UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

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.

Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities

You may remember that back in December, I (Melissa Terras) gathered some stats about Digital Humanities. I turned these into an infographic, which is available in full technicolour and much higher res than this blog will allow, over at the UCLDH Flickr account. The infographic is courtesy of UCLDH as it generously paid for the graphic design to allow this to happen.

Wait! You want a print version? Well, find a 300dpi CYMK version here.

We at UCLDH are also going to get some printed up as posters -more about that soon, hopefully, once we figure out the costs involved.

Just a few words on the process. This was an inclusive, not an exclusive, attempt at trying to pull together available statistics on Digital Humanities. I’m aware there are a lot of things that dont appear on the infographic – major individual projects, for example. But it was the best that we could do, with the information available. I’m still collecting statistics, and interested in anything else that comes to light – I need to dig out the subscription numbers for LLC in the early 2000s, for example – but if you are not represented here, and have some statistics to share, do let me know via @melissaterras. Depending on reception, we may do an updated version of this.

Additionally, I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on other things we can do in this vein to scope out and promote our field. Its been fun to put together – even if snow in Seattle stopped play for a week or so in the round of final edits with the designers – and after I’ve done some serious academic work we plan on doing some more of these.

We hope you like it!

On Saturday 17 September,  HIDDEN HISTORIES: SYMPOSIUM ON METHODOLOGIES FOR THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES c.1949-1980, will talke place in UCL, sponsored by HKFZ and UCLDH.  Presentations include, in the following running order:

• Opening Keynote: Beyond chronology and profession: discovering how to write a history of the Digital Humanities, Willard McCarty, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

• Knowledge Spaces and Digital Humanities, Claudine Moulin, Universitaet Trier, Germany

• Unwriting the history of Humanities Computing, Edward Vanhoutte, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature – Ghent, Belgium

• Crowd sourcing: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history, Melissa Terras, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Different stories to be lived and told: recovering Lehmann James Oppenheimer (1868-1916) for the narrative of the Irish Arts & Crafts movement (1894-1925), James G.R. Cronin, School of History & Centre for Adult Continuing Education, University College Cork, Ireland.

• Oral History and acts of recovery: humanizing history?, Andrew Flinn, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Lost origins of Information Science, Vanda Broughton, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Plus ça change: a historical perspective on the institutional context of Digital Humanities,  Claire Warwick, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• (Virtual presentation) DH pioneers and progeny: some reflections on generational accomplishment and engagement in the Digital Humanities, Ray Siemens, Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria

• Closing Keynote Data vs. Text: forty years of confrontation, Lou Burnard, Oxford University Computing Services (Emeritus)

• Discussion: towards an oral history of Computing in the Humanities, Chaired by Anne Welsh and Julianne Nyhan, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Thanks to funding from UCLDH and HKFZ, we are now able to invite approximately 10 extra participants, waive their cover fee, provide them with a light lunch and invitation to our evening reception (beginning at c.18:00 on Saturday 17 September). Please contact Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh directly if you are interested in attending: places will be allocated on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. Unfortunately places are otherwise by invitation only but podcasts / videos of some presentations will be posted online after the event.

The programme for the 2011 Digital Classicist summer seminar series is now available on The Stoa. As in previous years, we have a wide range of papers on diverse topics from an international field of early career and established scholars, and practitioners.  Full abstracts will be available on the Digital Classicist website shortly.

As always these seminars are held at the Institute of Classical Studies at Senate House, London on Friday afternoons at 4:30 (a good excuse to finish early) and are followed by wine, refreshments and a trip to a local pub. Check the Digital Classicist webpage or discussion list for any updates and confirmation of the room number and location.

All are welcome.

XML? TEI? RDF?        Eh?

Ever wondered what on earth Digital Humanities is?  Who we are? What we do?

Come along to our painless introduction, a brief seminar designed to introduce researchers to basic concepts and techniques in digital humanities.
Date: Monday 28th June
Time: 13:00 to 13:45
Location: Room 101 Foster Court, UCL