A new digital toolkit for researching the human past

Digital tools and artificial intelligence are an integrated part of everyday life for most people, including the research world. But how do we navigate the many opportunities, pitfalls, and ethical dilemmas that come with digital development?

These are questions that Rubina Raja, former director of UrbNet, set out to answer. A little more than two years ago, more than 100 humanities researchers were contacted to collect and share knowledge and experience from their work with digital technology. The result has now been brought together in The Oxford Handbook of Digital Classical Studies, published in July.

“The book brings digital technologies and artificial intelligence into the heart of research on the human past. It is aimed particularly at scholars and students in the humanities and other fields who work with the past, but it can also be read by people outside the field,” says Rubina Raja.

The new handbook contains more than 60 chapters, providing an up-to-date overview of a complex and wide-ranging field. It brings together experience and reflections that can inspire researchers to develop their own critical perspectives on technologies and their future work with artificial intelligence.

Why now?

Digital tools have been part of researchers’ work for several decades and play a major role in students’ everyday lives. Rubina Raja therefore also finds it surprising that no dedicated handbook has previously addressed digital technology and its significance for research from a critical and ethical perspective. Part of the explanation may be timing:

“It is only now that these issues are really beginning to take hold. Now we need qualified and critical knowledge. And we need to address the ethical aspects that keep emerging. You cannot avoid AI, but it can be devastating to your research results if you use it incorrectly.”

A global success

Rubina Raja is proud of the new Oxford handbook. It is quite an achievement, she says, to have brought together so many international researchers in such a short time. This was possible because, during its lifetime, the Center of Excellence UrbNet established a very strong international position within its field.

“UrbNet has built a global reputation for high-quality research, and that is why we were able to bring this enormous project to fruition so quickly. All the leading researchers we contacted agreed to contribute, and they had a great deal to offer. It is a success story!”

At the same time, the handbook draws on the experience UrbNet has built over the years, including its work on organizing data and making it responsibly accessible—and on an approach that reflects all the facets that come with complex data. After many years of collecting large amounts of data, the next step is to explore what those data can be used for, for example, in light of artificial intelligence.

“As researchers, we have a responsibility to rethink how we organize ourselves and our research, and how we make our complex data accessible and reuse them in new contexts. Only in this way can we ensure that the data remain relevant at a time when many things look worrying. The humanities have answers to many of these concerns. That is why we need larger humanities projects and research centers that allow researchers to develop their visions over a longer period of time. This is one of the things the Danish National Research Foundation makes possible,” Rubina Raja concludes.

In addition to Rubina Raja, The Oxford Handbook of Digital Classical Studies is edited by Elton Barker and Olympia Bobou. The introductory chapter, written by the three editors, is available open access here.