UCL CENTRE FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES

This month we read: Ramsay, S. (2012)​. Programming with Humanists: Reflections on Raising an Army of Hacker-Scholars in the Digital Humanities​. In Hirsch, B.D. (ed.), Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. 

In this UCLDH Seminar talk, Lindsay MacDonald will discuss dome illumination systems and their use in the digitisation and display of cultural heritage objects. With a camera on a copystand one obtains a single image of an object with a fixed (usually diffuse) lighting geometry. In a dome illumination system, however, the same camera can be used to capture many different images in pixel register, each illuminated from a different direction.

The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient Greek astronomical calculating machine of remarkable sophistication. As part of an international team of scientists, Dr Tony Freeth has been a central part of research on the Antikythera Mechanism over the last fifteen years. It has been an extraordinary journey of discovery, which has led to a revolution in our understanding of the device. It is a landmark in the history of science and technology and one of the true wonders of the ancient world.

Between 1500 and 1800, the development of increasingly affordable, reliable, and accessible postal systems allowed scholars to scatter correspondence across and beyond Europe.  This epistolary exchange knit together the self-styled ‘republic of letters’, an international, knowledge-based civil society central to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs and formative for many of modern Europe’s values and institutions. Despite its importance, the republic of letters remains poorly integrated into early modern European intellectual history, and this primarily for one simple reason: its core practice of creating communities by dispersing archives of manuscripts has posed insuperable difficulties to subsequent generations of historians attempting to reconstruct the very documents which established this community.  The ongoing revolution in digital communication provides, for the first time, an adequate medium for reassembling the material dispersed by the earlier revolution in postal communication; but before this potential can be realized we need, not merely to adapt the technology to the task, but also to adapt our working methods and scholarly cultures to the technology. More specifically, we need (1) to create an interdisciplinary network of archivists, librarians, IT systems developers, experts in communication and design, educationalists, and scholars from many different fields (2) to design the networking infrastructure and scholarly practices needed (3) to support an international scholarly community devoted (4) to piecing back together the scattered documentation of the international republic of letters.  In other words, we need a network to design a network to support a network reconstructing networks: networking to the fourth power. 

In his research, Regner Ramos explores the relationship between bodies, urban space and mobile technologies by studying the affectional and spatial properties of three GPS-based mobile applications—Grindr, Mappiness and Waze. Guided by cyberfeminist theories, he approaches these apps as a series of material objects, particularly when addressing the physical and spatial properties of the screen/interface; through interface and performance the apps create a sense of othering and difference, as theorised by Donna Haraway, Rosie Braidotti and Katherine Hayles. Thus, his dissertation seeks to address and understand the ways in which GPS apps create new spatiotemporal relations for bodies, as well as how these relations are made visible/mobilised by the interfaces’ spatial and urban representations.

In our first installment of The Susan Hockey Lecture series, Professor Susan Hockey discusses the trajectory of digital humanities from its many years on the fringes to its current position at the centre of the humanities scholarly arena, and its future challenges.