UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

UCLDH are pleased to be organising a free, one day symposium at UCL in conjunction with 4Humanities, Arts Emergency, and UCL Department of Information Studies.

Government and private support for the Arts and Humanities—for research, teaching, preservation, and creative renewal in such fields as literature, history, languages, philosophy, classics, art history, and cultural studies – is in decline. What can we do to demonstrate that the Arts and Humanities matter?

This free, one day symposium, on 18th September 2012 at UCL, will feature leading figures in understanding, demonstrating, and advocating for the Arts and Humanities. The symposium will also mark the launch of the 4Humanities@UCL chapter.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Professor Alan Liu, University of California Santa Barbara, and 4Humanities founder
• Dr Rüdiger Klein, European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities
• Amy Westwell and Oliver Milne, The Free Hetherington Campaign
• Neil Griffiths, Arts Emergency
• Dr Anna Upchurch, University of Leeds, and Dr Eleonora Belfiore, University of Warwick
• Professor Andrew Prescott, King’s College London.

More information will be posted soon at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah/4humanities/18thSeptember. The symposium is free to attend, and all with an interest in this area are welcome, although please do register in advance at http://showingtheartsandhumanitiesmatter.eventbrite.com.

4Humanities@UCL is supported by UCL Enterprise, as part of the Knowledge Transfer and Enterprise Scheme at UCL in 2012.

We are delighted to report that the award winning Transcribe Bentham has secured further funding!

UCL’s Bentham Project, which is producing the new scholarly edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, has received a grant of $538,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s ‘Scholarly Communications Programme’, for a project entitled The Consolidated Bentham Papers Repository (CBPR). This funding will come into effect from 1 October 2012 for a period of two years, and will continue the on-going success of the award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, which is digitising and making freely available UCL’s vast Bentham Papers collection, which runs to some 60,000 manuscript folios (c. 30 million words).

Transcribe Bentham is a collaboration between the Bentham Project, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Creative Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and volunteer transcribers from around the world. Under this new funding, a new partner will be added to the group: the British Library. In the CBPR, almost all of the remainder of the UCL Bentham Papers will be digitised, along with the entirety of the British Library’s own Bentham collection, which runs to 12,500 folios (c. 6 million words). The material will thus be reunited (digitally) for the first time since Bentham’s death in 1832.

The crowdsourced transcription of Bentham manuscripts in Transcribe Bentham has been a great success: volunteers have, as of 15 June 2012, worked on 3,663 complex manuscripts. Transcripts submitted by volunteers have two purposes: they are uploaded to the digital Bentham Papers repository and make the collection searchable for other researchers; and they will form the basis of forthcoming volumes of the Collected Works. The CBPR will also lead to major improvements to the existing transcription interface, which will encourage further participation.

UCLDH are delighted to be part of this project, and to continue to contribute to the transcription of Bentham’s work.

We have a new post open at the intersection of music analysis, information theory, and computer science.  More details below…

Research Associate in Information Theoretic Music Analysis
Computer Science Department
CREST Centre, UCL

Salary
(inclusive of London allowance)
£32,055 -£38,744 per annum

Duties and Responsibilities
Applications are invited for a Research Associate post on an EPSRC-funded grant in the CREST centre at UCL, working on the relationship between Information Theory and Music Analysis. We seek a candidate with a track record in either of these two areas (Information Theory or Music Analysis), but fully recognise that we are unlikely to receive applications from those with significant expertise in both. Therefore, we will be very happy to consider applications from those with an excellent track record in one or other of these two areas (although candidates who are conversant to some degree with the area in which they are not expert will be at an advantage).

Funding for this appointment runs until 31st August 2014 in the first instance.

Key Requirements
Candidates should hold a PhD in a relevant subject, or will shortly be assessed for a PhD level qualification.
Publication in relevant leading peer reviewed conferences and/or journals is essential.

Further Details
Informal enquiries about the post are welcome. Please contact Dr Nicolas Gold (n.gold@ucl.ac.uk).

To apply and get further details visit http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs/index.php and search for vacancy ref: 1262231

If you have any administrative queries regarding the vacancy or the
application process, please e-mail crest-admin@cs.ucl.ac.uk or telephone +44
(0)20 7679 0325.

Closing Date
1 Aug 2012

Interview Date
Interviews are scheduled to take place on 1st October 2012. When applying please ensure that you are able to attend to present a talk and be interviewed on this date. We shall not be able to re-arrange the interview date should you be unable to attend.

DH@ucl
Humanities loves Computing. We love both!

Some of our current UCLDH MA/MSc students have just launched their own blog. This is independent of us and UCL to allow them to direct and develop it as they wish. It’s a free space for them to share news and views, to post things of interest as well as material that didn’t make it into their assignments. It’s the start of community building and creating a networked space to link together alumni, current students, and indeed potential ones.

Go take a look!