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This edited volume collects together peer-reviewed papers that initially emanated from presentations at Digital Classicist seminars and conference panels.\ud \ud This wide-ranging volume showcases exemplary applications of digital scholarship to the ancient world and critically examines the many challenges and opportunities afforded by such research. The chapters included here demonstrate innovative approaches that drive forward the research interests of both humanists and technologists while showing that rigorous scholarship is as central to digital research as it is to mainstream classical studies.\ud \ud As with the earlier Digital Classicist publications, our aim is not to give a broad overview of the field of digital classics; rather, we present here a snapshot of some of the varied research of our members in order to engage with and contribute to the development of scholarship both in the fields of classical antiquity and Digital Humanities more broadly.

Research funding organizations, particularly at international level, are increasingly promoting the\ud creation and maintenance of open access research infrastructures (RI). These resources have\ud assumed a pivotal role as support for the new open and networked science in their dimension of\ud technical and operational frameworks that allow scientists and stakeholders to collaborate and\ud share scientific data and results. In Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), the creation and\ud exploitation of open data platforms is still attempting to catch up with longer-standing practices\ud in the “hard sciences” as the resistance to wider data sharing has not yet been completely\ud overcome. This paper aims to describe how a large project, financed by the European\ud Commission, managed the creation of a RI in the field of SSH, showing the steps undertaken to\ud comply with the GDPR regulations and prepare the data for useful sharing and reuse. In this\ud regard, the authors present the case study of the Horizon 2020 “CultureLabs” project, placing\ud emphasis on some specific practical factors that they believe are particularly important for\ud implementing open access principles in the establishment and maintenance of RIs in the new\ud course of science based on sharing and openness. In particular, the authors will focus on creation\ud of “useful” and GDPR-compliant data and the impact on research activities as a result of their\ud (re)utilisation; the control of the data management process; and the compliance with funders’\ud requirements (e.g. in terms of data security). The reflection on the interplay of these aspects,\ud operated through a case study, appears to be crucial in moving away from a merely theoretical\ud approach to addressing the issue of open access, and it hopes to serve as a guide or a warning for\ud those who create and administer open RIs.

‘Salvage’ evokes complex dynamics of loss, recovery and value, in such contexts\ud as waste management or shipwreck and maritime law. Similar dynamics, often\ud triggered by a collective or individual experience of a void or an absence, motivate\ud and inform much research into the history of women’s writing. The present article\ud explores, from the point of view of literary studies, the effects of understanding\ud research into the history of women’s writing as a salvage operation. This metaphor\ud bestows on the material studied the ambiguous status of remains. While\ud hindering the full integration of women’ s writing in more traditional accounts of\ud the literary past, the understanding of surviving material as remains can become\ud the starting point for constructing new, inclusive approaches to literary history.\ud This reframing of the problem is possible thanks to recent developments in the\ud Humanities, with an increasing interest in models and theories that allow us\ud to better understand complex and dynamic phenomena. In order to illustrate\ud the possibilities of this approach, the article draws on a brief analysis of nineteenth-century Spanish fashion magazines.

This first discussion paper, produced by the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network in consultation with the wider Digital Humanities (DH) community in the two countries and beyond, summarises the findings of a) the first workshop organised by the network and b) the post-workshop survey and offers recommendations based on these findings.

No abstract available.

It is essential that we develop effective systems for the management and preservation of digital heritage data. This chapter outlines the key issues surrounding access, sharing and curation, and describes current efforts to establish research infrastructures in a number of countries. It aims to provide a detailed overview of the issues involved in the creation, ingest, preservation and dissemination of 3D datasets in particular. The chapter incorporates specific examples from past and present Archaeology Data Service (ADS) projects and highlights the recent work undertaken by the ADS and partners to specify standards and workflows in order to aid the preservation and reuse of 3D datasets.

AbstractTropical peatlands are currently being rapidly cleared and drained for the establishment of oil palm plantations, which threatens their globally significant carbon sequestration capacity. Large-scale land conversion of tropical peatlands is important in the context of greenhouse gas emission factors and sustainable land management. At present, quantification of carbon dioxide losses from tropical peatlands is limited by our understanding of the relative contribution of heterotrophic and autotrophic respiration to net peat surface CO2 emissions. In this study we separated heterotrophic and autotrophic components of peat CO2 losses from two oil palm plantations (one established in ‘2000’ and the other in 1978, then replanted in ‘2006’) using chamber-based emissions sampling along a transect from the rooting to non-rooting zones on a peatland in Selangor, Peninsular Malaysia over the course of 3 months (June–August, 2014). Collar CO2 measurements were compared with soil temperature and moisture at site and also accompanied by depth profiles assessing peat C and bulk density. The soil respiration decreased exponentially with distance from the palm trunks with the sharpest decline found for the plantation with the younger palms with overall fluxes of 1341 and 988 mg CO2 m−2 h−1, respectively, at the 2000 and 2006 plantations, respectively. The mean heterotrophic flux was 909 ± SE 136 and 716 ± SE 201 mg m−2 h−1 at the 2000 and 2006 plantations, respectively. Autotrophic emissions adjacent to the palm trunks were 845 ± SE 135 and 1558 ± SE 341 mg m−2 h−1 at the 2000 and 2006 plantations, respectively. Heterotrophic CO2 flux was positively related to peat soil moisture, but not temperature. Total peat C stocks were 60 kg m−2 (down to 1 m depth) and did not vary among plantations of different ages but SOC concentrations declined significantly with depth at both plantations but the decline was sharper in the second generation 2006 plantation. The CO2 flux values reported in this study suggest a potential for very high carbon (C) loss from drained tropical peats during the dry season. This is particularly concerning given that more intense dry periods related to climate change are predicted for SE Asia. Taken together, this study highlights the need for careful management of tropical peatlands, and the vulnerability of their carbon storage capability under conditions of drainage.

This is the second discussion paper produced by the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network in consultation with the wider Digital Humanities (DH) Community in the two countries and beyond. It summarises the findings of the second workshop organised by the network, and offers recommendations based on these findings.

Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide large-scale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes. This article reports on a pilot project at University College London, working in collaboration with the British Library, to scope out how best high-performance computing facilities can be used to facilitate the needs of researchers in the humanities. Using institutional data-processing frameworks routinely used to support scientific research, we assisted four humanities researchers in analysing 60,000 digitized books, and we present two resulting case studies here. This research allowed us to identify infrastructural and procedural barriers and make recommendations on resource allocation to best support non-computational researchers in undertaking ‘big data’ research. We recommend that research software engineer capacity can be most efficiently deployed in maintaining and supporting data sets, while librarians can provide an essential service in running initial, routine queries for humanities scholars. At present there are too many technical hurdles for most individuals in the humanities to consider analysing at scale these increasingly available open data sets, and by building on existing frameworks of support from research computing and library services, we can best support humanities scholars in developing methods and approaches to take advantage of these research opportunities.

Contribution to the crowd-sourced reflection titled 'Doing Arts Research in a Pandemic, published by the Culture Capital Exchange.