How do you define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities?

February 24, 2009 at 10:29 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

The digital humanities is a set of beliefs, theories, practices, methods, and artifacts associated with the use of digital technologies to support, extend, and transform traditional humanistic fields. I follow Erwin Panofsky’s definition of the humanities as those disciplines concerned with interpreting the “records left by man.” (Sexism not intended.) Among the specific assemblage of artifacts and ideas that currently characterize the field are (1) the use XML in a variety of forms, including TEI and RDF, to encode texts, and (2) the use of mathemetical graph theory as a unifying language for describing texts, minds, and societiies, and other organis(m|ation)s (link)

From the Day of Humanities; an ethnographic study of what Digital Humanists do on one day of the year.

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British Library Holocaust recordings launched online

February 12, 2009 at 5:41 pm · Filed under digitisation

Marking Holocaust Memorial Day, the latest collection added to the JISC funded Archival Sound Recordings website provides a new tool for Holocaust research and education, available online from the British Library.

Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust documents the moving testimonies of Jewish immigrants to Britain, many of whom survived Nazi concentration camps. Over 440 hours of life story recordings explore 66 personal experiences of persecution across war-torn Europe and the impact of the Holocaust, covering:

- Anti-Semitism before the Second World War
- Ghettos and concentration camps
- Resistance and liberation
- Searching for family in the aftermath
- Building a new life in Britain
- The legacy of the Holocaust

The Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust resource will also support primary and secondary education, supplementing the study materials and lesson plans provided by the British Library’s Learning team’s Voices of the Holocaust package.

The testimonies now available are drawn from a major oral history programme The Living Memory of the Jewish Community which between 1987 and 2000 gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. It was initiated by National Life Stories based in the British Library’s oral history section and funded by a number of organisations including the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the John S Cohen Foundation and the Porjes Charitable Trust.

The collection joins a growing range of oral history recordings on Archival Sound Recordings, which makes selections of music, spoken word, and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online. Recordings can be accessed from British Library reading rooms and are available for free to licensed UK higher and further education institutions. In addition, over 2000 recordings, including Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust, are available to the public via the website.

UK higher and further education librarians can email to request a free licence.

Ginevra House
Engagement Officer
Higher Education Team
The British Library
www.bl.uk
+44 (0)20 7412 7245

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The Virtual Museum of the Pacific: A Semantic Web-based Content Management System

February 12, 2009 at 5:07 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, history, web2.0, wiki

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) is a Rich Internet Application with a Web Services architecture used to manage and navigate 400 objects from the Australian Museum’s (http://www.austmus.gov.au/) Pacific Island collections. This project tests a new means of facilitating access for Indigenous people and researchers to museum-based digital collections whose artefacts are physically distributed and often not on public display. The project has two dimensions: at the technical level the focus is on leveraging metadata used in curatorial management to produce a Web-based content management system for representing collection resources as a dynamic associative network; at a museological level the focus is on studying the effective means of presenting and interacting with this semantic network for traditional owners, the general public, researchers and curators (link)

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Redmond Barry 1854 fellowship

February 12, 2009 at 4:56 pm · Filed under history

The University of Melbourne solicits proposals for its Redmond Barry 1854 fellowship. The fellowship facilitates research by enabling scholars to access the collections of the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne.

This programme aims to: promote the library and its support for scholarly activity and research; support research that would benefit from an intense period of activity and focus in Melbourne; and encourage scholarly use of the general collections and specialist resources of the library and the university.

Applications are invited from scholars from Australia and overseas. Up to $20,000 will be awarded to assist with travel, living and research expenses. Fellows will be based at the library for three to six months (you will have to search for the link; I got sent this via email. Thanks to Menzies Centre; King’s College).

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