UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

UCLDH Co-director Melissa Terras is on the Advisory Group for the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Centenary digital project, assisting the museum with their online plans for marking this centenary.

Further details about the project can be found on their website  http://www.1914.org/ and on Twitter @iwm_centenary.

The Bentham Project is currently advertising for a Research Associate (60% FTE) to work on a newly funded initiative called tranScriptorium.

The following text is taken from the advertisement:

The Bentham Project, in collaboration with partners from across Europe, has recently received a grant for a project entitled tranScriptorium, which aims to develop innovative, efficient, and cost-effective solutions for the indexing, search and full transcription of digital images of manuscripts, using modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology.

The role holder will work with tranScriptorium partners (especially the University of London Computer Centre), to design and develop an HTR crowdsourcing platform, analyse the user needs and requirements of transcript correctors and visitors, carry out beta testing of the platform to ensure full functionality, and be responsible for the running of the crowdsourcing platform on a day-to-day basis.

The post is funded for 21 months in the first instance.

The deadline for applications is 12 noon on Friday 4 January 2013. To apply, or for further information, please see the full job advert.

We are pleased to announce that UCLDH will be working with the Slade School of Fine Art on a pilot project to see what is held in the Slade Archive and to look at ways in which the information can be made available to a wider audience.  The project is funded by a UCL Arts & Humanities Small Research Grant.

For further information please see the project blog: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/slade-archive-project/

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.

One of our PhD students, Greta Franzini, has put together this YouTube playlist of DH videos and made it available. I’ve been looking through and see there are some familiar names there!

This is a good way of collecting together resources – thanks Greta. Do we have any other examples?

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.

UCLDH’s Dr Julianne Nyhan is a joint Author of a new Science Policy Briefing from the European Science Foundation, entitled Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities. This report was written by the ESF Working Group on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities under the editorial chairmanship of Professor Claudine Moulin (Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Universität Trier). It also in includes contributions from many Scholars from across Europe who are researching the areas of digital humanities and digital infrastructures.

Today, ESF has described the report as follows:

“Europe’s leading scientists have pledged to embrace and expand the role of technology in the Humanities. In a Science Policy Briefing released today by the European Science Foundation (ESF), they argue that without Research Infrastructures (RIs) such as archives, libraries, academies, museums and galleries, significant strands of Humanities research would not be possible. By drawing on a number of case studies, the report demonstrates that digital RIs offer Humanities scholars new and productive ways to explore old questions and develop new ones.” (see here)

Both the full report and a shorter document that excerpts the report’s main findings are freely available on ESF’s publication page.  We hope you find it interesting and relevant.

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.

At lunchtime on 4 October 2011 UCL Art Museum will be hosting a pop-up exhibition for which I am selecting works of art that started life as book illustration.

You can read more about the pop-up and the Autumn exhibition in which it takes place on the UCL DIS Staff Blog.