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The record of the meetings of UNESCO’s General Conference offers a valuable resource for research in the global humanities. We present a digital text corpus, including metadata and supplementary material, that makes the complete record of these meetings from 1946 to 2017 in English and/or French accessible in a machine-readable form that is suitable for digital text analysis. The corpus is stored on Zenodo; relevant code is available on GitHub. The corpus offers reuse potential for scholars interested in any of the countless issues that have been discussed and debated in UNESCO’s General Conference over more than seventy years, as well as to Natural Language Processing (NLP) developers interested in the challenges of language recognition and automated segmentation.

The monthly magazine of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in 1948 as The UNESCO Courier, represents an extraordinary resource for research on global themes in the humanities. We present the Curated Courier 1.0, a package of digital text corpora, text analysis tools, and supplementary material that aims to make the complete archive of this publication from 1948 to 2020 machine-readable, accessible, and reusable for digital text analysis. One corpus compiles the text of all articles, which we carefully reconstructed and linked to a comprehensive curated metadata index while excluding additional text (masthead, photo captions, letters to the editor, and so on). A second corpus brings together the complete text of all issues. This article first presents the value of Courier as a source for digital research in the global humanities. Second, it outlines how we created the curated corpus and discusses some challenges we met. Third, it offers examples of tools researchers might use to explore and utilize the annotated corpus and discusses a few approaches that we have developed and tested.

Even if digitized and born-digital audiovisual material today amounts to a steadily increasing body of data to work with and research, such media modalities are still relatively poorly represented in the field of DH. Streaming media is a case in point, and the purpose of this article is to provide some findings from an ongoing audio (and music) research project, that deals with experiments, interventions and the reverse engineering of Spotify’s algorithms, aggregation procedures, and valuation strategies. One such research experiment, the SpotiBot intervention, was set up at Humlab, Umeå University. Via multiple bots running in parallel our idea was to examine if it is possible to provoke — or even undermine — the Spotify business model (based on the so called “30 second royalty rule”). Essentially, the experiment resembled a Turing test, where we asked ourselves what happens when — not if — streaming bots approximate human listener behavior in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish between a human and a machine. Implemented in the Python programming language, and using a web UI testing frameworks, our so called SpotiBot engine automated the Spotify web client by simulating user interaction within the web interface. The SpotiBot engine was instructed to play a single track repeatedly (both self-produced music and Abba’s “Dancing Queen”), during less and more than 30 seconds, and with a fixed repetition scheme running from 100 to n times (simultaneously with different Spotify Free ‘bot accounts’). Our bots also logged all results. In short, our bots demonstrated the ability (at least sometimes) to continuously play tracks, indicating that the Spotify business model can be tampered with. Using a single virtual machine — hidden behind only one proxy IP — the results of the intervention hence stipulate that it is possible to automatically play tracks for thousands of repetitions that exceeds the royalty rule.

To curate processes within the digital humanities, an elaborate infrastructure of technology, supporting processes, physical spaces, competences, and human attitudes is needed, which can be challenging to create and sustain in the academia of humanities. In this poster we will share our experiences, good as well as bad, and how we have tackled the challenges of working within the digital humanities.

The physical spaces of HUMlab are open and accessible, where technicians, students, and researchers from a wide variety of fields can meet and collaborate. The spaces in HUMlab have been designed with the aim of creating an appealing and attractive ‘meeting place’ with a technological infrastructure that breaks interdisciplinary barriers. The codesign of digital research methodologies and tools also functions across the disciplines and joins knowledge from different fields.

The supporting processes, and the way they are executed, emphasise collaboration, knowledge sharing, and joint venture. The project model used in software development is based on an agile approach that has been adapted to the special needs and demands of academia and research within the humanities. Supporting workflows have been specified and implemented (e.g., stakeholder discussion, project initialization) with tollgates and templates. The real challenge is to create formalized workflows that promote new ideas, quality, creativity, innovation, and individual development.

An open mindset is required to achieve and sustain interdisciplinarity and collaboration on equal terms. The working process must allow mistakes and encourage new ideas. Part of the challenge is to build trust and share knowledge in a dialogue that translates scholarly needs with technology to give added values.

Technology plays an important part of HUMlab (e.g., a multitude of screen scapes), but even more important is the critical attitude towards the technology and how it is used. It is vital to understand the underlying epistemology of different technologies, and the methods and tools, and to have transparency on how they are applied in order to achieve certain (research) objectives.

A real challenge is to sustain the numerous competences needed within the fields of digital humanities and humanities computing (especially when you don’t know the needs of the next collaboration). At HUMlab, this is done by so-called pet projects (freedom to work with personal projects), focus projects (small projects to expand knowledge in certain areas, and to step out of your ‘comfort zone’), assigned fields of interest (personal responsibility to sustain knowledge for a specific fields), and a competence matrix at an organizational level that is based on HUMlab’s needs and vision for the future, but also dynamic and flexible and adapting to an ever-changing world.