These lists are often transformed into other forms — visualisations, maps, information systems, software tools — but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived.

Ramsay offered some meditations on the nature of lists, and suggested ways that they lend themselves to narrative and explanation.

Ramsay was particularly impressed by the volume of conference papers that was produced by the new Espresso Book Machine, a print on demand machine at the University Library that can produce a book in a matter of minutes.  The volume contains many excellent papers on subjects such as ‘fair use’ and copyright, collaborative tools for typological research, semantic annotation for 3D museum artefacts, and language archiving and documentation technologies. The conference’s core theme was focussed upon language documentation of endangered languages in the Asian-Pacific region; thus long-term preservation and reuse of these materials is of paramount importance to this research community. The .pdf version of the book and the presentations can be downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/2123/7890 and further printed copies can be ordered from the University of Melbourne Bookshop.

Also at the conference, the new Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) held a reception in the beautiful Arts Hall in Old Arts at the University of Melbourne.  I as Secretary of the Association welcomed guests and explained that membership to the Association would be through LLC: the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Membership also came with numerous benefits such as a substantial discount to the Associations upcoming conference ‘Digital Humanities Australasia’ in Canberra in March 2012 and discounted entry to the international Digital Humanities Conference in Hamburg, Germany, July 2012.

Together the conference revealed how a specialised disciplinary group of scholars largely working on vial and urgent questions around the documentation and preservation of the recordings of endangered languages are engaging with a broader Digital Humanities community in Australia so that many of the computational methods used can be shared and applied in other disciplines. The Digital Humanities is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour party with the goal to provide a ‘methodological commons’ for the humanities to discover and use new computing methods. The more that we provide these interdisciplinary spaces, the greater the ‘technical capital’ of the humanities will grow thus opening up a more active engagement with the development of appropriate computing tools and methods to address specific humanities research questions.

Time: Monday December 12 from 9.30 – 10.30 in the Wood Theatre, Arts West, University of Melbourne (Map: Building 148, Next to Old Arts and Baillieu Library)

(A video of a keynote talk given by Stephen Ramsay at “The Face of Text” — the third Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA) held at McMaster University in 2004.
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In this presentation in Melbourne, Stephen Ramsay will discuss some of the latest research in the Digital Humanities. This includes applying methods to analyse the vast array of digital collections that have been developed over past decades. These methods provide additional layers of scholarly interpretation and thus uncover new insights.

“Computational processes generate lists: lists of numbers, lists of words, lists of coordinates, lists of properties.  We transform these lists into more exalted forms — visualisations, maps, information systems, software tools — but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived.  Whenever we treat the world as data, we are nearly always creating lists.

But what sort of *texts* are these, and can we consider them the same way that we consider other texts within the humanities?  In this paper, I offer some meditations on the nature of lists, and suggest that it is the paucity of information they provide — and the ways in which that paucity licenses narrative and explanation — that allows us to imagine computational representations as texts that can play a fruitful role in the wider context of humanistic inquiry

 

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DIGITAL HUMANITIES AUSTRALASIA 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting
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The inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 28-30 March 2012

Sponsored by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://aa-dh.org/conference
CALL FOR PROPOSALS CLOSES: 11 November 2011
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE: 30 November 2011
REGISTRATION OPENS: Early January 2012

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce its inaugural conference, to be held at the Australian National University, Canberra, 28-30 March, 2012. The conference will feature papers, panels, posters and associated workshops. We invite proposals on all aspects of digital humanities in Australia, New Zealand and internationally, and especially encourage papers showcasing new research and developments in the field and/or responding to the conference theme of ‘Building, Mapping, Connecting’.

Proposals may focus on, but need not be limited to:

- Institutionalisation, interdisciplinarity and collaboration
- Measuring and valuing digital research
- Publication and dissemination
- Research applications and interfaces for digital collections
- Designing and curating online resources
- Digital textuality and literacy
- Curriculum and pedagogy
- Culture, creativity, arts, music, performance
- Electronic critical editions
- Digitisation, text encoding and analysis
- Communities and crowdsourcing
- Infrastructure, virtual research environments, workflows
- Information mining, modelling, GIS and visualisation
- Critical reflections on digital humanities futures

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INTERNATIONAL SPEAKERS
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Julia Flanders (Brown University, USA)
Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Harold Short (King’s College London, UK and University of Western Sydney, Australia)
John Unsworth (University of Illinois, USA)

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SUBMISSIONS
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Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a biography of no more than 100 words, should be submitted to the Program Committee by 11 November, 2011. All proposals will be fully refereed. Proposals should be submitted via the online form at http://conference.aa-dh.org. Please indicate whether you are proposing a poster, a short paper (10 mins), a long paper (20 mins) or a panel. Presenters will be notified of acceptance of their proposal on 30 November, 2011.

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TRAVEL BURSARIES
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The Australian Academy of the Humanities has provided funding for travel bursaries. These will be available on a competitive basis for postgraduate students and early career researchers from Australia and New Zealand to present at the conference and participate in associated workshops. Staff from cultural institutions are also encouraged to apply. When submitting your proposal please indicate if you wish to be considered for a bursary.

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PROPOSAL TYPES
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1. Poster presentations

Poster presentations may include work-in-progress on any of the topics described above as well as demonstrations of computer technology, software and digital projects. A separate poster session will open the conference, during which time presenters will need to be available to explain their work, share their ideas with other delegates, and answer questions. Posters will also be on display at various times during the conference, and presenters are encouraged to provide material and handouts with more detailed information and URLs.

2. Short papers

Short papers are allocated 10 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions) and are suitable for describing work-in-progress and reporting on shorter experiments and software and tools in early stages of development.

3. Long papers

Long papers are allocated 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes for questions) and are intended for presenting substantial unpublished research and reporting on significant new digital resources or methodologies.

4. Panels

Panels (90 minutes) are comprised of either:

(a) Three long papers on a joint theme. All abstracts should be submitted together with a statement, of no more than 300 words, outlining the session topic and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities; or

(b) A panel of four to six speakers. The panel organiser should submit a 300-word outline of the topic session and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities as well as an indication from all speakers of their willingness to participate.

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CONVENORS
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Dr Paul Arthur, Australian National University
Dr Katherine Bode, Australian National University

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Dr Paul Arthur, Australian National University
Dr Craig Bellamy, VeRSI, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr Katherine Bode, Australian National University
Prof Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle, Australia
Prof Jane Hunter, University of Queensland, Australia
Dr Sydney Shep, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Conal Tuohy and myself recently attended the Digital Humanities conference 2011 at Stanford University in California (19-22 June). In its 23rd year, the conference is the peak conference for the application of computing to humanities research with the numerous digital humanities associations holding their annual general meetings at the event.  Papers range from encyclopaedias in the study of Egyptology, to the computational study of linguistic-style in medieval texts, to the creation of digital editions of early modern texts.   Many of the panels and papers at the conference also included a ‘community building’ aspect such as teaching digital humanities, the digital humanities and alternative academic careers, and funding the digital humanities.   The keynotes at the conference were particularly impressive and included Dr Chad Gaffield, President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada on Re-Imaging Scholarship in the Digital Age, David Rumsey on Reading Historical Maps Digitally, and JB Michel and Erez Liberman-Aiden, the developers of Google’s N-Gram viewer, on the quantitative analysis of millions of digitised books.

Chad Gafffield, President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada delivering the annual Zampoli Prize Lecture on 'Re-imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age

And as the conference has its roots in literary and linguistic computing, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a strong representation of papers dealing with issues of encoding and computational analysis of text. Geoffrey Rockwell, from the University of Alberta in Canada, discussed corpus linguistics; or the study of the entire collection of works on any given subject using computational techniques. Rather that enter a digital corpus by a facsimile, as is lamentably the case with many digitisation projects in the humanities, Rockwell discussed ways to enter a  corpus using ‘corpus interfaces’ and search and analysis tools that are better placed to impart multifaceted understandings of the nature of the human record as it interfaces with the computer.

The next Digital Humanities conference is to be held at the University of Hamburg in July 2012. http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de

Please note:  The Program Committee will not be offering an extension to the deadline as has become customary in recent years. The deadline of November 1 is firm. If you intend to submit a proposal for DH2011, you need to submit it via the electronic submission form on the conference website by November 1

Presentations include:

• Posters (abstract max of 1500 words)
• Short papers (abstract max of 1500 words)
• Long papers (abstract max of 1500 words)
• Multiple paper sessions, including panels (overview max of 500 words)

Call for Papers Announcement

I. General Information

The international Program Committee invites submissions of abstracts of between 750 and 1500 words on any aspect of digital humanities, from information technology to problems in humanities research and teaching.  We welcome submissions particularly relating to interdisciplinary work and on new developments in the field, and we encourage submissions relating in some way to the theme of the 2011 conference, which is Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities. With the Big Tent theme in mind, we especially invite submissions from Latin American scholars, scholars in the digital arts and music, in spatial history, and in the public humanities. The conference web site is in development at http://dh2011.stanford.edu will be developing over the next few weeks.  The program committee aims for a varied program and for that reason will normally not accept multiple submissions from the same author or group of authors for presentation at the conference.

Proposals might, for example, relate to the following aspects of digital humanities:

research issues, including data mining, information design and modelling, software studies, and humanities research enabled through the digital medium;

computer-based research and computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship. Some examples might be text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning, and endangered languages;

the digital arts, architecture, music, film, theater, new media, and related areas;

the creation and curation of humanities digital resources;

the role of digital humanities in academic curricula;

The range of topics covered by digital humanities can also be consulted in the journal of the associations:  Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC), Oxford University Press.

The deadline for submitting poster, short paper, long paper, and sessions proposals to the Program Committee is November 1, 2010.  Since the deadline is firm, we urge you to begin preparing your proposals before the submission form is ready. Presenters will be notified of acceptance on February 15, 2011.  The electronic submission form will be available on the conference site the beginning of October 2010. See below for full details on submitting proposals.  

A separate call for pre-conferences and workshops will be issued by the Program Committee next week. In addition, proposals for non-refereed or vendor demonstrations should be discussed directly with the local conference organizer, Glen Worthey, as soon as possible.  His email address is gworthey@stanford.edu. All other proposals should be submitted to the Program Committee through the aforementioned electronic submission form on the conference web site.

For more information on the conference in general, please visit the conference web site.

II.  Types of Proposals

Proposals to the Program Committee may be of four types:  (1) poster presentations; (2) short paper presentations; (3) long papers; and (4) sessions (either three-paper or panel sessions).  This year, the committee is approaching submissions in a different way.  The type of submission preferred should be specified on the application; however, the committee may accept the application in another category based on the number of proposals and the nature of the abstracts.  In part this addresses the incredible response to recent calls and in part recognizes that all applications are refereed and that the types of presentations are therefore equal in importance.

Papers and posters may be given in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish.

1)  Poster presentations

Please submit an abstract of 750 to 1500 words.  Poster presentations may include any work in progress on any topic of the call for papers as outlined above, computer technology, project demonstrations, and software demonstrations.  Posters and software demonstrations are intended to be interactive, with the opportunity of the presenter to exchange ideas one-on-one with attendees and to discuss their work in detail with those most deeply interested in the same topic.  Presenters will be provided with board space to display their work, computer connections may be available, and presenters are encouraged to provide a URL, business card, or handouts with more detailed information. Posters will be on display at various times during the conference, and a separate conference session will be dedicated to them when presenters should be present to explain their work and to answer questions.  Additional times may be assigned for software or project demonstrations. Poster sessions may showcase some of the most important and innovative work being done in the digital humanities.  In recognition of this, the Program Committee will award a prize for best poster.

2)  Short papers

This is a new category of presentation, allowing for up to five short papers in a one-hour session, with the length held to a strict ten (10) minutes each in order to allow time for one to two questions per paper.  Short paper proposals (750 to 1500 words)  are appropriate for reporting shorter experiments; describing work in progress; and  for describing newly conceived tools or software in early stages of development. At the behest of the Program Committee, short papers may be presented as both a short paper and as a poster session.  For research or projects further along in development, presenters should consider applying for a long paper presentation.

3)  Long Papers

Proposals for long papers (750-1500 words) are for reporting substantial, completed, and previously unpublished research; the development of significant new methodologies or digital resources; and/or rigorous theoretical, speculative, or critical discussions.  Individual papers will be allocated twenty (20) minutes for presentation and ten (10) minutes for questions.

Proposals about the development of new computing methodologies or digital resources should indicate how the methodologies are applied to research and/or teaching in the humanities, what their impact has been in formulating and addressing the research questions, and should include some critical assessment of the application of those methodologies in the humanities.  Papers than concentrate on a particular application or digital resource in the humanities should cite traditional as well as computer-based approaches to the problem and should include some critical assessments of the computing methodologies used.  All proposals should include relevant citations to sources in the literature.

4) Multiple Paper Sessions (90 minutes) are either:

• Three long papers.  The session organizer should submit a 500-word statement describing the session topic, include abstracts of 750-1500 words for each paper, and indicate that each author is willing to participate in the session;

or,

• A panel of four to six speakers.  The panel organizer should submit an abstract of 750-1500 words describing the panel topic, how it will be organized, the names of all the speakers, and an indication that each speaker is willing to participate in the session.

The deadline for session proposals is the same as for proposals for papers, i.e. November 1, 2010.

Several points about the sessions papers:  papers that are submitted as parts of special sessions may *not* also be submitted individually for consideration in another category. Session proposers should justify bundling the three papers into a special session, i.e., explaining the added value of the special session as opposed to including the papers separately, particularly how the special session addresses the conference theme.

III.  Format of the Proposals

All proposal must be submitted electronically using the online submission form, found at the conference web site at http://dh2011.stanford.edu beginning October 1, 2010.  Anyone who has previously used the confTool system to submit proposal or reviews should use their existing account rather than setting up a new one.  If anyone has forgotten their user name or password, please contact dh2011@digitalhumanities.org.  As noted above, the electronic submission form will be available on the conference site the beginning of October 2010.

IV.  Information about the conference venue
Situated on the peninsula between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, Stanford University is in the heart of Silicon Valley, not far from magnificent redwood forests and the vineyards of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys.  Stanford has a special culture and history to offer the Digital Humanities, sharing both rich traditions in the humanities, arts, and sciences, and a deep kinship with the world of computing, beginning well before the late 1930s founding of Hewlett-Packard by two recent Stanford graduates in a Stanford professor’s now-legendary garage, and continuing through the founding of Google by two other Stanford graduate students in the late 1990s.  We welcome new pioneers of DH2011 to Stanford.

V.  Bursaries for young scholars

A limited number of bursaries for young scholars will be made available to those presenting at the conference by the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).  Young scholars who wish to apply for a bursary will find guidelines on the ADHO website http://www.digitalhumanities.org later this fall (roughly November 1st).  More details will be issued about this subject in the next few weeks.

VI.  International Program Committee

Arianna Ciula (ALLC)
Dominic Forest (SDI-SEMI)
Cara Leitch (SDI-SEMI)
John Nerbonne (ALLC)
Bethany Nowviskie (ACH)
Daniel O’Donnell (SDI-SEMI)
Dot Porter (ACH)
Jan Rybicki (ALLC)
John Walsh (ACH)
Katherine Walter (ACH: Chair)

The Australia and New Zealand Digital Encyclopaedia Group (ANZDEG) is a loose affiliation of people working on, or associated with, online reference collections. We include people working on small, individual projects and members of large institutions – the definition of “digital encyclopaedia” is deliberately vague so as to encompass a broad range of projects and interests. The group includes people working in eResearch and digital humanities, libraries and archives, museums, web publishing and computing science (link).

(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)