(Opening Address, Digital Humanities 2010)

Digital Humanities 2010, King’s College London, 7-10 July, 2010.

Members of the VeRSI team attended the Digital Humanities Conference at King’s College London (7-10 July); the annual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities Organisations.  The conference in its various guises has been running for 22 years or 37 years if the first conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing is incorporated.  This year’s Digital Humanities Conference was significant as two of the elder statesman of the field, Professors Harold Short and Willard McCarty are both retiring. Professor Short has been head of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s for many years and received a long, standing ovation from the 400 plus delegates at the Conference dinner. Professor McCarty is one of the strongest critical voices in the field and has built a thriving Doctoral programme in Digital Humanities at King’s and has published widely on the application of computing technology to the understanding of human culture.

This year’s conference also included pre-conference workshops on various applied subjects such as text-mining for Classicists, text analysis, peer reviewing of digital work, and even how to design a Digital Humanities Lab. Also before the conference, a THATCamp was held; an informal user-generated ‘unconference’ about humanities and technology. Subjects such as what is computing analysis for an historian, geography in text, and even a manifesto for the Digital Humanities were robustly discussed (a ThatCamp will be held in Canberra, 28-29 August 2010 http://thatcampcanberra.org )

The main conference includes papers on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and various encoding techniques, Music Encoding within Musicology, Digitisation in Japan, and a number of papers on the state of the field in various regions of the world. The conference was well-recorded including the lively closing plenary by Dr Melissa Terras from University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities about the state of the field online ( http://www.arts-humanities.net/video/dh2010_keynote_melissa_terras_present_not_voting_digital_humanities_panopticon

How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete? What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use? What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them? Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked? (link)

4th Symposium, Cultural Heritage Knowledge Visualisation, CHKV

A symposium in the 14th International Conference Information Visualisation, 26,
27-29 July 2010, London South Bank University, London, UK.

http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV10/ Click on Symposia hypertext

Important Dates:
1 March 2010: Submission of papers
16 April 2010: Notification of Peer Review Result
30 April 2010: Submission of camera-ready
7 May 2010: Early registration closes

Paper Format Guide: (Not more than 6 pages – excess pages at 25 GBP per page.)

http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV09/INSTRUCTION.htm

Over the last 2 decades we have seen a shift from the physical confines of the
‘houses of knowledge’ – traditional museum, cultural galleries, knowledge
institutes – to more online, mobile, accessible interactive displays of
cultural heritage knowledge. From books, physical displays and site-specific
places of cultural heritage significance, many more can now access these
repositories remotely. As touring 3D installations, interactive online
applications, images, text, audio and video, access to cultural heritage
knowledge has never been so accessible. What does this mean to those who’s
heritage is on display? What protocols are needed to protect the integrity of
the knowledge included? And, what new knowledge do we gain through these
technological interventions and expositions of cultural heritage? These are
only some of the many questions raised in this emerging field of Cultural
Heritage Knowledge Visualisation.

The symposium seeks original projects that deal with, but are not limited to,
the following topics:

* Heritage Visualisation
* Culture Visualisation
* Visualising Society Networks
* Visualising Cultural Heritage Knowledge Practices
* Developing Protocols for Cultural Heritage Knowledge Visualisation
* Cultural Heritage Knowledge Semantics
* Narrative Visualisation
* Cultural Heritage Knowledge Ethics

Symposium Cultural Heritage Knowledge Visualisation Liaison

Theodor G Wyeld, Flinders University, Australia

Advisory, Programme and reviewing committee:
Theodor G Wyeld, Flinders University, Australia
Sarah Kenderdine (Museum Victoria, Aust)
Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland (NTNU, Trondheim)
Teng-Wen Chang (NYUST, Taiwan)
Brett Leavy (CyberDreaming, Aust)
Malcolm Pumpa (QUT, Aust)
Marinos Ioannides (HTI, Cyprus)
Giovanni Issini (DFI, Italy)

Special Journal Edition for selected papers: TBA.

Supporting Bodies:
Flinders Humanities Research Centre for Cultural Heritage and Cultural
Exchange,
Flinders University, Australia

HOST: http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV10/

All enquiries about Cultural Heritage Knowledge Visualisation should be
addressed to:
Theodor Wyeld
Digital Media Studies
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100
Adelaide 5001
South Australia

ph: +06 8 8201 3264
fx: +06 8 8201 3635
em: theodor.wyeld@flinders.edu.au
wb: ehlt.flinders.edu.au/screen/staff/wyeld.php

URL: http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV10/CHKV.htm

Instructions for Authors
All submitted papers are peer reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. Authors are
invited to upload full original papers to the conference online submission
system by February 25, 2009, http://www.conftool.net/IV2010. Electronic
submissions (PDF) are recommended and should be formatted according to the
instructions for papers at http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV09/PAPERS.htm. The
final manuscripts for full papers are expected to be no more than 6 pages – up
to 4 excess pages may be purchased and is set by publisher at 25 GBP per page.

– Theodor Wyeld Director of Studies Digital Media Studies Flinders University GPO Box 2100 Adelaide 5001 South Australia ph: +06 8 8201 3264 fx: +06 8 8201 3635 em: theodor.wyeld@flinders.edu.au wb: ehlt.flinders.edu.au/screen/staff/wyeld.php

Call for Presentations

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars
at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with
support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of
research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital
component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates
interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient
History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or
practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to
August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers
from the DC WiP seminars have been published* in a special issue of an
online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released
as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication
opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help
with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to by
March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers
Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London
Stuart Dunn, King’s College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006),

http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252

(2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9).

– Dr Gabriel BODARD (Epigrapher & Digital Classicist) Centre for Computing in the Humanities King’s College London 26-29 Drury Lane London WC2B 5RL Email: gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388 Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980 http://www.digitalclassicist.org/ http://www.currentepigraphy.org/

TERI invites your attention to ICDL 2010, the third conference in the Institute’s ICDL (The International Conference on Digital Libraries) series. ICDL 2010 is proposed to be organized during 23-26 February 2010 in New Delhi. The theme of the conference is ‘Digital Libraries : Shaping the Information Paradigm’ and the focus is on the strengths and potential of digital libraries and their role in education, cultural, social and economic development (link).

No form of human knowledge passes into a new medium unchanged. Digital
technology is fundamentally altering the way we relate to writing,
reading, and the human record itself. The pace of that change has
created a gap between core cultural and social practices that depend on
stable reading and writing environments, and the new kinds of digital
artefacts – electronic books, being just one type of many – that must
sustain those practices into the future. This paper will discuss work
toward bridging this gap by theorising the transmission of culture in
pre- and post-electronic media, by documenting the facets of how people
experience information as readers and writers, by designing new kinds of
interfaces and artifacts that afford readers new abilities and by
sharing those designs in online prototypes that implement new knowledge
environments for researchers and the public (link).

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Hindman was on the panel titled ‘Social Media so what? Assessing the impact of blogs and social media?’ The main thrust of his argument was that the Internet isn’t inherently democratic and that it is not so much about the medium, but how the medium is institutionalised that makes it democratic. He discussed democracy in the broader sense and asserted that there are a lot of democratic values and they aren’t all about the web. Publishing is an important part of political expression, but as the barriers to publication are so low on the web, anyone can publish creating a cacophony of noise. In other words, a lot of people are publishing but who is listening? Hindman claimed that the very volume of data on line necessitates the need to filter and this may create a new set of ‘gate keepers’ rather than usurp the older gate keeping mechanisms of industrial media. He also discussed (as he does in his book) that the Internet hasn’t partially empowered a new political class and that unequal political expression and organisation remains. The most important lesson from Hindman is that technology is not good nor bad nor is it neutral and that all technological advance isn’t towards the removal of privilege. All technological advances create winners and losers and the increased use of social software isn’t necessarily good for democracy; we must make it good for democracy.

Kara Swisher, on the other hand was a technological determinist. She was on the panel ‘Blogging at 20? The future and potential of social media’. It may have been that it was the end of the day and people were grappling to find anything more to say about blogs (I have been blogging for 10 btw), but the discussion descended into the usual gee-wizz, determinist clap-trap. Swisher embraced the technological determinists’ narrative in a vigorous gravitas that I haven’t heard since the superstitious days of the late 20th Century. She performed brilliantly claiming that politicians and the rest of us don’t use social software such as Facebook then they will become redundant (not sure what ‘redundant’ means here). She made an historical and metaphorical leap that made me dizzy and claimed that as people learned to drive cars and left their ponies behind, democracy must do the same (no donkeys!). The usual catalogue of new gadgets was brought to the fore with the only argument it seems; that if we don’t embrace them then we are doomed!

I twitted a message that was projected on the wall behind her head ‘technological determinism bad; technology good!

In ending, the Convention shouldn’t have concentrated on Blogs so much; they are really not that interesting. Also I would have liked to see a speaker or two from China and other countries as the US and Britain were over-represented. Plus, I would have liked to see more evidence presented (as Bill Dutton; the Director of the Oxford Internet did), as Conventions such as this are in danger of being hijacked by trivia dressed up as revolution. As Dutton argued, the Internet reconfigures rather than changes, it has always been social and even wondered if it is possible to have an overview at all now.

But still, in the words of Bill Thompson, Technology critic, BBC News Online, people will do remarkable things if you remove the need for them to ask permission.

(Follow what others had to say…)

Matthew Hindma

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the mass digitisation of textual materials: Improving Access to Text

Contact: Michael Day            UKOLN, University of Bath 24 Sept 09
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ocr-2009

• Digital imagery: creation and importance in the visual arts

Contact: Leigh Garrett            University for the creative Arts 22 Sep 09
http://www.vads.ac.uk/digitalimagery

• Digitising Correspondence (Digitising Early Modern Letters)

Contact: Dr Jan Broadway          Queen Mary, University of London 17 Sep 09
http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/events/2009/09/17/digitizing-correspondence-workshop

• Creating digital performance documentation
• Managing digital performance documentation
• Delivering digital performance documentation

Contact: Stephen Gray                    JISC Digital Media 23-25 Sep 09
http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/blog/entry/free-to-attend-digitisation-seminars

• Climate Data Digitisation and Visualisation

Contact: Dr Rob Allen             Met Office Hadley Centre 15-17 Sep 09
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/reports/workshops.aspx (Word Document on JISC workshops webpage)

• Collaborative scholarly editing over the Web

Contact: Dr Peter Robinson                University of Birmingham 24-25 Sep 09
http://www.itsee.bham.ac.uk/vmr/toolscfp.htm

• Geographical Information Systems in history and heritage

Contact: Sarah Rees Jones                 University of York 17-18 Sep 09
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/isthmus/ISTHMUS_Site/Public_Participatory_GIS.html

• Archival digitisation of large artworks: A special international JISC symposium

Contact: Prof Haim Bresheeth      University of East London 1 Sep 09
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/reports/workshops.aspx (pdf Document on JISC workshops webpage)

• Mathematical content – tools and standards, practice and strategy

Contact: Dr Jonathon Fine         The Open University 9 Sep 09
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-math-content-2009?hl=en&pli=1

• Successfully building and managing a digital media collection
• The digital media collection +100 years

Contact: Dave Kilbey             JISC Digital Media 15-16 Sep 09
http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/blog/entry/free-to-attend-digitisation-seminars

• Building Usage of Cartoon Archives

Contact: Dr Nicholas Hiley                University of Kent
(Awaiting Website/Programme details)

• Digital History Workshop: Connecting researchers to digital collections

Contact: Dr Kathryn Eccles                Oxford Internet Institute 3rd Sep 09
http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/2009/07/23/digital-history-digital-resources-for-history-and-historians/

• High Volume Digitisation: Issues, Trends & Innovative Robot Tech

Contact: Beverley Dodd            Birmingham City University 23 Sep 09
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/reports/workshops.aspx (pdf Document on JISC workshops webpage)

(image of statues from ‘Memento Park’; the Communist statue park).

I recently attended the XXIII International Congress of History of Science and Technology in Budapest Hungary.  http://www.conferences.hu/ichs09/index.htm The conference was a large and truly international event with 1400 delegates from 60 countries. Set in the Budapest University of Technology and Economics; the university is one of the oldest technological institutions in the world (1772) and has a long history of major contributions to Science and Technology (the conference was however, set in a rather grim building).

Broadly speaking, the History and Philosophy of Science and the Digital Humanities do cover some similar academic territory as both are concerned with understanding technology through humanities approaches. Whist HPS is about critically understanding the history of technology in broader social and cultural contexts, the Digital Humanities is about applying computing technology to humanities problems.

The plenary on the first day covered topics such as the relation of modern science to Islam, Darwin’s drive to abolish slavery (through his scientific work), and scientific exile in totalitarian regimes such as in Cold War Czechoslovakia. The speaker, Sona Strbanova explained how exodus from Czechoslovakia peaked in 1969 (not surprisingly) with 200000 exiles. She knew this because the government (the Cadre Department) kept an extensive list of exiles and framed exiles as ‘traitors’.

During the regular conference sessions, the topics covered included Cold-war Social Science, Art and Science, Earth Sciences in the contemporary period, and science in a political content. Many of the papers had a Cold War focus which seemed appropriate in a university in Budapest with the gigantic Liberation Monument (1947) looking down on the conference venue from the top of Gellert Hill. http://photos.igougo.com/images/p35226-Budapest-Liberation_Monument.jpg

In my own paper at the conference I discussed the contributions that the Digital Humanities had made to the history of science, particularly through the promotion of text encoding and meta-data standards, repositories, and computational research methods. http://www.craigbellamy.net/images/bellamy_budapest.ppt I explained how we promote the history of science through the Arts-Humanities.net web site. The particular examples I used were Complete Works of Charles Darwin online; which is perhaps the largest publication of Darwin’s works and contains 40,000 pages of searchable text and 130,000 electronic images. It also contains all of Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts as well as many his published ones.  http://darwin-online.org.uk/ The other example I used was the Newton Manuscript Project; a collection of Newton’s non-Scientific papers and his unpublished theological papers. Its central focus is a series of (XML encoded) transcriptions of Newton’s theological works, personal notebooks, and biographical information about Newton dating from the eighteenth century and many of his early scientific papers. http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk

I discussed these projects in terms of the methods that they used, how we record these methods, and the problems associated with their long-term preservation. An audience member asked how we defined ‘the national’ in the project (as this is the project’s broad scope) and I explained how we arrived here through the rather complicated institutional history of the project including the closing down of the Arts and Humanities Data Service last year.

Other papers in my session (sessions titled  ‘history of science and new media’) were about managing the national bibliography of science history in Hungary, the work of a science-history digitisation centre in Brazil, and an excellent paper by Gavan McCarty from the University of Melbourne about the World History of Science Online project. http://www.dhst-whso.org/ Gavan also discussed the need for an active and vibrant ‘public sphere’ online and the need for rigorous citation standards so as to aid discovery and reuse of online scholarly resources. Stephen Weldon, who organised the session and is editor of the ISIS bibliography, discussed an ‘open access’ model for his journal and explained how making certain data free and open online can also boost the actual sales of the journal as well as increasing its circulation within libraries. http://www.ou.edu/cas/hsci/isis/website/index.html

One of my favourite Technical sessions at the conference (as opposed to the Science sessions) was ‘Space Exploration and research in the Contemporary Period (1800-)’. One of the speakers, Joseph Tatarewicz, discussed the history of the Hubble Telescope from 1923 to 2009. He framed the talk in terms of the telescopes ‘career’ (successes and major failures). Whilst the speaker, an ex-employee of the Smithsonian Institute, was a somewhat enthusiast for the Hubble, the audience had mixed feelings and many believed that the project had been a great socio-technical disaster.

Together the conference was a broad and eclectic mix of papers from all parts of the globe, from many periods of history, and numerous stands of Science and Technology. In a city at the centre of Europe built on the historical rubble of ideological exuberance, war, empire, greed, religious turmoil, nationalist fervour and totalitarian oppressions (and average food), Science and Technology have either been a servants of all this or have stubbornly subverted it. Let’s hope that the Digital Humanities never becomes a servant of draconian academic forces either emanating from the excesses of the market or the mono-mania delusions of technological –determinism.

All technological advances create winners and losers and some of them have guns!