Activities and Funding from the Methods Network

March 30, 2007 at 10:42 pm · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing

(The Methods Network is an organisation here at King’s that seeks to promote the use of ICTS and ‘advanced methods’ within the Arts and Humanities). Here is a list of their activities)

Apply for Funding from the AHRC ICT Methods Network – Deadline 30 June 2007

The AHRC ICT Methods Network invites the arts and humanities Higher
Education community in the UK to submit proposals for Methods Network
activities. Activities may include workshops, seminars, focused workgroups,
postgraduate training events and publications.

The Methods Network is keen to support both single- and cross-disciplinary
proposals and those that encourage new collaborative frameworks between
technical specialists and arts and humanities researchers. The primary
emphasis is on the use and reuse of digital resources.

Proposals for hybrid activities such as workshop/seminar/workgroup
combinations are also welcomed, as are proposals for any other activity
which falls within the Methods Network remit to support and promote the uses
of advanced ICT methods in academic research.

Funding of up to £5000 is available for workshops and hybrid activities.
Workshops provide training in advanced ICT methods for community members
within academic institutions. They engage with issues such as: formal
methods in analysis of source data and the creation of technical models;
working with multiple technologies; and other matters of vital practical
interest to the community.

Funding of up to £2000 is available for seminars. These may concentrate on
highly-defined topics of interest and also problem areas within the
community or may have a more general focus.

For information on eligibility and how to apply for funding see the Methods
Network website (www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk).

Please be aware that all applicants are expected to submit fully-formed
proposals with full programme, budget and projected outcome details and with
particular emphasis on the research significance of the proposed activity.
Applications that fail to provide all required details will not be
considered for funding. For further information about submitting a proposal
contact Hazel Gardiner (hazel.gardiner@kcl.ac.uk).

Forthcoming Methods Network Funded Activities

We welcome applications from individuals who would like to attend Methods
Network workshops and seminars, but must emphasise that registration is
essential for these activities. Participants are also expected to make an
active contribution to the activity. Occasionally a Methods Network event
will be by invitation only, but all resulting materials, including (where
appropriate) podcasts, wikis, training workbooks, reports and publications
will be made freely available to the community via the Methods Network
website. All enquiries about registration for the Methods Network
activities listed below should be sent by email to methnet@kcl.ac.uk. For
further information about the following activities see the Methods Network
website.

Annotating Image Archives To Support Literary Research – A workshop
organized by Omer Rana, University of Cardiff. (May 2007)

Developing an International Framework for Audit and Certification of Trusted
Digital Repositories - A seminar organized by Joy Davidson, HATII,
University of Glasgow. (June 2007)

New Protocols for Electroacoustic Music Analysis - A workshop organized by
Leigh Landy, De Montfort University. (12 June 2007)

Data Sans Frontiers: Web Portals and the Historic Environment A workgroup
organized by Stuart Jeffrey, ADS/AHDS Archaeology, University of York. (25
May 2007)

From Abstract Data Mapping to 3D Photorealism: Understanding Emerging
Intersections in Visualisation Practices and Techniques – A workshop
organized by Julie Tolmie, 3DVisA, Kings College, University of London.
(June/July 2007)

Real-time Collaborative Art Making - A workshop organized by Gregory
Sporton, University of Central England. (20 July 2007)

Space/Time: Methods in geospatial computing for mapping the past – A
workgroup organized by Stuart Dunn, AHESSC, Kings College, University of
London. (23 - 24 July 2007)

Text Mining for Historians - A workshop organized by Zoe Bliss, AHDS
History, University of Essex. (17 – 18 July 2007)

Opening the Creative Studio – a hybrid activity comprising presentations and
workshops, organized by David Gorton, Royal Academy of Music. (10 September
- 30 November 2007)

INTIMACY: Performing the Intimate in Proximal and Hybrid Environments - a
hybrid workshop/seminar activity, organized by Maria Chatzichristodoulou.
(22 - 24 November 2007)

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From Community to Gemeinschaft: Belief or Truth?

March 30, 2007 at 7:57 pm · Filed under digital humanities, gemeinschaft, humanities computing, stubs, web2.0, wiki

Community is a hackneyed phrase. It is like the word ‘democracy’ or ‘friends’ or ‘freedom’; the more it is spoken, the less of it there is. There is a lot of talk (again) about online communities; especially considering that it is a central component of Web2.0. But what is a community? I grew up in a community; in a small island on the edge of the Western world. It was fun for a while, but then I discovered that it had boundaries. The word community is often applied to individuals who exchange opinions and text online, but is this a community or is it just sending text? Can we understand online communication without the need for the word community? I hope so. I like the German word Gemeinschaft much more. It refers to a ‘community of belief’. It has religious undertones, just like the bad old days of Web 1.0. An online community is just a belief; and belief all too often overrides truth. The belief is that the online community actually exists; in a word where’ social capital’ and community is on the decline.
By all means start a Wiki, but please don’t call it a community. A community requires boundaries and as soon as you believe that online messages and communication is a ‘community’; you are missing the real one in which these activities are embedded.Here

Here is an article ZDnet on how to get people to use your Web 2.0 applications. Also here is an a new system called Wikipatterns that is built on the assumption that communication is not good nor bad nor is it neutral. (Or, you have a right to be a Libertarian, but I have a right not to be killed!).

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Too many passwords!

March 29, 2007 at 11:41 pm · Filed under blogs, digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

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What is DiggLicious?

March 29, 2007 at 6:32 pm · Filed under digital humanities, web2.0

Here comes the real time web. Check out this blend of Digg.com and del.icio.us (link)

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AHDS Guides to Good Practice

March 29, 2007 at 1:56 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

Guides indicating best practice and good standards in digitisation

The AHDS publishes a series of Guides providing the arts and humanities research and teaching communities with practical instruction in applying recognised standards and good practice to the creation and use of digital resources. Some of the Guides focus on methods and applications relevant to humanities disciplines, such as history, archaeology, visual arts, performing arts and textual and linguistic studies. Others address those areas which cross disciplinary boundaries.

All Guides identify and explore key issues and provide comprehensive pointers for those who need more specific information. As such they are essential reference materials for anyone interested in computer-assisted research and teaching in the arts and humanities (link)

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doing digital: using digital resources in the arts and humanities

March 27, 2007 at 1:39 am · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing, web2.0

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

doing digital: using digital resources in the arts and humanities

DRHA07 : Dartington College of Art : 9 - 12 September 2007
http://www.dartington.ac.uk/drha07/

Bringing together creators, practitioners, users, distributors,
and custodians of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities

Over the last decade the annual Digital Resources for the Humanities and
Arts (DRHA) conferences have constructed an unusual kind of meeting
place: a space in which researchers, curators, and distributors of
digital resources could meet and share perspectives on their
complementary agendas.

Last year, that forum was expanded to include
participants from the creative and performing arts, giving the event a
new flavour and a new direction. This year, the conference aims to
explore further major issues at the interface between traditional
humanities scholarship and the creative arts, by focussing on their
differing or complementary approaches to the deployment of digital
technologies.

Can the Arts and the Humanities share expertise? Are they
divided by a common tongue? To what extent are they developing common
technical solutions to different problem areas? As in previous years,
the conference will articulate these questions by showcasing the very
best in current practice across the widest spectrum of digital
applications in the arts and humanities and by fostering informed but
accessible debate amongst professionals.

The Programme Committee for DRHA07 is now soliciting imaginative and
provocative contributions for the conference addressing such topics as:

* the benefits and the challenges of using digital resources in
creative work, in teaching and learning, and in scholarship;
* the challenges and opportunities associated with scale and
sustainability in the digital arena;
* new insights and new forms of expression arising from the
integration of digital resources in the arts, humanities, and sciences;
* social and political issues surrounding digital resource
provision in the context of global ICT developments;
* the implications of “born-digital” resources for curators,
consumers, and performers;
* training methods and best practice for digital arts and
humanities practitioners.

Other themes include: interactivity and performance; digital media in
time and space; integration and deployment of existing digital resources
in new contexts; policies and strategies for digital deployment, both
commercial and non-commercial; cataloguing and metadata aspects of
resource discovery; digital repositories; Web 2.0 and other new
technologies; encoding standards; intellectual property rights; funding,
cost-recovery, and charging mechanisms; digitization techniques and
problems.

Format: The conference will take up three intensive days, comprising
presentation of academic papers and technical reports, performance and
installation events, software and product demonstrations, debates and
training events. The atmosphere will be informal, the discussion
energetic. Leading practitioners and representatives of key funding
agencies, such as the the Arts Council, the AHRC, the JISC
will be amongst the participants. We hope that from this occasion a
new consensus will emerge based on real life experience of the
application of digital techniques and resources in the Humanities and Arts.

Timetable: Proposals are now invited for academic papers, themed panel
sessions and reports of work in progress.Your proposal should be no
smaller than 500 words and no longer than 2000; closing date for
proposals is May 2nd 2007. All proposals will be reviewed by an
independent panel of reviewers, and notifications of acceptance will be
sent out by 13th June 2007. All accepted proposals will be included in
the Conference preprint volume, and will also be considered for a
post-conference publication.

Cost: The all-in conference rate covering all meals and accomodation as
well as conference registration and proceedings will not exceed £400.
Reduced rates for early registration, and partial rates for one-day or
non-residential attendance will be announced shortly on the conference
website.

Further information: The conference web site at
http://www.dartington.ac.uk/drha07/ will be regularly updated, and
includes full details of the procedure for submitting proposals, the
programme, and registration information. Bookmark it now!

(Sent on behalf of DHRA07 Progamme Chair, Lou Burnard, Oxford University)

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How to Study an Electronic Text

March 26, 2007 at 10:02 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, open source, web2.0

TaPOR, the distributed text analysis system being developed in Canada has some fantastic notes (or recipes) on studying electronic texts.

This page describes common or interesting sequences of actions, or recipes, for the TAPoR portal. They are organized according to the objective of the recipe. Recipes fall into the three categories of location and identification of ideas, themes or specific terms; analysis of textual devices or themes; or the construction of new entities or corpus. There are also a set of three tutorial recipes included to introduce three common and specific tasks using TAPoR Tools.

The TAPoR community benefits from shared experience and learning how others make use of the portal. You can share your experience by adding your own recipes to the collection. More information about recipe and exercise structure and authoring is available on the RecipeStructure page.

If you feel you can improve a recipe, or find a problem with an existing recipe, please edit the existing recipe and indicate your name and the date at the bottom of the modified recipe or exercise. To edit a recipe you must be registered with TADA, but this is a relatively painless task and can be accomplished simply by messaging Stéfan Sinclair. If you have hints, tips or would simply like to comment on how a recipe has worked for you, please add a comment at the bottom of the page in the comments box. This does not require a TADA account (link).

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The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945

March 24, 2007 at 1:20 am · Filed under digital humanities, history, humanities computing

The Reading Experience Database is about 10 years old now. It seeks to gather and provide access to (from a community of scholars) evidence of the history of reading in the UK over a 500 years period (pretty ambitious huh?). It is built on some solid conceptual and scholarly ideas, and has just undergone a technical re-fit and will be re-launched in a few days.

Newsflash: At present, we are completing a substantial technical upgrade of the Reading Experience Database. We would like to apologise in advance for any difficulties contributors may encounter while completing online forms during this period. Within the next few months we will be launching a new, more user-friendly interface which we hope will make the process of contributing electronically both easier and faster. In the meantime, we suggest that if you are interested in providing any material for the database, you contact either Rosalind Crone (R dot H dot Crone@open.ac.uk) or Katie Halsey (Katie dot Halsey@sas.ac.uk). (link)

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E Research in Australia Conference

March 23, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing, web2.0

There is an E Research Conference coming up in Brisbane, Australia on June 26-29. There is a stream on E Research in the Arts and Humanities for those who are interested (link)

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

March 23, 2007 at 1:19 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, politics

This year is the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. There are a lot of exhibitions and events taking place around London at the moment. Here is a timely new resources from the Arts and Humanities Data Service (btw. this is just the database files you download).

The database is freely downloadable from the AHDS.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade remains a major field of academic enquiry and public interest. This new database of over 34,000 slaving voyages is the largest single resource of information available for the study of pre-colonial African history and a major asset for the study of Atlantic history and race relations.Deposited

by Professor Philip Richardson of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, the database builds on previously published information resulting from three decades of work from numerous scholars. It has just been made available via AHDS History.TheThe

The new enlarged database includes information on some 7,000 previously unknown voyages and additional information relating to over 10,000 voyages. The resource provides details of the itineraries and characteristics of ships involved ttrade.It.It.

It also covers the human dimension, including information such as the numbers of slaves embarked in Africa and disembarked in the Americas and the owners and crews of the ships involved ttraffic.It.It.

It provides details of the geography of the trade, notably ports of provenance and return of ships, trading destinations in Africa, and ports of slave embarkation in the Americas, together with the time schedules involved in completing the various phases of voyages. The database comprises voyages of British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese (including Brazilian), Spanish aorigin.TheThe

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A revised and enlarged database 1500-1867

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Genevan Sex Crimes Database

March 21, 2007 at 1:47 am · Filed under digital humanities, history, humanities computing

Thanks to Alistair Dunning for the Link

Exhibit is a tool from MIT. It “enables web site authors to create dynamic exhibits of their collections. The collections maybe browsed using facetted browsing. Assorted views of the collections are provided including tiles, maps, etc”. It allows anyone to put tabular data online with astonishing ease.
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit

One of the datasets that the AHDS has in its catalogue is the
Genevan Sex Crimes database. A temporary online test version of this database using Exhibit is available online.

http://ahds.ac.uk/collections/exhibit-test/exhibit.htm

Have a go. There a lots of little flaws but the underlying idea is
fantastic.

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What is ICT Guides: Community?

March 16, 2007 at 11:39 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

Part of my job here at King’s is to develop ICT Guides into a sustainable community resource. The present version of ICT Guides is built on a MySql database with a JSTL (Java) interface.

The new community component of ICT Guides will (initially) be built on a Joomla (or Drupal) CMS (partly because it has excellent community building functions…though the add-on ‘Community Builder’ and also the Joomlaboard forum software). Overall Drupal is probably better for our needs in the long run, as it supports complex taxonomies, but this is a little way off as yet. We hope to use the taxonomy that we have developed in ICT Guides to feed into the communty site. And perhaps we could migrate the entire ICT Guides site over to Drupal at a later date and customise Drupal for our needs (Link: ICT Guides: Community)

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How to record and transcribe interviews

March 16, 2007 at 11:09 pm · Filed under digital humanities, history, humanities computing

From the AHDS blog:

One of the increasingly common project outputs is for recorded interviews to be made available as audio files and or transcriptions. There are numerous sources of advice for those planning to do such interviews

http://blogs.ahds.ac.uk/?p=26 

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Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry

March 16, 2007 at 10:59 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, events, humanities computing

AHeSSC workshop at UK All Hands meeting
10-13th September 2007, East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham

MINI-WORKSHOP CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry

http://www.allhands.org.uk/news/textgridws_call.cfm

Textual resources play a pivotal role not only in research, but also in business. In 2003 alone, 300 Terabytes of textual data were produced, without counting more dynamic texts like blogs, wikis, websites, etc. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all working on creating gigantic digital libraries for textual resources that would both be more accessible and comprehensible than any other digital library in history. Project partners in “Cultural Heritage Language Technologies” like the Perseus Project promote the use of modern computational and storage techniques to integrate tools and data for research on and with texts in different formats. In the UK, the AHRC E-Science Scoping Study expert seminars in textual studies, linguistics and history have discussed the potential of Virtual Organisation and Grid technologies for humanist textual analysis.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Who are Civic Actions?

March 16, 2007 at 9:49 pm · Filed under CMS, political communication, politics, web2.0

Another wonderful ‘virtual’ organisation spread across Europe and the US who are active in the Drupal (Content Management System) community is Civic Actions.

We believe that our works should be available for the larger good. Whenever possible, we work to share our innovations with other consultants and organizations. We believe in growing the size of the universe, as opposed to subscribing to a model of scarcity. We are active in the Drupal community, have recently began to participate in sharing best practices with other firms, and are actively working to drive the education of independent consultants to create a larger field of skilled practioners for all firms including ours, as well as our customers.This website is a work in progress, and will always be, because our work is. Please take a look at our People, our Clients, and our Projects and let us know if you have any questions (link)

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