UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

I spent a chunk of last week in Chicago at the TEI Council face-to-face meeting. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium that develops and publishes XML-based Guidelines for making digital texts machine readable. The Guidelines are used by a very wide range of Digital Humanities projects, in universities, libraries, museums and in publishing. TEI is the first standard of its kind in the Humanities and Social Sciences and is endorsed by bodies such as NEH, AHRC and the EU’s Expert Advisory Group for Language engineering.

I was elected to the TEI Council, which has twelve members in total, in December 2009. All of us on the Council have expertise in XML, but we come from a wide range of backgrounds, including, Palaeography, History, Linguistics and Computing. The chief responsibility of the Council is the technical development of the TEI Guidelines, which involves ‘recommend[ing], evaluate[ing], and implement[ing] new features and modifications of existing features, and supervise[ing] the overall development of each new version of the Guidelines’. In essence, this means that in addition to establishing that a modification of some kind (which has been requested by a member of the community in the usual way) is technically feasible, we must also establish that the modification does not conflict with the intellectual content of the Guidelines as a whole or (except in special circumstances) break backwards compatibility with previous versions of the Guidelines. If you are interested in learning more about this work, and about the kinds of deliberations that take place at Council meetings, please see the Council meeting minutes: http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Meetings/. The minutes of the 2011 meeting will be posted there too over the coming days.

UCLDH have teamed up with UCL CIBER team,  the Digital Learning Network, and the British Library to bring you another Digital Think Drink!

Following on from the success at the Petrie Museum, it’s now the turn of the British Library.

Monday 23rd May sees a Think Drink on Digital technology and the future of the research library, at the British Library, in the Growing Knowledge exhibition.

The exhibition explores the value of libraries and research in present and future digital times, the use of social networks and social media, and asks questions about the inter-relations and synergies between research and technology. You will be able to sample each of the tools and applications presented, including some of the latest creations by Microsoft and Hewlett Packard.

This is an informal evening of talking, testing, playing and giving feedback on the digital resources and Growing Knowledge exhibition.   If you are interested in the value of new technologies in libraries and exploring how research libraries can best meet the needs of their users  please do come along.

Spaces are limited so book a place quickly.

Durham is a great University town and I’m looking forward to a trip up there for the 2011 Classical Association Conference. The Digital Classicist community are presenting two panels there this year, one chaired by myself, Teaching and Publication of Classics in the Internet Age, and another, Ancient Space, Linked Data and Digital Research, by a friend and colleague Gabriel Bodard. In addition to the conference itself, Durham Classics and Ancient History are hosting a Digital Classicist Training Day where we will have a morning session looking at and playing with Generic Web Tools and an afternoon one introducing participants to the Papyrological Editor.

It’ll be good to visit the Venerable Bede, Binchester Roman Fort and of course to catch up with the friends and colleagues we only see at conferences.

I hope the weather holds!