UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

As the clock ticks to midnight, I thought I would start the Day of Digital Humanities with a post about Playing the Margins, a public engagement project led by MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser. Sian and Paris have both taken Digital Resources in the Humanities and Historical Bibliography, and we are delighted to see them putting their learning (and previous experience) into practice in this project, funded by UCL’s Train & Engage Scheme.

Paris and Sian write:

The aim of Playing the Margins is to bring drama students and actors into UCL Special Collections to engage with early printed books relating to their interests. The project is being supported by the Public Engagement Unit and Special Collections at UCL. The workshops concentrate on readers’ marks and annotations, and give participants insights into how earlier readers left traces of their engagement with dramatic (as well as non-dramatic) texts. Inspired by our studies of digital humanities and historical bibliography at UCL DIS, Playing the Margins is an experiment in using digital tools to explore reading practices and dramatic performance.

In the workshop, participants will be invited to reflect on their own marking practices in scripts and play-texts, and to think about taboos or proscriptions relating to writing in books. Then, participants are presented with examples of interesting annotations, ownership marks and other readers’ marks taken from UCL’s Special Collections, so they can explore the continuities between their reading/annotating practices and those of early readers. The workshop concludes with participants inscribing virtually a photographic image of a text they have encountered, using a digital tablet which captures handwriting. Their recorded hand-written engagements will form the basis for an online blog and exhibition, which will also showcase participants’ further written and/or spoken reflections on the workshop.

We’re really looking forward to hearing more about Sian’s and Paris’s experiences and findings through the project, and especially, to following the blog that they are in the process of setting up. Watch this space (and Sian’s Day of DH blog) for more.

UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology / Matt Clayton

UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology reopened yesterday (15 March), it houses around 67,000 specimens, covering the whole Animal Kingdom alongside some of the rarest extinct animal specimens in the world to be displayed for the first time, including lost dodo bones, the remains of a quagga (an extinct species of half-striped zebra) and a giant Irish elk with antlers measuring nearly 3 metres across.  In contrast to the more traditional museum outlook, crammed full of specimens, the new Grant has integrated iPads, QRCodes and Twitter into the mix via a UCLDH and CASA project known as QRator. The aim of which is to stress the necessity of engaging visitors actively in the creation of their own interpretations of museum collections, and whether this can be done seamlessly through digital technology.

Through the QRator project the Grant Museum is experimenting with ways of using a natural history collection as a starting point for questions about science. Alongside displays of stuffed chimpanzees, and pickled animal parts, iPads are scattered, asking provocative questions about the ways museums operate, and the role of science in society.  QRator encourages visitors to tackle big questions in the life sciences and engage with the way museums work.  Questions include “Should human and animal remains be treated any differently?” And “every medicinal drug you have ever taken was tested on animals. Is this a necessary evil?”  Each iPad holds a current question which visitors can respond to on the iPad itself, via Twitter or the Tales of Things app on their smart phones. Visitors’ thoughts become part of the museum objects history and the display itself creating digital ‘living’ labels which subsequent visitors can read and respond to in real time.

QRator has been a very exciting project, and we are very proud of it.  It is picking up quite a bit of media attention:

• Home of dodo pelvises and quagga bones spreads its wings – New Scientist
• Museums: Campus treasures – Nature
• Pickled Moles And iPads: Grant Museum Set To Reopen – Londonist
• UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology to reopen – Wired
• Dodo bones discovery adds life to museum’s opening – The Evening Standard
• Half a dodo found in museum drawer – The Guardian
• In Pictures: University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology gets ready for reopening – Culture24
• Extinct creatures on display at Grant Museum of Zoology – BBC Science

Throughout the project we have tried to be as user centred as possible, undertaking user requirements gathering and user evaluation every step of the way. Now that the iPads have been installed into the Grant, visits to the museum will be observed to discover how visitors interact and engage with the content.  It is frequently voiced that visitors do not read labels; it will be interesting to observe if this is still the case when the visitors themselves are able to create and interact with the interpretive content.

We will be continuing to do user testing on QRator for the next few months to see what people really think.  So if you are interested in being involved, do let us know!  If you would like to take part in the evaluation or would like further information, please contact Claire Ross directly.  All feedback received will help shape the future development of QRator as it continues to explore increasing digital access and engagement with museum collections.

There has been a massive shift from the use of the type mould and typeset plate to the use of Word and programming languages for web publishing, but that only made me realize how much potential there still is for things to change later on.

I had initially approached this outing from a historical perspective, hoping that it would help me grapple with some of my research questions. I had not expected that it would enable me to examine what is for me the utterly normal and every day act of using a computer to write with and through in an utterly new way.

Things never seem to stay very still for very long here at UCLDH. The latest news is that I’ve just been asked to take on the job of acting Head of the UCL Department of Information Studies (UCLDH’s parent department). This won’t affect UCLDH at all except insofar as it makes us even more integral to DIS’s mission, and let’s face it we already felt pretty much at home. It’s perhaps a sign of how important DH as a discipline is to iSchools at present; the reverse is, of course, also true. So there we are, another day, another massive life change for me: situation normal UCLDH!

The next DDH, number 11, will be held on the 23^rd March.  The topic of this Decoding Digital Humanities will involve discussions about “A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities 2011″.

Start: Mar 23, 2011 5:30:00 PM

End: Mar 23, 2011 7:30:00 PM

Location: G24, Foster Court, UCL

A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (Day of DH 2011) is a project documenting a day of computing humanists around the world on March 18th, 2011. More details about Day of DH 2011 can be found at: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities_2011.

You can get a feel about what some of the UCLDH team got up to last year here.  We want to hear peoples experiences, who took part and why.  Is it a good project, how could it be expanded?

There is also a reading:

Rockwell et al 2010: A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities 2010. (pp.208-211). London: Office for Humanities Communication. in HTML, PDF,or  XML

We have also decided to change locations of DDH.  The Wheatsheaf was incredibly noisy, despite it serving a decent pint, we couldn’t hear ourselves think. So we shall be trying inside UCL for a change.  Foster Court has a new Common Room, with lovely red sofas.  Wine will be provided!

Hope to see you there.

The following two three digital humanities events will take place at UCL this week, all of which are free and fully open to the public:

• Mon, 7 March 2011, 16:00 – 18:00: Daniel Pett (British Museum) will talk about ‘The Portable Antiquities Scheme’ in Room 612, UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London [announcement | recommendation | map]
• Thu, 10 March 2011, 17:30 – 19:30: Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London) will speak on ‘Written in stone? Encoding ancient documents’ in Room G34 of Senate House  [announcement | map]

Update:

• Thu, 10 March 2011, 16:15: Ville Miettinen will present Digitalkoot, a project in Finland which combines the digitisation of archival materials with online gaming [announcement]

Well actually it works on wireless. But we are feeling very chuffed indeed that UCLDH’s and CASA’s QRator project is featured in Wired UK today in a report on the opening of the new Grant Museum at UCL. There is also a beautiful photo gallery which includes a picture of the iPad itself in situ in photo 5. QRator will go live at the launch of the new Grant on 17th March and will allow visitors to join in a conversation about museum objects, by scanning QR codes attached to cases in the museum. These then link them to the CASA Tales of Things website where they can record their views. Or visitors can use an interactive label in the form of an iPad on which they can leave a comment and see those that others have left.

This changes fundamentally the way that we interact with museum objects. At the moment the only label we see in a museum is provided by curators. As a result of this world leading work visitors will now be able to see what curators say, but also join in a dialogue with them and with others about the object and the questions that they feel it raises. We’re very excited to be taking part in this work with CASA and UCL Museums, and can only say thank you again for the vision of Claire Ross, UCLDH PhD student, who had the idea in the first place.

Look out for a Digital Excursion to the Grant in May at which you’ll be able to hear all about QRator and play with all the lovely kit.

Why is it that there are so many Digital Classicists who do such great reserach? Undoubtedly this is one of those enternal imponderables of DH, but we are lucky enough to have two classicists coming to give a seminar next week as part of the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship series. Charlotte and Gabby will be talking about their work on encoding ancient documents. Do come and join us to hear all about it.