the late 1800s. The data comes from lots of very diverse sources.
Does the Nature of Interdisciplinary Nature of Digital Humanities follow the Same Route?
This is the exact kind of thing that they love to examine, some projects have done things like calculating the optimal route for camels to travel through large fists of desert based on where the ground is softened so you can see what is the best route or the route that was most likely taken. For Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, the most exciting kinds of questions are the ones where her link data methodology has a chance to shine and that is if and when they have opportunities to combine information from widely different sources. A lot of the stuff we do online these days as regular human beings every day who use the web is to retrieve information that we already know is there. Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller examines what happens when she manages to find information that someone else has published online that she did not even know that she could possibly want to ask. That is the thing that enriches and brings in a whole different angle to the research.
Contact Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terhinurmikkofuller
Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tmtn.f/
Learn more about The Australian National University: https://www.anu.edu.au
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