A shared task for the digital humanities: annotating narrative levels

Abstract

This volume is the first of two, and it documents activities that we have been conducting in the past years. They are best described as “organizing shared tasks with/in/for the digital humanities” and have evolved significantly since we started. Research in digital humanities entails a number of unique challenges, some of which are caused by the collaboration model that digital humanities projects often work in. This collaboration creates a lot of friction, but comes with huge potential: Different collaboration partners can specialize in different aspects of the shared goal. While a shared goal and a common language is still needed, each party does not have to know everything about the other party’s focus area. A (proto-)typical division of labor lends itself to the digital humanities: Computer scientists work on the technical aspects, while humanities scholars focus on the content side. Still, it turns out that knowing what each party is working on does not suffice, because content and technology need to be re-integrated at some point. How exactly this integration takes place depends on the specific project design and is a matter of interface.