Shared Horizons – Is it cutting-edge science when you can’t find a joke about it on the web?

The following is a guest blog post from Suzanne Austin, Deputy Director for Research Councils UK team in the US.

I wanted to start this blog post with a joke. You know the one where there’s a historian, biologist and computer scientist in a bar? And they….except they don’t. There are no jokes about these folks getting together in a bar or changing lightbulbs. Trust me, I scoured the Internet for hours. We just typically wouldn’t place these researchers anywhere near each other, let alone in a bar.

So what’s this blog post about? Well, last month, I was lucky enough to attend a workshop bringing together US and UK academics to talk about the digital humanities.

At the workshop we had an exciting mix of experts in the room covering the biological sciences, computer sciences and the humanities. The result was extraordinary conversations on Urdu poetry and digital forensics, through to newspaper reports from the Influenza outbreak in 1918. Participants were eager to learn and share knowledge with others, the only barrier being the occasional need for translation of terms, a common feature of interdisciplinary and international discussions. There were several strong examples of researchers working together to overcome these barriers and work jointly on a project as reported in this Chronicle of Higher Education article. Working together across disciplines brings the ultimate benefit to a research project of gaining from the research skills and methods from all the different disciplines and researchers involved.

One of my favourite presentations at the workshop was by Katy Börner, of Indiana University. Her presentation introduced me to a whole new area of science, looking at the mapping of scholarly networks. Using funding award and citation data, it is possible to analyse the spread of research networks over time based on single PI (Principal Investigator) or key words. There really is a wealth of data available on this, yet without using computational network analysis methods; in the past this data would probably just have been left unexplored. Understanding how researchers come together to work together across departments, institutes and even countries is always fascinating to me.

Digital humanities are a newly emerging area of academic research and it is positive to see that interdisciplinary and international approaches are being encouraged and openly adopted in the field. As someone who has worked to support international collaboration for a number of years, it is always heartening to see emergent working relationships that will spark interesting projects and undoubtedly have real impacts.  The Digging into the Enlightenment project is a fantastic transatlantic collaboration bringing the 17^th Century Republic of Letters (a long-distance social and intellectual network) to life with some great visual mapping techniques. The project team used sophisticated new tools to map and explore the complex geographical interconnections between these tens of thousands of letters to and from forty countries across Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Make sure you check out their video!

And so in a few years time, with this increase in research collaboration in the digital humanities, we might inundated with “historian, biologist and computer scientist“ jokes. Admittedly, this would be a slightly less impactful measure of success than we’d normally aim for!