UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

The next Decoding Digital Humanities meetup will be held on Monday 12 April. We had an excellent crowd of about 20 people come along to the first event (DDH # 1) on 16 March with loads of thought provoking discussion. But of course, there are many issues yet to consider and explore and what could be more fun than doing so with others over a pint or two? As before, we would like to continue with assigning some reading(s) to provide a focus for our discussions.

Richard Lewis, did an excellent write up which can be found on his blog here , and he suggested this reading:

Mateas, Michael (2005). “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media
Practitioner”. On the Horizon 13:2 (2005): 101-111.

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~michaelm/publications/mateas-oth-2005.pdf

We would really like you to suggest ideas on what you would like to discuss or articles you reccomend for future meet ups. Email you suggestion to Kathryn or Claire or leave a comment on the blog. The assigned reading will be posted on here andon the DDH webpage . Again the purpose of these events is to discuss the nature, purpose and potential of DH in order to learn about and make the most of current developments.
Date: Monday, 12 April 2010

Time: 5.30pm – 7.30pm

Location: Jeremy Bentham pub, 31 University Street, London, WC1E 6JL (map )

This event is open to UCL staff and students, and their guests. RSVP is appreciated but not required. If you cannot make this date but are interested in future events, send us a quick email to register your interest and we’ll add you to the DDH e-list!

For other UCL Centre for Digital Humanities events visit the UCLDH events page .

On March 18, 2010 people working or studying in digital humanities  documented the events of their day for the Day of Digital Humanities.   An online collaborative publication, with each participant as a co-author. The idea is that everyone will spend one day writing about what we do as a digital humanists so everyone can find out what digital humanities is about and how we work as a community.

Of course UCLDH couldn’t wait to take part in the event,  you can see a snapshot of what members of UCLDH have been up to below:

Claire Warwick

Melissa Terras

Simon Mahony

Claire Ross

Ernesto Priego, PhD student

Alejandro Giacometti, Affiliate PhD student

Susan Greenberg, UCL DIS PhD student

Registration is now open for the DH2010 conference which is being held at KCL this year from July 7-10. There is a special rate of for University of London employees £90 or £30 per day, so we hope that as many people as possible from UCL will attend.

This  is the major international meeting for DH and is a great way to make connections with other DH researchers. It is a very friendly gathering that actively welcomes newcomers. We also hope that it will be a good way for the wider DH community to find out more about what we are doing at UCL. Needless to say we know that there is already a great deal of interest in the DH world in what we are doing here.

This conference is particularly special for UCLDH, as Melissa Terras will be giving a plenary lecture entitled “Present not voting, digital humanities in the panopticon.” It’s good to know that she’ll be stressing our Benthamite heritage, perhaps in revenge for all those insults to the great man perpetrated by KCL students over the years!

There are also two other UCLDH papers and a poster which we are delighted about, since the acceptance rate for papers is now around 30%. Claire Ross, Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras and Anne Welsh will be giving a paper on academic use of twitter, Claire Warwick is also a co-author of a paper on collaborative research on digital humanities. Isabel Galina, a UCLDH research associate will also be presenting a poster on her work in DH at UNAM in Mexico where she is now based.

So please come and support Melissa and the other UCLDH researchers, and meet some new people who will doubtless be fascinated to hear about what is happening at UCL.

Last night saw the gathering of the first Decoding Digital Humanities

The aim was to get together to talk about  what Digital Humanities is, whether anyone has a definitive answer, where the discipline has come from and where we can take it.

It kicked off with some quick discussion centred around rabbits, apparently a must in digital humanities.

Starting with a classic, the first paper: Benjamin, W. 1936. the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction fostered a lot of discussion about cultural materialism, old and new heros, the differences between visual and textual, and a lack of theoretical underpinning. As well as talking about notions of authority, authorship, copies and reproducibility in digital media. What is the ‘real’ work, does it matter?

The second paper: Wikipedia Digital Humanities Page we discussed whether or not we need to redefine digital humanities on wikipedia?

This provoked talk about digital identity, digital humanist online presence are digital humanists managing their own online presence?

other points raised:

• Techies as ‘cultural producers’
• Need to think about equality between Computer Science and humanities. Technology is not in service of humanities
• Why do we perceive the need to have an ‘authentic’ single voice?
• We need a common language in which CS and humanities can speak with equal confidence.

Do you have any points you would like to add to our discussion?

Thanks to all that came and made it a really enjoyable event.  We are planning the next one for April, we will keep you posted.

ISKO UK in cooperation with the UCL Department for Information Studies are holding the first event of 2010.

Three invited speakers will discuss projects undertaken by the Natural History Museum, liberating data about all living species to the public as well as to scientists.  Organizing information and collections for the living world.    Further details of the programme and registration can be found at: http://www.iskouk.org/living_world_mar2010.htm

It’s £5.00 to include refreshments, and wine and nibbles after, but is free to all students and to UCL staff.

UCLDH is delighted to be co-sponsor of the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, with KCL’s CCH.

We would like to invite proposals for seminars in the 2010-11 academic year, October through April.

The London Seminar in Digital Text & Scholarship focuses on the ways in which the digital medium remakes the relationship of readers, writers, scholars, technical practitioners and designers to the manuscript and printed book. Its discussions are intended to inform public debate and policy as well as to stimulate research and provide a broad forum in which to present its results. Although the forum is primarily for those working in textual and literary studies, history of the book, humanities computing and related fields, its mandate is to address and involve an audience of non-specialists. Wherever possible the issues it raises are meant to engage all those who are interested in a digital future for the book.

The Seminar is held once per month in Stewart House, adjacent to Senate House, Bloomsbury, London, normally on a Thursday. A seminar usually consists of an hour’s presentation followed by another hour of discussion. Refreshments (wine & water) are provided. The seminar leader is taken out to dinner afterwards at the Seminar’s expense. Unfortunately the Seminar cannot fund any major expenses, such as transatlantic travel.

An e-mail note sent to both Convenors will suffice. Please specify a working title, an abstract and a choice of date. If multiple dates are possible, please specify your preference(s).

Convenors:

Willard McCarty
Professor of Humanities Computing
King’s College London
staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/

Claire Warwick
Reader in Digital Humanities
University College London
www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/claire-warwick/

Last night saw the first of the UCLDH digital excursions, at the  Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology .

UCLDH’s digital excursions are an opportunity to visit UCL departments that have specialist equipment and expertise of use to the field of digital humanities giving people a chance to look over interesting bits of kit and discuss the possibilities the gadgetry and skills presented provide to the field of digital humanities. So, last night we looked at the Petrie Museums use of 3D scanning in the museum environment..

The Petrie looks amazing, and it is stuffed full with artefacts dating back 5,000 years. Every available space is filled with a multitude of objects, so much that you cant take it all in, in one go. It’s overwhelming just how many artefacts there are in such a small space! over 80,000 objects in fact.

This hidden museum holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology, ranging over 7000 years from prehistory through Pharaonic to Islamic times.  The Petrie is committed toward public accessibility for its collection, particularly via online access; the entire collection of 80,000 objects is now online with images, which has led to several projects to digitise Egyptian collections in small UK museums  The museum also has a Digital Egypt teaching resource. Now they are working in partnership on 3D Encounters, with the Ireland-based multimedia company IET (Íomhánna Éigipteach Teoranta) to develop high-end 3D scanning, modelling and presentational resources. Its a really interesting project and the webiste is quite fun.

The project has only just started, but the kit is pretty cool.  The aim is to digitally record themed selections of objects and make them more accessible by telling their ‘stories’. The project will also digitally recreate some of the more rare & fragile artefacts, replicated for public handling and as a means of monitoring decay. There is something really compelling about being able to manipulate digital objects and being able to learn more about them in such a tactile (albeit virtual) way, so I cant wait to see the end product.

A good night out. Couldn’t make the Petrie?  Don’t worry, the next Digital Excursion is scheduled for April and will be hosted by The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Collection.  More details soon.

A Brief introduction to one of the UCLDH projects

I’m the research assistant (Claire Ross) on project LinkSphere, which is a joint research project with the University of Reading , funded by the JISC Virtual Research Environment 3 programme. The project is aiming to develop a virtual research environment (VRE) which will allow cross-repository searching across various digital collections and archives including (just to name a few) the Silchester IADB, Film Collection, Film, Television and Theatre archive, the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology collections, The Museum of English Rural Life collections and the Cole Museum of Zoology collections) producing a useful user interface to various disparate digital collections. Within this project we are also integrating a social network for researchers within the University of Reading to enable collaboration and ensure that it is possible to work more closely together on cross-disciplinary projects.

Development of the VRE will be undertaken at the University of Reading, with user analysis and usability from us at UCL.

My role is to focus on the user centric design aspect of the project.  The UCL team are on board to ensure that the project is a fully user driven design process, and that all user requirements are met and fed directly into the development of the project.  User centric design explicitly and actively includes users in the development process form an early stage.  Focusing on user requirements will hopefully enable the LinkSphere project to become embedded and owned by the users, creating a comprehensive collaborative tool specifically designed to the requirements of the users.

User research is currently split into two themes:

• Research into the use of digital resources within institutional repositories with particular focus on usability and functionality
• Academic use of Web 2.0 applications and Social Networks, with particular focus on usability, requirements gathering and functionality.

We will post regular updates atbout the usability side of the LinkSphere project on this blog. Further information about the whole project can be found at:

http://www.linksphere.org/about

While going through some old DH documents I happened upon a summary I had written of the Town Meeting for UCLDH. I had a vague memory that it was some time in March last year, but by an extraordinary coincidence I found that the date of the meeting was March 5th 2009, in other words exactly a year ago today.

There are various ways you could date the beginning of UCLDH and in some ways we have still not officially begun, as we have not yet held our external launch event. But I see the Town Meeting as the effective start, since it was at that event that we realised quite how many people were interested in DH at UCL. There were around 100 people there from every faculty, from the Library and from Museums and Collections, and more were unable to come but emailed me about their interest. It became plain how much excitement there was about the whole area, and how much good will there was from senior management. So we knew that we just had to make this happen. And it has.

I find it hard to believe just how far we have come in a year. We have been funded by the Provost’s Strategic Fund, and so we have a centre with staff who belong to it. We have an executive, who support us in all things DH. We have new funded research projects such as the Bentham Transcription initiative and Humanities Information Practices Our first Digital Excursion to the UCL Petrie Museum is happening next Tuesday and the first meeting of the Decoding Digital Humanities group on the following one with many more to come in future. We are meeting new people with new ideas for research projects. We are giving talks at and making new links with organisations outside UCL, such as the British Library and the British Museum. We have had papers accepted at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference, at which Melissa will give a plenary lecture. We are planning a new Masters course. We are sponsoring external seminars. We are blogging and tweeting anything we can think of that might interest all of you. We are busier than we could have imagined possible, but all in a very good way. And I am hugely grateful to everyone whose hard work and support has made it possible.

We have a long way to go of course, and I hope that the next year will bring with it more exciting challenges that as yet we cannot conceive of. I can’t wait!

Oh and a year and a day ago I could not imagine signing this off as Claire Warwick, Director, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

Isabel Galina Russell was the first PhD student at UCL DIS to complete a thesis on a Digital Humanities topic. Her PhD was awarded just after UCLDH began, and so we claim her as one of our own, and she has now become our first Research Associate. So Isabel is a real UCLDH pioneer.

She has just received the Highly Commended Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award for her thesis on the role of institutional repositories in informal scholarly publishing and communication.

Repositories have been set up by numerous institutions to aid in the management and dissemination of increasingly copious amount of scholarly electronic resources produced by academics. To date, most research has focused on formal publishing, mainly articles in repositories. This study focused on other types of digital resources that are outside the formal publishing framework. This is particularly relevant for Digital Humanities, as scholarly products produced in this field are of varied formats such as audio, videos, virtual reality, photographs, manuscripts, to name a few. Findings show that classification and acquisition schemes for these types of resources are still not fully developed and that there is a lack of cohesive discourse between repository objectives, their collection policies and actual work flow processes. There is a generalized interest in these types of resources but repository managers are still not sure how to handle them. A fundamental challenge, if academia is to move towards news forms of communication and publishing enabled by digital technologies, is to find ways to effectively name, manage and integrate these non formal electronic resources in order to disseminate and publish them more effectively.

Her thesis supervisors were Dave Nicholas and Claire Warwick, both of UCL DIS. The thesis is available from UCL Eprints . A member of Emerald Group Publishing Limited recently presented her with the award at the International Book Fair in Mexico City where she currently works at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – UNAM (link:www.unam.mx).