UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Thursday 6th June, 9:30am-5:00pm

Room G31, Foster Court

As part of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE), UCL, together with its project partners, is hosting a one day workshop on 6th June on the theme: Social Media and the Museum.

General workshop theme: how social media is changing museum practice and visitor experience; how social media can be integrated into museums and collections.

This is a one day workshop with talks from a range of academic and non-academic social media experts, targeted at doctoral students and early career researchers. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion as well as hands on practical experience. Workshop places are strictly limited and so early registration is necessary. Please register via Eventbrite.

Please see the SMKE website for full programme information.

Registration is also now open for the SMKE conference on 2 & 3 July.

The programme for the Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2013 is now published (the abstracts will be added very soon). This year we will be recording video and so presentation slides, audio and video files will be available.

These seminars range far beyond an interest in the ancient world. Each paper must have an innovative digital component and incorporate Digital Humanities techniques and methodologies. The series seeks to accommodate broader theoretical considerations of the use of digital technology in Classical Studies. The content needs to be of interest both to classicists, ancient historians or archaeologists, and to information specialists or digital humanists, and have an academic research agenda relevant to at least one of those fields.

All seminars are on Fridays at 16:30 at Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU and the programme flyer can be downloaded as a PDF.

All are welcome; these are public events with no need to book.

Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), the Barlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and UCL Museums and Public Engagement have launched a digital dashboard highlighting the UCL Museums and Collections.

Check it out at http://citydashboard.org/uclmuseums/

Part of the bigger CityDashboard project, this special version shows data from, or relevant to, UCL Museums and Collections. It is part of the NeISS project and was jointly funded by JISC and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.

We’re going into our fourth year at UCLDH, and there have been quite a few changes along the way. Since the centre was founded under the direction of Professor Claire Warwick, Claire has also taken on Head of Department in UCL Department of Information Studies, as well as Vice Dean of Research for the Arts and Humanities faculty. Over the past year, Claire and myself (Melissa Terras) have been co-directing the centre. I’m pleased, proud, and a little bit nervous to say that from now on I’ll be taking on full operational duties as Director of UCLDH, still working closely with Claire, who remains committed to Digital Humanities as a subject, and UCLDH in particular. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Claire for her continued input into UCLDH – and I look forward to working with her in this slightly different capacity over the next few years, as well as the rest of the team at UCLDH, and putting my efforts into building up UCLDH even further after its great start.

The Annual Bliss Classification Association Lecture will be given this year by Michele Pasin and John Bradley, on the topic “Exploring highly interconnected humanities data: are faceted browsers always the answer?”  The lecture will take place in the Lankester Lecture Theatre in the Medawar Building of University College London at 3.30 on Friday 19 April, 2013.  (Map available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/)

Admission is free, but if you expect to come please let Ian Evans know at i.evans@ucl.ac.uk

Digital Pedagogies: E-Learning and Digital Humanities Unconference
13 June 2013

Call for Session Proposals

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, in partnership with the Higher Education Academy, will be hosting a FREE ‘unconference’* focusing on bringing together the e-learning and digital humanities communities to discuss the development of ‘Digital Pedagogies’ in University teaching. We want to hear your ideas for sessions!

* An ‘unconference’ structure is delegate-driven with the agenda created by the attendees on the day. There is an open call for presentations on the topic of enhancing and developing digital pedagogies in your field of research.

About ‘Digital Pedagogies Unconference’
‘Digital Pedagogies’ are innovative methods of teaching – using ICT tools to facilitate and foster a high quality digital learning space. There are big questions around how teaching techniques can be modified and digital enhanced to meet the needs of 21st century virtual learning. The objective of this unconference will be firstly to bring together these e-learning and digital humanities communities with what are often similar research objectives, and secondly provide a space to speak about current digital teaching techniques, defining areas for improvement and enhancement.

What do I propose?
There are roughly four things people do in sessions: Talk, Make, Teach, and Play. Sometimes one session contains elements of all these, but it’s also a fair taxonomy for sessions. In a Talk session proposal, you offer to lead a group discussion on a topic or question of interest to you. In a Make session proposal, you offer to lead a small group in a hands-on collaborative working session with the aim of producing a draft document or piece of software. In a Teach session, you offer to teach a skill, either a “hard” skill or a “soft” skill. In a Play session, anything goes — you suggest literally playing a game, or you suggest some quality group playtime with one or more technologies, or what you will. Of course, these are just guides – we are open to new ideas, new ways of interaction and methods of making this unconference insightful and fun!

How do I propose a session?
There are two ways of proposing a session:
(1) through the THATCAMP Digital Pedagogies site at http://digitalpedagogies2013.thatcamp.org/registerproposal/ or
(2) by emailing Rachel at
rachel.kasbohm.11@ucl.ac.uk with a brief proposal.

*Remember* that you will be expected to facilitate the sessions you propose, so that if you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it or find a teacher; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep the discussion going, and end the discussion.

To register as a delegate: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/13_June_digital_pedagogies_UCL

More information: Please visit http://digitalpedagogies2013.thatcamp.org/

Questions, comments or concerns? Contact Rachel at
rachel.kasbohm.11@ucl.ac.uk

One of our former students, Davor Orlic, works as Publication Manager at videolectures.net which has just been awarded the United Nations and UNESCO award for the Best Educational Product of the Decade and in their words represents ‘one of the most outstanding examples of creative and innovative e-Content in the World in the last decade’. Davor’s blog post gives more details.

April is Digital Humanities Month at UCL!  Along with the DH Project Starter Workshop and the event for UCL undergraduates, we are holding a series of talks. All are welcome and there will be a drinks reception after each talk. Please note that registration is required as places are limited.

Friday 12^th April, 5.30pm, G31 Foster Court

“Contexts, Toward Building the Social Edition”

Ray Siemens, University of Victoria

This talk explores, via narrative and example, research contexts toward the social scholarly edition, among them notions of Big Humanities and Humanities 2.0, the nature of impact in and beyond academic environments, and engaging extended community through work anchored in an academic research agenda.  A prime example will be the social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492)

Register here

Tuesday 16^th April, 5.30pm, G31 Foster Court

“The Gates of Hell: History and Definition of Digital | Humanities | Computing”

Edward Vanhoutte, Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature

The origins of the Digital Humanities dating back to the late 1940’s are quite well known, or so it seems. In The Gates of Hell, Edward Vanhoutte recounts the story of the use of computational techniques through history and frames its early history within the context of failure from the part of war technology. He will show how the use of the computer for electronic text analysis developed into Humanities Computing and how the schism with Computational Linguistics occurred. He will argue that these historical insights are important for our current thinking about where the Digital Humanities come from, what they are, and where they should head to. Vanhoutte will use Auguste Rodin’s sculpture La porte de l’Enfer or The Gates of Hell as a metaphor throughout the lecture.

Register here

Thursday 18^th April, 5.30pm, G31 Foster Court

“Exploring Enlightenment: Text Mining the 18th-Century Republic of Letters”

Glenn Roe, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford

The challenge of ‘Big Data’ in the Humanities has led in recent years to a host of innovative technological and algorithmic approaches to the growing digital human record. These techniques—from data mining to distant reading—can offer students and scholars new perspectives on the exploration and visualisation of increasingly intractable data sets in the human and social sciences; perspectives that would have previously been unimaginable. The danger, however, in these kinds of ‘macro-analyses’, is that scholars find themselves increasingly disconnected from the raw materials of their research, engaging with massive collections of texts in ways that are neither intuitive nor transparent, and that provide few opportunities to apply traditional modes of close reading to these new resources. In this talk, I will outline some of my previous work using data mining and machine learning techniques to explore large data sets drawn primarily from the French Enlightenment period. Building upon these past experiences, I will then present my current research project at Oxford, which uses sequence alignment algorithms to identify intertextual relationships between authors and texts in the 18th-century “Republic of Letters.” By reintroducing the notion of (inter)textuality into algorithmic and data-driven methods of macro-anlalysis we can perhaps bridge the gap between distant and close readings, by way of an intermediary mode of scholarship I term ‘directed’ or ‘scalable’ reading.

Register here

Wednesday 24^th April, 5.30pm, G31 Foster Court

“Public support for the UK Digital Humanities: looking back and forwards”

David Robey, Oxford e-Research Centre

The UK has swung in a few years from leading the world in its infrastructure for the Digital Humanities to providing almost nothing in this respect. This talk, by the former Director of the AHRC ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, will discuss some of the reasons for this change, and the issues, needs and prospects for a Digital Humanities infrastructure in the future.

Register here

Kim Martin from Digging Digital Humanities has written a blog post about her recent research visit to UCLDH. We’re glad to see our various mugs make such a prominent appearance!