UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Event: Time, Trust and Authority – is Web 2.0 the tool for you?

As part of the launch celebrations of UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities, we have teamed up with Information Services Division to bring you Time, Trust and Authority – is web 2.0 the tool for you?

Information Services Division and UCLDH would like to invite you to a series of ‘15 minutes’ demonstrations and case studies, focusing on new Web and online applications and how they are used by UCL. Come and learn something new about Web 2.0 in easily digestible chunks!

Place: Haldane Room off the North Cloisters

Time: 11am to 3pm on Friday 21^st May

Cakes: Coffee and cakes will be available from 10.45am

There is no need to pre-register or book a session – just turn up for as much or as little as you want.

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is the hub of a network, bringing together work being done in different departments and research centres within UCL, as well as working closely with UCL Library Services and Museums & Collections, to undertake research that addresses important questions in the field of Digital Humanities.

For more details visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/events

The Information Services Division works closely with staff in academic departments and other UCL support services to provide UCL’s central IT facilities, including high performance computing facilities for research, multimedia and AV support, Moodle, the UCL VLE, and software support and training.

Dr Brigitta Zics, artist, media philosopher and interaction designer::
How to think about Art and Design in the Age of Consciousness Research

Speaker: Dr Brigitta Zics
UCL Contact: Gordana Novakovic (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Thursday, 29 April, 18:00 – 19:00
University College London
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
Garwood Lecture Theatre, South Wing

This presentation provides an overview of the critical thinking in some creative practices through the study of consciousness. It argues that technology has brought such qualities and capacities to aesthetical production and meaning creation which might only be extractable through the understanding of the human factor in these experiences. The presentation proceeds from the assumption that philosophical accounts of consciousness and recent multidisciplinary approaches to cognition have provided valuable perspectives in the understanding of human aspects in the man-computer interrelationship and will develop this position in order to understand consciousness research as an aesthetic inquiry.

To illustrate this, the model of Transparent Act will be introduced as a paradigm that detaches itself from previous aesthetic models and argues for a novel philosophical conceptualisation of technology mediated creation. A consequence of such an approach is to bring design and artistic strategies to the same platform and, as it is will be argued, introduces a radical approach to creative production. As a practical example the resentation will introduce a discussion of the large scale interactive installation of Mind Cupola which aims to apply the approaches represent in Transparent Act and suggest new ways of meaning production through biofeedback interface.

Brigitta Zics is an award winning artist, media philosopher and interaction designer with particular interest in emerging technologies and their impact on creative practices.  find out more.

For directions and more information on the event click here.

The next Decoding Digital Humanities meetup will be held on 10th May.

As before, we would like to continue with assigning some reading to provide a focus for our discussions.

Salina Christmas has suggested the idea of technoromanticism

Coyne, R., “Introduction” pp. 2-15 and “Ch. 1 Digital Utopias” pp. 19-45 in Technoromanticis: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real by Coyne, Richard, MIT Press, 1999 [Held by Library] it is also available on google books

If you have access to the Digital Anthropology Moodle you can access the paper here http://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/file.php/7255/readings/theories-of-digitisation/Coyne-2001.pdf

Or there is the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoromanticism

Date: Monday, 10 May 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!

The first continental THATCamp is to be held May 18–19, 2010 – Paris, France.  It’s a brilliant opportunity to contribute to the Digital Humanities Field.  THATCamp is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities.  It is a brilliant opportunity to present work, share knowledge, and actively collaborate with fellow digital humanities scholars.

The spectrum of digital humanities is broad, and the first European ThatCamp, can afford to cover very diverse areas. To find out more  about ThatCamp Paris 2010, you can view the ThatCamp Paris blog or the ThatCamp Paris wiki.

GET INVOLVED
Who should attend?
Anyone with energy and an interest in digital humanities: Advanced students, researchers, teachers, engineers, librarians and lovers of Humanities and Social Sciences

you can register your name in the list of applications.

you can suggest a workshop.

you can offer your help.

Wow, what a night that was. Discussions centred around the paper by Michael Mateas’ ‘Procedural Literacy – Educating the New Media Practitioner’ which suggests that procedural literacy is necessary for new media researchers, because without understanding the behind the scenes of the screen or programme, researchers will never be able to deeply read new media work.
This idea provoked some very interesting and lively discussion focusing around;

Is programming a language? Or is this a misleading term?

• If you can’t learn the language should you learn the processes behind the language?
• How can academia combat the science/humanities divide? And should it?
• Is online publishing a red herring?
• How do you manage or balance traditional methods with digital methods? Should you?
• Can you ever be procedural literate if you don’t have any training in computer science?

And the most relevant question: do you need to understand programming to work in new media and digital humanities? what benefit could being procedural literate have? This was difficult to answer and I don’t think we reached a consensus around the table.
I for one (clairey_ross) would be really interested to know anyone’s thoughts on whether you think digital humanities scholars being able to programme or at least being taught to understand the historiography and theory behind programming would make researchers in a digital age?
We also came on to the idea of what Digital Humanities actually is; a definition which appears to remain illusive. We discussed the idea of online publishing; what do people mean when they talk about humanities; is the move to digital a superficial change? Ruth has posted her review of the DDH evening on her blog finds and features, she raises some interesting points following on from the excellent question raised during the evening ‘how much impact is the Digital Humanities really having‘, ‘how fast is the world really changing‘ and ‘is the current digital revolution really all that?‘, its well worth a read.

Fancy doing a PhD in Digital Humanities? Then come join us over at UCLDH!

The PhD studentship in Digital Humanities will be held at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities which brings together work being done in many different UCL departments and centres, in the humanities, computer science and engineering, as well as Library Services and Museums and Collections. We also collaborate with organisations outside UCL, such as museums, galleries, libraries and archives. We aim to produce research that is meaningful to both computer scientists and humanities scholars, and that will bring about new knowledge in both research areas.

Studentship Description

The award may be held by a student working on any topic relevant to digital humanities. However, it should involve genuinely interdisciplinary research, which is likely to require joint supervision from more than one UCL department or faculty.  The award provides funding for tuition fees at the UK/EU rate and a student stipend for three years.Find further information about our current UCLDH research projects.

Informal enquiries may be made to Samantha Hulston (s.hulston@ucl.ac.uk) or Dr Claire Warwick (c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk).

For more information on the Studentship and details of how to apply click here.

(N.B. must like bunnies)

This post is written by Ernesto Priego a PhD student at the Department of Information Studies and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. You can find out more about Ernesto on his blog and twitter feed.

International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference. Comics: Cultures & Genres
Manchester Metropolitan University
12-14 April 2010

On April 14th I will participate in the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference. Comics: Cultures & Genres at Manchester Metropolitan University. My paper, drawn from my PhD dissertation, is titled “‘Floppy Paper Things With Staples’: Comics and Materiality in the Digital Age.” The paper is indeed a continuation and reworking of an article I presented last year at the Computers and the History of Art 25th Annual Conference in London.

Organised and curated by Dr David Huxley and Dr Joan Ormond, researchers of the Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Culture Research Centre, the Manchester conference will host keynote lectures by some of the most prolific comics scholars in the UK (Paul Gravett, Roger Sabin, Mel Gibson and Martin Barker), as well as eight panels covering the subject areas of genre, gender, culture, national identity, adaptation, ideology, history and form. It is within this last bracket that I will participate.

The Manchester conference also marks the launch of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge), a much-needed addition to the still-limited number of peer-reviewed publications solely devoted to the study of comics, such as the pioneer International Journal of Comic Art and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies .

My paper seeks to discuss how materiality plays/played a key role in the phenomenology of comic books and graphic novels, and therefore in understanding what is at stake in the migration from the printed page to the digital screen. In days when the “dematerialisation” of “creative content” is so pervasive, it is important to focus more emphatically on the materiality of the printed comic book as a process of construction of meaning.

The challenges of contemporary comics scholarship and comics conferences are several. In spite of their apparent ubiquity in the mainstream cultural landscape, comic books are the object of a widespread prejudice that has two main expressions. One is the debatable disqualification of any text perceived as addressed or appealing to children as lacking in “seriousness;” the second is a pervasive iconophobia that still has very actual manifestations today.

For comics scholars the challenge remains in establishing a critical distance from their object of study. Nevertheless, as Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse discuss in their introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, it cannot be denied that often the academic study of popular culture shares productive and creative spaces with “fan culture” and is the result of “the meeting of two worlds” (2006). This does not deny the fact that serious critical inquiry of cultural products requires both a passionate approach to the subject matter and an almost heartless, cold-blooded ability to dissect it.

Bart Beaty (University of Calgary) wrote that comics, as “a maligned and ignored medium of communication” tends to be “bolstered by those that are interested in the form” (2004). In reaction to this widespread tendency Beaty argues that if “comics studies” are to be taken seriously as a scholarly field, “the medium [of comics] needs to be promoted by its detractors.” According to Beaty, beyond the mere “celebration” of the form, what would make comics scholarship reach “maturity” would be proper scholarly interrogation; “to bring to light submerged insights into culture generally that the specific form of comics illuminate.”

I am hopeful the Manchester conference will offer both an excellent opportunity to evaluate the state of international comics scholarship and to prove that a love for comics is not opposed to their critical scholarly interrogation.