CALL for Paper: Digital Humanities 2010, Stanford, 19-22 June

September 2, 2010 at 12:16 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities

Wow, it seems like I was just there. Here is the call for paper for next years Digital Humanities conference in Stanford
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Digital Humanities 2011
Call for Papers
Hosted by Stanford University

19-22 June 2011
http://dh2011.stanford.edu

Abstract deadline:  November 1, 2010 (Midnight GMT).

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.
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Decoding Digital Humanities (Melbourne)

August 27, 2010 at 3:53 pm · Filed under digital humanities

We held our second DDH last night in the Price Alfred Hotel in Carlton. Individuals from the Public Records Office, the University of Melbourne, Victoria University, and VeRSI showed up. As it was no longer the beginning of semester, the pub was safe from pub-crawling students.  We discussed issues such as history online (and its limitations), the THATCamp in Canberra (in which a number of us are attending on the weekend),  and the use of the TEI in history. I am not sure we actually touched upon the issue that we were supposed to discuss;  ‘the free software movement’, but we did touch upon some important broader Digital Humanities issues. One of which is somewhat ephemeral nature of ‘digital humanities’ practice in Melbourne in terms of the ebbs and flows of the field. There had been numerous computing in the humanities initiatives over the past 15 years that had come in waves of rewards structures and incentives. Many of these had been forgotten, but most of us agreed that it was again a good time to become involved in the field as there is a lot of interesting activity occurring in the field.

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ARC Centre for Excellence in History of Emotions

August 25, 2010 at 7:45 pm · Filed under digital humanities

What an amazing boost to the Australian humanities! A Digital Humanities Centre of Excellence should be next!

“This exploration is framed by a series of seminal questions,” Professor Trigg says. “What happens when European emotional regimes are transported into a colonial context? What role do emotions play in the development of Australian national identity? How do we track emotional continuities and discontinuities between past and present? And what can we learn from older emotional regimes about contemporary social and cultural patterns? (link).

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Australia and New Zealand Digital Encyclopedia Group

August 24, 2010 at 1:51 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities

One of the most important ‘digital humanities’ groups working in Australia is the Australia and New Zealand Digital Encyclopaedia group. They have a meeting coming up soon; possibly in Melbourne. Keep an eye on there web-site or subscribe to their list.

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).

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Decoding Digital Humanities #2, August 26

August 19, 2010 at 12:58 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

Dear Digital Humanists,

Next Thursday 26th , 5.30-7.30 we will meet again in the Prince Albert Hotel, 191 Grattan Street, Carlton, to discuss digital humanities in the pub. ‘Decoding Digital Humanities’ is an informal monthly get together in to discuss all things digital in the humanities.  This is an opportunity to meet others working on digital projects (or thinking about starting one) and is open to staff, students, and faculty.

Again the format of Decoding Digital Humanities has been borrowed from one of the newest centre’s in the field, UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities in the UK. They hold a similar pub event and are eager to collaborate in some way with others working of the intersection of computing and the humanities (I believe a couple of places in the US have now started DDH too!).

This month we will be discussing the Free Software movement
http://www.2cultures.net/ddh/

Have a look at the material and come to the pub to discuss. We will meet down stairs and there is food available. And we can move upstairs if needed.

Tell others and hope to see you Thursday,

Kind regards,

Craig

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The Anxiety of Digital Humanities

August 11, 2010 at 10:26 am · Filed under digital humanities

Digital humanities is an anxiety-ridden set of practices at the intersection of humanities research and computer technology. But the worst thing that could befall DH is forced collective psychotherapy or free prescriptions for Prozac. As long as we are anxious, we will try to find new and interesting things to do (link)

Thanks to Toma for sending the Link

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Google digital humanities project: GAP Project

August 4, 2010 at 11:38 am · Filed under digital humanities

A new Google digital humanities project has been awarded to Leif Isaksen and Elton Barker of the HESTIA project whose workshop I attended recently at Oxford. Having good humanities scholars such as this drive Googles agenda on access and interpretation of the ancient texts they have digitised can only be a positive thing (link).

Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.

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Decoding Digital Humanities (Melbourne)

August 2, 2010 at 1:58 pm · Filed under digital humanities

A small group of Digital Humanities enthusiasts met at the Prince Alfred Hotel in Carlton to discuss all things digital in the humanities.  We did this in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities in London who hold a similar monthly event.

As it was the first week of Semester at the University of Melbourne, the Pub chosen was unfortunately on the route of a College pub crawl so our conversations were in competition with crowds of fresh undergrads complete with loud speaker!

We did manage to discuss some of the activities of the Digital Humanities at Melbourne, including a proposed workshop in the Faculty of Arts showcasing some of the digital projects being developed. As a field, the ‘Digital Humanities’ is not as coherent in Australia as it is in come countries, but there is still interesting work happening in various research and service contexts within a number of disciplines. We discussed the possibility of setting up an ‘Australian Association for the Digital Humanities’ to bring together some of the existing digital projects and forums in the humanities with the possibility of holding a small conference sometime next year.

Although those present did view the video of the Plenary of this year’s Digital Humanities conference by Dr Melissa Terrace, we didn’t really discuss it at length because of the loud-speaker and pub-crawling students. Next time we will bring our own loud speaker.

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Decoding Digital Humanities (Melbourne Chapter)

July 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

In conjunction with University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities, Decoding Digital Humanities is an informal monthly get together in the pub to discuss all things digital in the humanities.  This is an opportunity to meet others working on digital projects and is open to staff, students, and faculty.

The first meeting of this semester will be held at the Prince Alfred Hotel, 191 Grattan Street

Date: Thursday  29 July 2010

Time 530-730PM

To kick off this semester, it is suggested that we engage with the same material as our colleagues at UCL. Melissa Terras from UCL gave the closing plenary at the recent Digital Humanities conference in London which is online as text and video and would be a good point to start the informal discussions. This is from UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities web site.

The annual Digital Humanities 2010 conference held this year at King’s College London was brought to a close on 10 July with a plenary speech by Dr Melissa Terras (UCL). Due to the topical and timely nature of issues raised in the speech, we felt it would make an excellent focus for discussion. The assigned reading for our meetup on the 27th will be:

“Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon”. Text available here. Video available here.

Have a look at the video and text and come along and discuss at the pub. If you have any suggestions for articles, software, funding opportunities any ‘digital humanities’ ideas drop us a line and we will put it on the agenda.  The meeting is organised by Craig Bellamy and Conal Tuohy of VeRSI. craig.bellamy@versi.edu.au, conal.tuohy@versi.edu.au

Decoding Digital Humanities Dates 2nd Semester:

• July 29 (Thursday)
• August 26 (Thursday)
• September 23 (Thursday)
• October 21 (Thursday)
• November 18 (Thursday)

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DH2010, Review, #DH2010

July 21, 2010 at 2:09 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

(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

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As a discipline, we suck online (boo! to Times Higher Ed)

July 16, 2010 at 5:23 pm · Filed under digital humanities

The UK Times Higher Ed published an article about the closing plenary lecture at the Digital Humanities conference in London. But I feel that there is some miscommunication happened. Something was lost from what the speaker, Dr Melissa Terras, perhaps intended and what the author of the Times Higher Ed article wrote.

Since when does the Digital Humanities make web pages? Any one can make a web page and it doesn’t take a classically educated scholar which a PhD and 3 books to do this well.

It takes about 1/2 day to make a web site look good (depending on the size and complexity of the site and the skills of the creator). Someone doesn’t get it.  A dentist has to wash the front window of her/his surgery just as a Digital Humanist has to spell correctly (apologies for my tardy blogging). But this isn’t the whole story.

(Link to Times Higher Ed article)

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THATCamp Canberra: Applications Closes July 23

July 16, 2010 at 5:05 pm · Filed under digital humanities

Just a reminded that applications for THATCamp Canberra; the Humanities and Technology Camp (28-29 August), closes on July 23. These are excellent events and I would encourage digital humanists to attend. I just attended THATCamp London and there were a diverse range of sessions and lots of rigorous debate.  The application process is simple; just log onto the web site and fill in the details. The main thing it to have something to bring to the event as they are highly participatory. Here is the link.

And if you cant make it to Canberra don’t worry as there will be another in Melbourne either later this year or early next year. I will keep you informed.

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Google and the Digital Humanities

July 15, 2010 at 11:20 am · Filed under digital humanities

We’ve given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:

• Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.
• Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.
• Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.
• Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.
• Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.
• Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.
• David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.
• Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.
• Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.
• Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.
• Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.
• Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books (link).

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DH2010 keynote – Melissa Terras: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon

July 15, 2010 at 9:01 am · Filed under digital humanities

Melissa Terras giving the keynote speech at the DH2010 conference, 10th July 2010 (link)

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Back in Melbourne #dh2010

July 14, 2010 at 12:09 am · Filed under digital humanities

I am back in Melbourne after attending the Digital Humanities conference at Kings College London and in my short experience of the event; it was by far the best. I get the feeling that the field is at a pivotal moment in its history and without continued institutional support and strong academic leadership, the field isn’t going to make the transition easily into the next stage (what ever this next stage may be).  We really need to build the field in Australia in a similar way to the Canadians by offering career options, degrees, research funding; all within strong academic departments and centres. The field will always have a service function; this is important, but in Australia we also need to push further into the ‘methodological commons’ and academic research beyond simply delivering someone else’s research from one place to another (or the ‘delivery boy’ scenario). I will write about this over coming weeks. I will try and not aggregate so much on this blog and keep that to 2cultures.net.

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