Open Data in the Humanities and Social Sciences Event

The Department of Library Services (DLS) in collaboration with the faculty of Humanities organized a hybrid workshop which was held on 22 May 2023 at the Plant Sciences Auditorium on the Hatfield Campus. This initiative was a side event for Africa Week 2023, under the theme 'Open Africa, Open Science', and took place on 22-26 May 2023 at Future Africa.

The DLS decided to present the event specifically to promote the concept of open data to the Humanities and Social Sciences faculties. It was also done to encourage and ensure that researchers comply with UP Research Policies. The DLS searched for and identified prominent researchers in the field who are generating and sharing their data openly. Programme participants and their contributions were as follows:

Prof Innocent Pikirayi, the Deputy Dean of Postgraduate Studies in Ethics and Humanities at UP gave the context and purpose of the day and officially opened the event.

Mr. Aby Louw (CSIR) gave a definition of DH as an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the Humanities. He elaborated on a few key topics: language technology (computing technologies), text corpora, and linguistic features (such as tokenization, grapheme-2-phoneme, normalisation, and phonetics, etc.). Furthermore, he spoke briefly on speech corpora and synthesis as well as resources including human capital, finances, and samples. His emphasis was on all the amazing things one can do using open data and current technologies.

Prof Tanya van Wyk (Theology & Religion UP) spoke about generating data from a theological perspective and explained how their researchers and students gather data. She asked three critical questions:

1. What constitutes data for Theology and Religion?
2. Can data be shared?
3. If yes, how?

She further talked about FAIR principles in research. In conclusion, she remarked on the research landscape in Theology and Religion, which is ever-changing, and she pointed out a need to be responsive to both challenges and opportunities.

Dr Benito Trollip (NWU, SADiLaR) spoke about the confusion that exists in data in the Humanities and responded to some questions Prof Van Wyk posed. He said that datasets can be corpora, wordlists, and methods of use. Furthermore, he stated that metadata is also data because it is data about other data. He mentioned FAIR principles that researchers need to adhere to and explained how to license your data using Creative Commons. He mentioned the advantages of sharing data as it advances innovation, transparency, and reproducibility, and it is required by funders and journals.

The keynote speaker was Prof Justus Roux from Stellenbosch University who is a trailblazer in establishing digital infrastructure to support the development of language resources in South Africa. In his presentation, he spoke about how computational linguistics enabled computers to translate texts from foreign languages into English automatically. He also spoke about how to approach DH using technology and how to access, use, and manage different data types and volumes (Using Big Data and Research Data Management Plan implementation). He also emphasised the new ways of presenting and interpreting research results using printed text visualizations, networks, and media. In closing, he urged researchers in the Humanities to embrace technological advances and pointed out how that would add value to their own activities. He advised new entrants in DH and computational social sciences to stay informed about developments, both nationally and internationally and to attend programs that could enhance their technical skills for future research.

Lastly, Ms. Jenine Esterhuizen, who is the institution’s Manager for Information Governance, gave closing remarks and aligned the work that she does on the iGaPP to assist researchers in complying with the University’s policies, regulations, and procedures. She stated that Humanities data that does not contain personal information is subjected to the FAIR principles and emphasized how important it is to adhere to these principles. She also mentioned the new UP Research Policy as the reason why it is now compulsory for all researchers to have a Research Data Management Plan. She ensured listeners that the iGaPP RDM project is currently working on assisting researchers with training on the infrastructure and assisting UP researchers in coming to grips with the new ethical and legal requirements that they need to adhere to.  

Attendees at the Open Data in the Humanities and Social Sciences event.