So glad I saw this and actually bothered to calculate what 17:00 London time works out to in California! Live-tweeting to commence shortly! Especially excited about this talk since I couldn't have put mine together without their amazing resource. https://twitter.com/scott_bot/status/1387023704144719876

. @scott_bot Will be discussing what we learned about North American and Anglophone DH when we put together this database. @NickoalEichmann describes previous work that built up to the current database, looking at trends in ADHO conferences.

. @NickoalEichmann Notes ongoing regional and gender imbalances, peer review biases, and topical shifts towards diversity in ADHO conference over time. Women are more likely to tag things gender studies, pedagogy. Authors of work presented at ADHO tend to be ~30% female.

. @scott_bot Importance of archive: lack of archival sources for history of DH (ref. @juliannenyhan). 7k works from 500 conferences from last 60 years, 8,400 authors, 86 countries. There's a mix of metadata depending on the conference.

. @scott_bot Don't currently have copyright permissions to share the full text of the abstract, but they're working on that. Started with ADHO and its predecessor orgs, but expanded to conferences and events elsewhere in the world. List here shows all the conference series.

. @scott_bot Overrepresentation of 1960's (focus on early history), and 2010's forward (things we remember). Literary and Anglophone focus. 1975-2008 is underrepresented, and other-subject DH (history, AV, library conferences, etc). Overrepresentation of "golf-playing countries".

. @scott_bot Everything except full text is available for a CSV download. Who built it? @matthewdlincoln! Has been adding data with @NickoalEichmann since 2012, but displaced library workers due to the pandemic were paid to do more data entry from PDFs or paper.

. @scott_bot Inherited some well-formed XML, paper conference programs dating back to the 1960's (hand-entering), many many other contributors and data people who scraped, typed, etc. to make the resource we have now.

. @scott_bot Historicizing the "DH naming moment"; before 2000, "digital humanities" modified some other noun rather than standing alone. Notes role of Anglophone literary scholars here. ADHOC(!) - Allied DH Orgs Committee was predecessor of ADHO. DH conference & DHQ in 2006.

. @scott_bot DH naming moment is fulcrum for common creation/genealogy story of DH. ADHO has relatively unambiguous & stable longitudinal trajectory. Hegemonic necessity for US-based Anglophone scholars; harder to explore alternate histories. Easy metaphor to break from.

. @scott_bot This myth is often used as genealogy for DH itself, rather than the genealogy of the conference. We can complicate that. Convenience periodization: 1950-2020. Clear ebs and flows in these primary sources: waves of excitement and depression.

. @scott_bot History of DH is history of computing + history of the humanities. Similar ebs and flows in the history of computing. Using this as guide for periodizing DH story, aligns pretty well with interest and excitement in computing.

. @scott_bot "Time on the Cross" in 1974, "the book that sunk a thousand ships". Ayers: "Quantitative revolution in history abandoned before it had a chance to fail" -- around the time of the "first AI winter".

. @scott_bot In early 1990's: closure of many well-known humanities computing departments. Then the DH naming moment arrived. Quote from @fraistat from DH 2009 "this is our time", coming after a previous decade of decline in status and fortune.

. @scott_bot Focus on "humanities" in DH was successful. Previous wave was emphasizing computing. Humanities computing was auxiliary discipline to computing, and to humanities. Work trickled into history of computing, but post-DH moment is much less connected to computing.

. @scott_bot DH has become institutionalized, with degrees and programs in universities. But it's disconnected from computing; DH work has a harder time trickling back into the humanities. Was institutionalization the right way to go?

"IBM Humanities": they mediated everything, they funded all the conferences, helped with all the publications, lent computer time to all the projects. IBM as central force in early humanities computing. Founding of CHUM, ALLC, ICCH. Founding of NEH (which IBM had a hand in).

. @scott_bot In early period: broken up by objects of study. Some interested in large-scale data fell in with social scientists, worked on ICPSR. Computer user in every history department, before this collapsed. Largely separate from early proto-DH community (largely literary).

. @scott_bot Topic model on DH index: predominant early topics at the conference were also the same topics in computing: computer-aided instruction, information retrieval, machine translation. Stylistics, concordances, dictionaries.

. @scott_bot Humanities computing centers: following crash of first wave of humanities computing. IBM had revenue crash in 60's-70's, became less of a player in humanities computing world. Stanley Fish's first major critique of stylistics in 1973. History's move towards humanities

. @scott_bot Computing centers were important; lots of people got involved because their office was near one. New wave of types of work done on personal computers --> new kids of scholarship. Strong partnerships with industry. 70's attendees from IBM, Bell, Kodak, others.

. @scott_bot Humanities Computing Central topics include AI, text databases computational criticism, textual models, semantic understanding, electronic publishing, text generation.

. @scott_bot Dot-com craze brought historians who hadn't previously aligned themselves with DH. Public history, New Media, GIS. Centers like George Mason's. Topics include hypertext, XML/TEI, literary modeling, electronic resources, hypermedia, virtual learning.

. @scott_bot Over the first three waves of DH, pedagogy was incredibly important, in a way that it was less so after 2005. Early phases were incredibly text-focused.

. @NickoalEichmann Post-naming moment as 2006-2020. Topics from the last two decades: predominantly text-oriented, but new methods and new communities of practice.

. @NickoalEichmann "Constant currents", long trajectory of consistency within the ocean of DH. Institutionalization + well-springs (e.g. rise of centers). All DH is local; institutionalization keeps happening depending on where you are in the world. Manifests in different ways.

. @NickoalEichmann Another constant current: technical affordances: e.g. mapping. Mapping is another trajectory beyond text. 70's in GPS, web mapping in 90's, personal computers. Proliferation of spatial analyses that we couldn't do before.

. @NickoalEichmann Constant current: crystallization of constellations of methods, practices, and values. E.g. DH Manifesto, @lisaspiro "this is why we fight" defining values for community of practice. Credit for labor. Recognition.

. @NickoalEichmann "Waves of maturation", like tidal waves, coming in and joining all the rest of the waters in the ocean. Computational and digital "turns", towards textual criticism, The Big Tent. More recent 'turn' waves: visual DH, data science. Also not just about the tools.

. @NickoalEichmann @alanyliu asking about where the cultural criticism in DH is has led to new ecologies of knowledge. "Big Tent" - multiplicities of varieties of DH. Not just text mining, but many varieties of DH not necessarily recognized before.

. @NickoalEichmann Realignment around communities of practice: e.g. multilingual, criticizing how those local practices take place in our local communities. Critiques and reflections: e.g. calling DH "tool of neoliberalism".

. @NickoalEichmann Referencing @elikaortega "ecologies of knowledge", connected by certain values or practices or organizations like ADHO. A more diverse DH, more global and local and multilingual. More collective/communal approaches. @elotroalex - non-hierarchical practices in DH

. @scott_bot Getting real about "what's next for the index". "It turns out a large archival project -- it wouldn't be underestimating to say we've put thousands of hours into this." It's no one's job to do this work. How to fund it and move it forward?

. @scott_bot Dream plan for what's possible for the index given time and funding. No way to import yet. Lots of hand-reconciliation of names and keywords. Physical archive of ADHO-related conference materials. Looking for feedback for where else it should go.

. @NickoalEichmann Future of DH: furthering global/local collective zones of contact. Disrupting hegemonies, moves towards decolonization / queering DH. Addressing abolition and surveillance capitalism? We use platforms that take user data, what role do we have?

. @NickoalEichmann Humanities is pushed by technologies, as much as DH itself. Looking towards next DH downturn? Should we anticipate it and incorporate it into our practices? Is this the end of DH? Are there more futures for DH?

. @scott_bot "Future of the history of DH itself", moving from DH double-funnel to DH cylinder? History of DH shouldn't be the same as the DH that existed in 2006. It should be what it is now, which is distinct from ADHO. Multiplicity of DH far beyond ADHO's remit.

. @scott_bot ADHO conference attendance vs. authorship: only about 30% of authors at DH are likely to be women, vs. ~50% of attendees. But outside ADHO (HASTAC and others), authorship is much more gender-balanced. Many core DH communities around / distinct from ADHO.

. @scott_bot Many new streams that have fed into the DH rivers since 2006, new histories of DH need to take this into account. Many genealogies exist, more on the way, but they tend to be piecemeal. Would like to see more work towards synthesis, looking across these histories.

. @scott_bot Looking to hear "outside the double funnel" that many histories have been stuck in, to see the wider universe, and expand the conference archive to include those other histories.

Q&A starting with Yunxin Li: appreciate self-reflection on biases within DH field, and the archive project. Question about who was less likely to attend early conferences. Social history of DH field, how that's reflected in index. How do DH scholars values reflect scholarship?

. @scott_bot Archive limited by source material, must apply source criticism. Knowing what limitations are. Have tried to emphasize that this is a weird slice of the history of humanities computing. Good at talking about history of associations (ALLC/ACH).

. @scott_bot So much of the social work of the field happened at the conferences, in these orgs. Good way to historicize the specific community of conference-goers that formed ADHO, set the int'l dialogue about what DH is, even when there were many others doing the same.

. @scott_bot There's a whole world of other sources that we need to draw upon, this is just one of many. Getting outside of ADHO at all: lots of communities around the world doing DH-y things that aren't part of this history. Looking for a more synthetic view across the field.

. @NickoalEichmann Definitely holds true to personal values in teaching DH. Acknowledging how Anglo-American centric the narrative can be. Can redirect the future of DH towards ecologies of knowledge. Some people tackle issues of socio-technical capitalism, come together for that.

. @scott_bot History of digital methods in these disciplines is often bizarrely distinct from community that's "digital humanities" / cliometrics / quantitative history. Certain methods / applications become core to fields that aren't called "DH" as such.

. @scott_bot Post-1990's history is much more transnational because pre-1990's history was people working in a specific archive, archives are generally local (about a region/group/language community). Post-1990's allows "side-glances" to other archives (digital/physical).

. @scott_bot Lots of digital tools / approaches shaping how historians work that aren't scrutinized as much as they should be. Lots more work to be done in seeing how it's affecting us.

Question from @triproftri about gap in historical narrative about pedagogy DH fighting to get through the door post 2006. Conference attendees are people who can afford to go to these conferences. @NickoalEichmann As we add more conferences, we see more pedagogy, but absolutely.

. @NickoalEichmann Who can afford to attend conferences impacts who gets represented by the index. THATCamps, etc. probably have more pedagogy there. It's one of the many strains that ought to be pursued, that can be contextualized through this index.

. @scott_bot Important to figure out what happened. Pedagogy was prevalent up to the 90's and then it disappeared. Lots of submissions to ADHO conferences on pedagogy, and they got rejected in ways they had not been previously. Lots of early pedagogical presentations.

. @scott_bot Found preponderance of rejection of pedagogical pieces during 2013-2017 ADHO conferences (where we had data). Pieces more likely to be rejected were from topics more likely to have women authors, or names not common in US census. Gendered aspect to this post-DH moment

. @NickoalEichmann Communities and practices / ecologies of knowledge are related to one another. See communities centered around global and multilingual DH. Communities will work towards addressing hegemonic practices. Already see DH for social good, bettering the world.

. @NickoalEichmann How we think about the cultural record has shifted. Moving towards compassionate technology, design justice. People who don't see themselves as DH people who we'll continue collaborating with, bringing it into DH practices.

. @christof77 What should conference organizers do in the future to make data collection process smoother? @scott_bot Getting XML things into ADHO GitHub is incredibly helpful. Unique IDs for authors & institutions (like ORCID). Dicey, but demographics?

. @juliannenyhan Had written a fellowship proposal to try to expand and critically analyze DH interviews. Outreach activity: Day of DH History, crowdsourced resource that could be more participatory, support more diverse range of sources. Proposal wasn't funded, but still exists!

. @scott_bot Have had similar conversations with @GeoffRockwell about doing a crowdsourced event around DH history. If anyone wants to help figure out a plan, should move the conversation forward. "Let's have a big Twitter thread with @juliannenyhan and myself."

Question: to what extent do you think that DH will remain a field? Seems to be strengthening, but methods have migrated to non-"DH" fields. Does DH coalesce attitudes and values that will now disperse? @scott_bot "Get 3 DH people in a room and you'll get 4 opinions about this."

. @scott_bot Other than a few people doing specific work on methodologies, would think that DH won't, and shouldn't, remain its own thing. A crash seems imminent, not sure what'll come out the other side. More cynical than I was before starting this project in earnest.

. @scott_bot Seems like people were doing a better job integrating methods into home discipline before the 90's than after, would like to see it get back to that.

. @scott_bot thanks @elotroalex for his question. Talking about it as the history of DH because the term came out of the community around which ADHO was formed. Important to acknowledge that, but more, important to acknowledge that communities are now well outside ADHO.

. @scott_bot Agrees that you can, and should do DH without ever thinking about ADHO. Now question from @roopikarisam: https://twitter.com/roopikarisam/status/1387092122638200835. Scott: work on database has just been reading old conference proceedings. Did topic modeling, but that mostly didn't inform it.

. @scott_bot Major limitation of the sources, though. Acknowledge that limitation, important to seek out other stories and other sources. Lots of stories that are much more difficult to tell because sources are harder to reach, have to work harder to get there.

Question from @Zoe_LeBlanc: comparing trend in DH conferences to scholarly turns in the humanities? Any common threads there for what drives scholarly practices in DH? @scott_bot found historiographic turns (away from social sciences in 70's that tanked quantitative history).

. @scott_bot It's not like quantitative history disappeared, it just left for economics / social sciences. But history-as-such turned away from it. Probably big pulling trends in literary studies, too. Post-2000 DH is pulled more by humanities strings.

Jin Gao notes that the index did a great job on East Asian names, which can be hard (especially Chinese) because phonetic transcription loses a lot of distinction between names that seem to have the same phonological values.