UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

As part of our expanding programme of research and teaching in computational musicology and computer music at UCL, we are pleased to announce a new AHRC-funded project (prospective PhD and MA/MSc Digital Humanities students may like to note this activity, particularly the COMPGC20 Computer Music module available as an option on the DH degree).

The Computer-Human Interactive Performance Symposium (CHIPS) project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the Digital Transformations programme.  The project runs from February to August 2012.

The aim is to explore the likely performance practices (and problems) that would result from having easily deployable, robust, creative, and reliable artificial music performers in mixed human-computer ensembles playing popular music.  There are many systems that go some way to solving the technical problems of computer participation in this kind of music (e.g. beat trackers, chord estimators, interactive improvisers) but as yet no complete systems that can be deployed by non-expert users into common practice performance contexts and be relied upon to underpin the performances of popular music ensembles.

Popular music (e.g. folk, rock, music theatre) plays a central role in the lives of millions of people.   Musicians of all standards from amateur to professional produce music that is heard on radios and televisions, and performed in concert halls and theatres.  Teenagers are motivated to learn instruments and play in bands to emulate their professional idols, serious amateurs play and sing together at open-mike nights, charity concerts, and in churches, and professionals perform in clubs, theatres, and spectacular multimedia shows like Cirque du Soleil and the Blue Man Group.   To learn, rehearse, and perform popular music often requires a musician to be part of an ensemble yet forming such a group can be challenging, particularly for amateur musicians.  Even in established communities such as churches, the demands of everyday life mean that musicians cannot always attend rehearsals or play regularly together.  In professional ensembles, illness can cause the absence of key musicians in rehearsal or performance.  Computer music technology offers the potential to substitute for musicians in these situations, yet reliable, robust, and simple systems that can be quickly set up, and that play musically and creatively do not yet exist.

The project aims to develop the future research agenda for both technical and non technical music computing research in this area, by learning from the issues and experiences of technological adoption in other relevant performance contexts, understanding the technological state of the art in relation to popular music performance, imagining future performance practices incorporating computer “musicians”, and thinking about how to study musicians (human and computer) in this context.

We hope to develop a network of interest around this symposium, beginning with some online discussion ahead of the face to face event on 7th-8th June 2012 and followed by further online activity and follow-up events.  For information, the programme, and registration for the main symposium (presented as part of the CREST Open Workshop (COW) programme), please see the COW web-page here.

Yesterday was the Day of Digital Humanities. This project, running since 2009, aims to “bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 27th this year. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal.” (Day of DH 2012 Wiki)

Naturally, most of UCLDH took part, so, ever the librarian, I thought it would be useful to collate the links to our pages here:

• Day of Claire Warwick (Co-Director)
• Day of Melissa Terras (C0-Director)

• Day of David Beavan (Research Manager)
• Day of Oliver Duke-Williams (Events Manager)
• Day of Simon Mahony (Programme Director, MA/MSc Digital Humanities)
• Day of Julianne Nyhan (European Liaison Manager)
• Day of Claire Ross (PhD Student Representative and Researcher)
• Day of Anne Welsh (Digital Identity Manager)

• Day of Lorna Hughes (University of Wales, National Library of Wales, Research Associate at UCLDH)
• Day of Stan Ruecker (University of Alberta, Visiting Researcher at UCLDH)
• Day of Edward Vanhoutte (CTB-KANTL, Research Associate at UCLDH)

As usual on Day of DH there are a few people who have signed up but not filled in their day yet. If you are one of those people and you are a member of UCLDH, drop me an email when you’re done and I’ll add you into the list here.

On 29 and 30 March I attended ThatCamp Luxembourg / Trier in order to give a joint workshop on the Text Encoding Initiative. Having not had the chance to attend a ThatCamp before I have to say that I am really impressed by how interesting and productive it was. One of my favourite sessions was called ‘Conceptualizing mobile’, proposed by Marc Tebeau. In it we discussed the new opportunities for accessing, interacting with and interpreting cultural heritage that mobile computing applications and approaches can offer, and the role that digital humanities can play in such developments. Key themes that we focused on included personalisation, collaboration and new forms of participation. A number of projects that seem to represent the state of the art were also discussed, for example, among others, Cleveland Historical and UCLDH’s own QRator. I notice that other interesting examples of projects and apps have since been added to the workshop’s online presence .
Another interesting aspect of the ThatCamp was seeing just how many different interpretations of ‘what Digital Humanities is and is not’ are current. This came as no surprise to me considering the numerous articles, blogs and comments etc that have been published on this subject over the past years. Yet, it was interesting was to reflect on how our interpretations of ‘what digital humanities is and is not’ are beginning to shape how it is being taught in universities around the world.
Here in the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, for example, a key starting point of our Digital Humanities MA/MSc is that we do not aim to teach how particular software packages work or do not work. Instead, we try to equip our students with what might be thought of as an overall intellectual, critical and technical skill set (and of course the exchange goes in both directions as often we find that we learn just as much from students as they do from us). To give a concrete example, we teach about descriptive markup, its advantages, disadvantages and digital humanities applications rather than teaching how to use particular software packages that one can implement descriptive markup with. Our ultimate aim is for students to be able to critically evaluate a range of technologies, approaches and methodologies and develop digital humanities research questions, as opposed to being able to use particular pieces of software.
I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to discuss this with the participants in Luxembourg and ultimately I think that it is becoming increasingly important to be able to differentiate between concepts such as ‘digital literacy’ (which will probably need to be taught on most introductory Humanities courses given the flight to digital we see all around us) and ‘digital humanities’ which is something rather different.

On Tuesday  Melissa Terras spoke at the Institute of Historical Research’s roundtable on Digital History (#dhist). In this post, Greta Franzini provides a short summary.

The IHR’s roundtable session, The Future of the Past discussed the future of history and how digital resources affect the way historians preserve history.

The panel included Dr Melissa Terras (Co-Director of UCLDH), Dr. Adam Farquhar (Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library), Dr. Torsten Reimer (Project Manager at JISC) and Prof. Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire), the latter reading a paper by Prof. Andrew Prescott (Head of the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London) who could not attend in person due to an injury. The talk was wrapped up by Prof. Lorna Hughes’ (University of Wales) response summarising the main points and discussing her views on the topic.

Prof. Andrew Prescott’s paper  flagged the current propensity to over-rely on electronic publications of historical data, used as replacements rather than surrogate media. It also noted that the academic market for historical studies is not the most profitable one, so we should strive to create large historical, crowd-sourced projects and collaborations to counterbalance commercial resources and act against the commodification of knowledge. Prof. Prescott has posted his paper on his blog.

Dr. Melissa Terras discussed how computers and datasets are changing historical methods by examining three points:

1. Scale of datasets. In the past, data-analysis projects were forced to meticulously select materials due to resource, time, technological and work-force restrictions. The unlimited power of today’s computers, however, allows us to perform quick, effective and seamless analyses on large datasets. Improved data querying and manipulation encourage new interrogations and change the way historians articulate their research. Dr Terras also described the difference between humanities and sciences datasets, whereby the former tend to be very noisy, error-laden and fragmented while the latter are organised and systematic.
2. Detail of historical materials we look at. Today’s technology allows us to discover details that have so far escaped our attention. Exploiting new technologies, such as multispectral imaging of manuscripts, furthers our understanding of cultural heritage and history.
3. Agency. Who is allowed to contribute to history? More and more projects nowadays rely on crowd-sourcing as a cost-effective means of producing large scale datasets and results. Transcribe Bentham exemplifies this trend in that it allows the general public to contribute to the project. The more people we involve, the more detail we get. But by the same token, the more information we get, the more chaos is produced. We need to ensure we trust and are clear about what we are doing.

Dr. Adam Farquhar’s work seeks to address the digital needs of historians and other departments within the British Library by producing digital tools to facilitate scholarship and research. In particular, Dr. Farquhar looks at the development of innovative models for digital scholarship by exploiting digital content and new technologies.Digital scholarship, Dr. Farquhar added, needs to rely on comprehensive digital collections and infrastructures, especially as radical changes in research have seen a growth of digital content, more interdisciplinary and collaborative work, more data analysis and repurposing of content. This trend comes with a set of requirements: mass and focused digitisation, visualisation tools, improved discovery, open licenses and APIs, conversion to data and analysis tools and interfaces for sharing (to mention a few).

Good examples of this new digital wave are the First World War digitisation project, set up to celebrate its 100th anniversary; the British Newspaper Archive which aims to become a free service and to facilitate historical research; the collaboration with Google to digitise books produced between the French revolution and the end of slavery; and the IMPACT project, whose aim is to improve state-of-the-art OCR technology which has yet to produce satisfactory results for old books, magazines and newspapers.

Dr. Torsten Reimer  began his digital history career in his undergraduate years in Munich where he worked on a digitisation project on history of early modern warfare and persecution of witchcraft. Echoing Prescott and Hitchcock’s previous remarks on the complementarity of digital and ‘real’, Dr. Reimer emphasised the need to effectively use digital methods so to avoid the frequent misconception of digital humanities as ‘digital photocopying’. We should be ‘big and bold’, ‘go public’ and not be scared by projects dealing with large-scale datasets as these can quickly gain interest and have the potential to be expanded. JISC’s new project, JISC Elevator, gives people the chance to advertise their project ideas through video-pitches and to receive JISC funding depending on their popularity. Historians can now make digital scholarship more exciting as they have access to a much more varied set of resources (images, film, sound, etc.), thus deeply changing historical research practice.

Lorna Hughes’ response, heavily tweeted under #dhist hashtag, essentially asserted how digital is not to be perceived as a plugin but as a founding pillar of good history.

The following Q&A session was also heavily tweeted, again under the #dhist hashtag.

It was my second week enjoying the wonders of my new role as Research Manager at UCLDH, and then it took a new turn. I was quite happily sipping wine and chatting away at some New Staff Welcome Do, when I was taken advantage of. Claire Thomson from Scandinavian Studies bounced up to me and asked, “fancy doing some stand-up comedy?” It was the wine, at least that’s my excuse, but I said yes.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and after some hard-core training from Steve Cross of the UCL Public Engagement Unit, I was about to be a comedian. Not ready to be a comedian, but certainly about to. Myself, fellow Digital Humanaut Steve Gray, and four other brave brains from UCL were performing at Bright Club, ‘the thinking person’s variety night’. We were going to educate and entertain one hundred paying punters, and they were expecting a good show.

Digital Humanities is a very diverse field, and many scholars have a good stab at trying to define it, almost as a rite of passage. So it was only fair that I have a go myself for Bright Club. It’s fair to say my content was definitely NSFW, so I can’t go into many details. But one thing is for sure; my interpretation was the only one I knew of that offered rampaging cyborgs and the medieval use of ultrasound equipment.

The whole experience was amazing; the capacity crowd lapped up every act and were incredibly rewarding to perform to. The camaraderie between the acts was special; we had all been through a fantastic journey, from academics to comedians. Sadly it’s back to the day job (for now), but I’ll never be able to write academic prose without wondering where I could insert a joke about somebody’s private parts.

Received by email this morning:

Speaker: Geraint A. Wiggins
from Queen Mary, University of London
Date: Thursday 15th March
Time: 13:30
Location: J Z Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building (ground floor)

Geraint A. Wiggins:
I present a whirlwind tour of my group’s research on computational support for musicologists and musicological knowledge. I begin with basic knowledge representation, founded on mathematical cognitive models of pitch perception and categorisation, and work upwards towards representations of the structural forms that make up what is generally agreed to be music. I briefly describe an implementation of these ideas, AMusE (Advanced Music Encoding), a music knowledge base that is being developed in my lab. I outline how the descriptive terminology of music theory can be declaratively defined over the structures it stores.

Because music has no denotational semantics, its meaning being experienced through structural and personal association, I propose that such a knowledge base can be a closed system, with respect to the non-affective aspects of musical semiotics. This yields an opportunity for cognitive modelling of a breadth and depth which is not afforded by other areas of the humanities. I outline systems for cognitively-based discovery of musical structure, that are incorporated into AMusE, with a view to placing the whole in context of a larger model of creative cognition.

The work reported here has been funded by EPSRC, AHRC and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Biography: Geraint A. Wiggins is Professor of Computational Creativity at Queen Mary, University of London. He studied mathematics and computer sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and holds PhDs from the University of Edinburgh in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition. His research career has specialised in generality, covering computational linguistics, computational logic, computational modelling of music perception and cognition, and computational creativity. He was one of the founders of the computational creativity research area, and is the founding chair of the international Association for Computational Creativity. From 2000-2004, he chaired the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the UK learned society for AI and Cognitive Science. He is an associate editor of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, a consulting editor of Music Perception, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of New Music Research.

Received from the Decoding Digital Humanities London mailing list this morning:

To all digital humanists or people working on humanities computing projects,

Please join us for the fourth annual Day of Digital Humanities that will take place on March 27th, 2012.

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a project looking at a day in the work life of people involved in humanities computing. Every year it draws people from across the world together to document, with text and image, the events and activities of their day. The goal of the project is to weave together the journals of participants into a resource that seeks to answer, “Just what do computing humanists really do?”

Please sign up for the project here:

http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/register/

More detailed information about the project, as well as links to the blogs that have been created over the past three years is available here:

http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities_2012

The twitter hashtag is #dayofdh

The Day of DH is now a centreNet initiative

Yours,
Megan Meredith-Lobay
Julianne Nyhan
Peter Organisciak
Kamal Ranaweera
Geoffrey Rockwell
Stan Ruecker