UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Registration is now open for a workshop, hosted by UCLDH, on 31st January 2013 beginning at 1:30pm

About: ‘Digital Partnerships’ will focus on how museums and universities can work together when it comes to digital innovation. A drinks reception will be hosted afterwards at the Grant Museum of Zoology nearby.

It will explore digital innovation and the relationships between museums, universities and their users. Digital innovation means that museums now find themselves in a new environment in which visitors can interact to create, curate, organise and share their own experiences. Leading to big questions around how we research and understand digital innovation in a cultural context. This event will bring researchers and museum professionals together to consider innovative practices, and develop new research ideas.

Speakers: Matthew Cock, Head of Web at the British Museum; Jane MacDonald, ToTEM Project Administrator at Edinburgh College of Art; John Hindmarch, PhD student at UCL; and Jack Ashby, Manager at the Grant.

Full program viewable at the Eventbrite site below.

Email Rachel directly with any questions at rachel.kasbohm.11@ucl.ac.uk.

Register FREE at http://digital-partnerships.eventbrite.co.uk/

UCLDH is pleased to announce the following lecture by Toma Tasovac on 29th November 2012 at 17:30.

Title: Rethinking Text-Dictionary Interfaces: Deformative Lexical Annotations in Digital Editions

Abstract: Despite claims about the radical nature of electronic textuality, on-screen texts in digital editions remain largely static. Most annotated digital editions of literary works follow the typographic and editorial conventions of the print medium: they reinforce a clear separation of text and paratext while ignoring the potential of more playful strategies, such as Jerome McGann’s deformative criticism. In this talk I explore a new kind of text-dictionary interface that embeds and animates lexical annotations directly inside the on-screen text. The result is a dynamic, deformative interface that destabilizes the text’s self-enclosed identity and becomes a platform for the user’s cognitive, aesthetic and performative interaction with the digital object.

About the speaker: Toma Tasovac is the Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (Belgrade, Serbia). Further information about his work is available:  http://humanistika.org • http://transpoetika.org

The talk will be followed by a reception at 6:30pm, in the Foster Court, Arts and Humanities Staff Common room, UCL.

Please register here in order to reserve a place: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/4703134201

Registration is now open for this event, which features UCLDH Co-Director, Melissa Terras.

Full post by Lorna Richardson, on the UCLDIS Student Blog.

I’m very pleased to have been invited to open the 2012 Leipzig e-Humanities Seminar series. Their new e-Humanities Centre is a collaborative venture between the computer scientists and humanities scholars there. My title for the talk is The Digital Classicist: building a Digital Humanities Community. I’ve been asked to analyze and present my experiences with helping to build this cross-disciplinary community and particularly as the organizers tell me that they have modeled their series on the long-running and successful Digital Classicist one. I’m very much looking forward to visiting Leipzig and regret that I will not be able to stay for longer.

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.

The full programme for the annual Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar series is available on our 2012 seminar page. As always, abstracts are there in advance and the slides and audiocast will appear soon after each seminar. Previous seminars and other Digital Classicist events (conference panels etc) are on the main seminar page.

Looking through, you will see that most, if not all, range far beyond an interest in the ancient world. Each paper must have an innovative digital component and many incorporate Digital Humanities techniques and methodologies. The series seeks to accommodate broader theoretical consideration of the use of digital technology in Classical Studies. The content should be of interest both to classicists, ancient historians, or archaeologists, and to information scientists or digital humanists, as well as having an academic research agenda relevant to at least one of those fields.

All are welcome; these are public events with no need to book.

The CHIPS project on popular music performance with technology (see previous post) is underway.  There is online discussion of the issues getting started here and registration is now open (there is no charge for the event) for the symposium on 7th-8th June.  We have a programme of great speakers lined up.  If you are interested in coming, please register asap as places are limited by the venue capacity.

On Tuesday 29th May, between 1 and 2pm, I’ll be hosting a Pop-Up exhibition at UCL Art Museum, looking at Computer generated art held in the UCL Art Museum Collection.

Pop-Up displays at UCL Art Museum are held throughout the year.  By becoming a guest curator for one day, anyone at UCL can select works from the vast art collection. They can share their choices with students, colleagues and the general public in the informal setting of a free lunchtime exhibition in the museum.

Given my background in computing and the arts and humanities, I thought it would be really fun to try and see what computer generated art there was in the collection. UCL has an interesting history of this – there was a lot of experimental computer art going on with the aid of the engineering faculty in the 1970s, and the Slade School of Fine Art (part of UCL) established an “Experimental and Computing Department” in the 1970s, and The Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art in 1995. What interesting art works that started their life on a computer now lurk in the UCL Art Museum archives?
Do come by on Tuesday 29th May, 1-2pm. Free entry. It would be great to see you there.

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

DDHL is tonight at the Plough (WC1A 1LH) at 6pm.
This time we’ll chat about the impact of social media both as a research subject and as a way for the researcher to establish his/her presence through them. To give us something to get the conversation started, we suggest this reading:
Beer, D. (2008). Social network(ing) sites…revisiting the story so far: a response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 13, pp. 210-230.

On Weds 18th January at 5.00pm, UCLDH will be jointly hosting an Industry Seminar with the UCL EngD VEIV programme. Dr Robert Bud, the Principal Curator of the Science Museum, London, will be talking about the role of interactive media in constructing museum visitor’s learning narratives.

Dr Robert Bud is an historian of science, technology and medicine and Principal Curator of Medicine at the Science Museum. His research interests include the social and cultural history of penicillin and understanding of the place of science in post-war Britain.

The seminar will take place in the Malet Place Engineering Building, Room 1.20  A drink reception will be held afterwards. All are welcome.