This poster will introduce DHARPA (the Digital History Advanced Research Accelerator project) and its innovative data orchestration tool, kiara, demonstrating its applications for digital history through the research projects of three associated PhD students, exemplifying its application in practical research. It also aims to demonstrate the software’s ability to formalise research transparency and critical reflection of humanities datasets.
This poster demonstrates how kiara has been used to create and foster a higher degree of research transparency for digital history. This software allows researchers to import their datasets, track meta-documentation and create a lineage of decisions, showing how data has been adapted, edited and processed during the research workflow. Capturing this intellectual work in kiara allows for traceable source criticism, furthering openness in research and data creation in data-reliant themes. Primarily a data-orchestration tool, kiara assists in harvesting big data from multiple locations to combine and organise it. Researchers are able to orchestrate, process, visualise and model the data in various ways, including functionalities for topic modelling and network analysis. kiara is currently available through a graphical user interface (GUI) as ‘mini-apps’, as well as the command line terminal and an API for Jupyter Notebooks, allowing for users to analyse their data in a guided research workflow (as shown through the case studies in this poster). A key aim of this software is to demystify the ‘black box’ of digital research, moving away from monolithic interfaces and making the methodological processes of digital research more transparent and open to commentary, replicability, and criticism.
Importantly, kiara is the first tool of its kind to enhance digital literacy whilst creating a comprehensive toolkit for researchers and simultaneously allowing for further reflection and more transparent research procedures. This fostering of transparency is crucial to supporting dialogues in digital history. This provides a means of demonstrating the researcher’s decision making process throughout the research lifespan. The emphasis on generating meta-documentation allows for replicability and openness concerning data and methods, whilst contributing towards the methodological development of data-reliant historical research.
All three doctoral dissertations use kiara to think through the process of creating a dataset from archival sources. Eliane Schmid’s research on the development of public urban green spaces in Hamburg and Marseille (1945-1973) applies GIS (Geographic Information Systems) as a tool for socio-spatial analysis. kiara allows her to keep track of the changes she makes to her dataset and to critically reflect on how she uses her data. This reflection will make up a methodological chapter of its own in the thesis. Luca Federico Cerra’s research analyses sources around the abolition of the guilds in Luxembourg attached to revolutionary France, between 1795 and 1812. These sources are produced either by craftsmen or the French administration overseeing the abolition of these Ancien Régime institutions.The purpose of this research is to fill an historiographical gap at the level of the causes and consequences of the abolitions of the guilds, mixing micro and macro-analytical approaches. To reach this goal, he uses kiara to highlight the interactions between craftsmen and members of the French administration, thus, uncovering a network of exchanges involving family, neighbourhood or professional ties. Lauren Coetzee’s research is a combination of several methodologies, exploiting mapping, network analysis, topic modelling and sentiment analysis to explore the multifaceted impacts of the bartering of guns and gunpowder in precolonial African trade. A crucial aspect of this research is integrating the Time Traveller dataset, encompassing over 500 years of African history. kiara assists with the data management and integration of various historical sources, and allows for critical reflection of the meta-documentation generated and computational analyses capable. kiara offers practical benefits to the researcher’s aims of uncovering narratives in precolonial African economic history.
Code and documentation available in DHARPA’s GitHub repositories [https://github.com/DHARPA-Project] .
License information can also be found here [https://github.com/DHARPA-Project/kiara/blob/develop/LICENSE] .
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