Menzies Lecture by Professor Graeme Davison, Monash University, Australia

October 23, 2009 at 9:32 am · Filed under events, history

Professor Graeme Davidson, an Historian from Monash University in Australia, delivered the annual Menzies Lecture at King’s College London on Tuesday Night (20th October).  The lecture is one of the events from the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College. In his lecture titled ‘Narrating the Nation’ Graeme discussed the foundation narratives that settlers societies such as Canada, Australia, and the US have in common and the religious undertones of such narratives (I believe the transcript will be online again soon). The event was the first official event held in the Anatomy theatre at King’s recently renovated by the Centre for eResearch (CeRch) and Professor Alan Reid of Theatre Studies.

Professor Graeme Davidson

‘Narrating the nation’

Professor Carl Bridge, Director of the Menzies Centre

Dr Ian Henderson, Lecturer at the Menzies Centre and his partner Kwesi.

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Decoding Pasts, Building Futures (Digital Humanities lecture)

October 21, 2009 at 11:33 am · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing

Inaugural Lecture

by Richard Beacham, Charlotte Roueché & Harold Short

Friday 23 October 2009
17.30, Edmond J Safra Theatre, Strand Campus

We have chosen to give a joint inaugural presentation of our work, because we all work in densely collaborative areas, in a manner which is not necessarily familiar to Humanities scholars.

We will be presenting how our individual researches have developed, how we have worked together, and what we hope for the future.

We are particularly keen that this event should inaugurate and inspire new activities among our friends and colleagues (link).

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Report back: IRCHSS Symposium: Digital Humanities – New Frontiers, Trinity College, Dublin, 14 October 2009

October 16, 2009 at 3:29 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, events, humanities computing

A one day seminar was held at Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday 14 October to discuss Ireland’s contributions to the Digital Humanities and the possible futures of the field within Ireland. http://dho.ie/node/634 The seminar, held in a skilfully restored 19th Century Anatomy lecture theatre, was attended by representatives from government, the Irish Research Council (IRCHSS), universities, and industry (Microsoft, IBM, Intel). The keynote speaker was Professor Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s External Research and former head of the UK’s eScience Core Programme. Other attendees included the Irish Minister of Education, the Provost of Trinity College, the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory Ireland, and representatives from IBM and Intel’s research divisions.

Professor Hey discussed ‘eScience’ and how it may be a new way to do science. He discussed the shift from experimental science to data intensive science. He explained that building datasets, using datasets, and analysing datasets had become a ‘new paradigm’ within scientific research. However, this shift is not exclusive to scientific research and ‘eScience’ offers new opportunities to the humanities as well. But there is a need to put data into a form and create the tools that are useful for the humanities (putting data into a useful form is partly the work of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s and the Digital Humanities Observatory). He showed some of the work of Microsoft including a video presentation, transcription and annotation system called Project Tuva. This project features the work of Dr Richard Feynman, a famous scientist at Cornell, and allows users to search and annotate videos of his lectures. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ .

Although not really Digital Humanities, he did show some of the other work of Microsoft’s 800 plus research scientists scattered around the world. Some of this work admittedly made me a bit nervous, especially Microsoft’s data centres that are each about the size of Dublin. The data centres represent a shift in Internet thinking from the autonomous computing and storage capacities of desktops (and various institutional computing facilities), to large centralised warehouses controlled by corporations such as Microsoft. Professor Hey touted the benefits of data centres for ‘cloud computing’ (ie. use of tools and services at a remote location), but in my mind, these centres give a lot of control to Microsoft and we must take it on good faith that Microsoft will always have our best interests in mind.

Martin Curley, Director of IT innovation at Intel Information Technology (based in Ireland), responded to Hey’s talk, but unfortunately at times, deferred to the flabby arguments of technological determinism with the usual utopian visions of ‘more computers make things better’ (why do utopian visions never imagine free Guinness?). He did make some interesting points about the ‘grand challenges’ facing the world and how these are, in part, being addressed through European Commissions Framework 7 Programme (focussed upon building the research infrastructure capacities in Europe). Humanists must always work alongside scientists in addressing ‘grand challenges’ as we already know that the ice caps are melting and that the world is running out of oil, but we also desperately need to understand the potentially catastrophic societal dimensions of this (and surly part of the cause is rampant consumerism driven by corporate globalism, but I would never infer such a thing in such company).

Other presentations during the day included more content-specific presentations such as the magnificent 1641 Depositions Project, presented by Dr Marie Wallace, that contains 20, 000 pages of witness testimonials about the massacre of Protestants in Ireland in 1641. Dr Seth Denbo discussed the DARAIH project (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and its aim to link researchers to important data sets held in major data centres throughout Europe. The project has 14 partners in 10 countries and plans to build a ‘discovery architecture’ so that researchers can find important data resources and incorporate them into their working practices and solve ‘real world’ research problems.

Dr Susan Schreibman, the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), discussed the work of her centre and emphasised the importance of building the human infrastructure as well as the technical infrastructure to support the research community. She explained that the Digital Humanities is not only about technical capacities, it is also about people and practices. I would like to think this is always the case, but often the short-term practical solution, devoid of the critical, contextual, and reflective apparatus of the humanists, triumphs. If we don’t understand the humanistic context of the technologies that we use (ie. how they help us understand human society), then we don’t always know how to apply the right technical solution to the right humanist problem. Computing, if poorly considered, can also damage scholarship and our relationship with the human record.

The seminar ended with a reception at the Provost’s house, Professor Andy Orchard, on the grounds of Trinity College.

Projects/papers/resources presented at the seminar include:

• Project Tuva (Video annotation system), Microsoft External Research,
  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
• The Digital Future is now; A Call for Action for the Humanities, Christine Borgman (article),
  http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1232&context=borgman
• DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)
  http://www.dariah.eu/
• European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme,
  http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/
• 1641 Depositions Project
  http://dho.ie/drapier/node/105
• Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO)
  http://dho.ie/
• Christ on the Cross Project
  http://christonthecross.org/index.html
• The Irish in Europe Project (Virtual Research Environment)
  http://www.irishineurope.com/
• A number of excellent poster presentations were also given at the event (many of the details of the projects can be found on the DHO’s DRAPIer projects database http://dho.ie/drapier/ )

Dr Susan Schreibman with the Provost of Trinity College, Andy Orchard.

Anatomy lecture theatre, Trinity College, Dublin

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Report back: ‘Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web’ Birmingham, 24 September

September 29, 2009 at 7:04 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, events, humanities computing

I attended the ‘Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web’ workshop on Thursday (24 September) organised by the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham. There were presentation by many leading figures of electronic textual editing from the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, Ireland, and Britain. The workshop was organised to discuss the movement towards online collaborative tools for scholarly editing and the problems and opportunities associated with this. Peter Robinson the Director of the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing and organiser of the event outlined the major issues as 1) ownership and control, 2) sustainability, and 3) interoperability (these were discussed in detail at a separate session on the second day) .

Joris van Zundert from the Huygens Institute in The Hague spoke first about moving humanities tools towards ‘networked services’. Many tools are developed for individual projects and are not often re-usable within other projects. By providing  tools online (or ‘micro services’ that can be plugged into a generic software frameworks), other projects may use them to say, parse TEI XML texts, tokenise texts, or apply other methods required to transcribe and annotate text. His vision,  shared by many projects, is for scholars to obtain their text from digital repositories, pipe it through a number of micro-services, and then end up with annotated and transcribed data. The particular content that Zandert is working with is critical editions of Middle Dutch; not easily automated through Optical Character Recognition Systems (thus a collaborative translation system is required).

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Quick Response: Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 #oxsmc09

September 21, 2009 at 5:14 pm · Filed under conferences, events, internet, political communication, video, video diary, web2.0

(Transcript below if you can’t follow my polemical prose; and sorry but the synchronisation in this clip has a mind of its own).

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.
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Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009

May 21, 2009 at 4:27 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, design, digital humanities, events, governance, humanities computing, internet, political communication, web2.0

On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that many of the regulating methods employed by them were outside of the rule of law. His contention was that many ‘Web 2’ companies have immense and increasing social and economic power within the fabric of our lives and are regulating their sites in a rather ad hoc and random way in terms of banning application developers, individuals, and groups that do not adhere to their governance structures. He used a number of examples to support his thesis, plus introduced a simple graph to illustrate emergent styles of governance:

Top-down

Hierarchy >poligarchy

Bottom-up

As an example of a ‘bottom-up’ governance structure Zittrain cited Wikipedia which includes a deliberative system to manage thorny editorial decisions. As a top-down system of governance he cited Facebook; although Facebook is beginning to include the community in decisions relating to its structure and functionality. He used the term ‘social governance’ to describe this bottom-up governance approach and suggested ways in which this approach may be designed into a system (through flagging certain tasks that help tap into the ‘reservoir of good will’ of the community). A well-designed system should have mechanisms to ask users for their input.

Although I tend to agree with many of the arguments of Zittrain, I feel there is a tendency to overstate the importance of sites such as Facebook and Youtube to the broader public. Sure they are popular, but this isn’t the British Library, the University of California, or the Library of Congress we are talking about! They are just large and fashionable web sites; a small part of the fabric of our complex lives. And commercial companies will perhaps always act in their own interests; either commercially or ideologically.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of bill of rights/responsibilities that is general to the operation of the Web within a certain geographical region balanced with the specific values of the site in question. There is nothing wrong with sites asserting behaviour norms upon users; but then again governance structures should be transparent and open; not outside of acceptable norms of the broader public sphere. A site should never assert policies that are deemed racist nor discriminatory (perhaps this is Zittrain’s anxiety when he claimed than many sites operate outside of ‘the rule of law’). The relationship between the community and the platform should always be fair and equitable; especially in large user-based sites such as Facebook. In my mind, governance structures, whether online or off, should always be open and transparent.

One of the respondents to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state) asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be reconsidered. He also claimed (from his experience) that that the issues raised by Zittrain are not well-known in the UK;  especially in senior government levels. As an historian (and not a legal expert), my  scepticism relates to the actual significance of the entire debate.  I suppose that the significance of the debates depends on the importance the public places on systems such as Facebook and their governance structures. I may agree with Eric Hobsbawn that Terrorism is more a perceived threat in the UK that an actual threat (to the state), but then again the public is led to believe otherwise so it now painfully significant.  So if the debates about governance are perceived to be important by the public; then they will become important. So we may have a ‘Facebook Parliament’ in the making deliberating about the rise of rudeness on Facebook . They should start with the Tube system!

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Queer@King’s

October 23, 2008 at 12:26 pm · Filed under events

Queer @ King’s is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary research group that has been operating in the School of Humanities since 2003, often with the support of the Annual Fund. Already an important feature in the research culture of the University of London for colleagues interested in gender and sexuality, Queer @ King’s joined the HRCs in November 2006 (Link)

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Under the Southern Cross

September 10, 2008 at 7:27 pm · Filed under events

The Weston Room, Maughan Library & Information Services Centre, Chancery Lane

Tuesday 9 September – Saturday 13 December 2008
9.30-17.00, Monday to Saturday

>From classical antiquity Europeans speculated on the existence of a continent in the Southern Hemisphere and imagined what it might contain. The voyages of men like Abel Tasman in the seventeenth century began to replace speculation and fancy with facts, while the voyages of Cook in the following century laid the foundations for the eventual settlement of the newly-discovered southern lands of Australia and New Zealand. This exhibition explores the experiences of the early European settlers as they began new lives under unfamiliar skies filled with strange constellations, such as the Southern Cross, and the effect they had upon their new homelands.

New South Wales was originally conceived as a penal colony to deal with Britain’s problem of overcrowded prisons; against the expectations of many, it became a functioning society. The colonial settlements of South Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, were largely modelled on the mother country. In both Australia and New Zealand the experience of colonial settlement had a colossal – though in some ways differing – impact on the indigenous populations. As the exhibition reveals, disease, displacement and conflict with settlers were the results, leading in the case of the Tasmanian Aborigines to their practical annihilation.

The same spirit of curiosity that had led the Dutch and the British to explore the Southern Hemisphere was soon turned by the early settlers to the exploration of their new homes. In the exhibition we look at the early explorers of the Australian interior and their motivations. Australia and New Zealand offered scope for scientific exploration and we look at how their unique flora and fauna were viewed by naturalists and what impact that European settlement had on this wildlife.

The majority of items on display are from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historical Collection, which was transferred on permanent loan to King’s in 2007.

Access to the exhibition is free. On arrival at the Maughan Library, please follow the signs to the Weston Room. Please note that visitors who are not registered members of the Maughan Library are required to complete an exhibition ticket on arrival at the Library. Further details are available on the Special Collections web pages, where you will also find a guide to the exhibition.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/library/spec/exhib/

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JISC Conference 2008: Enabling innovation

April 9, 2008 at 11:03 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, internet

Start date: 15 April 2008 09:00

End date: 15 April 2008 16:00

Venue: International Convention Centre, Birmingham

Follow the conference online

If you’re not attending the conference, you can follow what’s happening on the day (15 April) with:

• Live video-streaming⁵ of the opening and closing keynote speeches
• Conference social networking site⁶ so you can network online
• Micro-blogging of the parallel sessions (Twitter) conference tag: jiscconference08
• Live image sharing of the conference day (Flickr)
• Podcasts of interviews and recordings of parallel sessions

Plus, after the conference there will be:

• Screencasts of parallel session presentations (PowerPoint and audio – Slideshare)
• Videos of some of the more popular parallel sessions

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IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies

October 3, 2007 at 9:06 pm · Filed under collaboration, conferences, digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, web2.0

IEEE DEST 2008
IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies

26th-29th February 2008
Phitsanulok Thailand

Deadline for full paper submissions: October 14th, 2007

http://www.ieee-dest.curtin.edu.au/2008/tracks.php#trackE-humanities

eHumanities — Track Chairs: Marc Wilhelm Küster and Matthew Allen

Digital Ecosystem is defined as an open, loosely coupled, domain
clustered, demand-driven, self-organising collaborative environment,
where each species is proactive and responsive for its own benefit or
profit.
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LONDON SEMINAR IN DIGITAL TEXT AND SCHOLARSHIP

September 28, 2007 at 1:44 am · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing

The London Seminar in Digital Text & Scholarship focuses on the ways in which the digital medium remakes the relationship of readers, writers, scholars, technical practitioners and designers to the manuscript and printed book. Its discussions are intended to inform public debate and policy as well as to stimulate research and provide a broad forum in which to present its results. Although the forum is primarily for those working in textual and literary studies, history of the book, humanities computing and related fields, its mandate is to address and involve an audience of non-specialists. Wherever possible the issues it raises are meant to engage all those who are interested in a digital future for the book. The Seminar is sponsored by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Convenor: Dr Willard McCarty (King’s College London). NB:

Wednesday 10 October 2007; Room ST274 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
David Ganz, (Professor of Palaeography, King’s College London)
‘Medieval Libraries in the Digital Age’

Thursday 15 November 2007; 6.00pm; ST274 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
Paul Eggert (University of New South Wales)
‘Text as Algorithm and as Process: A Critique’

Thursday 13 December 2007; 5.30pm; NG15 (Senate House North Block)
Jan-Christoph Meister
‘The Myth of the Digital or: Why Humanities Computing is Really Business as Usual’

Thursday 17 January 2008; 5.30pm; Room ST274 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
James E. Tierney
‘British Periodicals, 1660-1800: An Electronic Index’

Thursday 21 February 2008; 5.30pm; Room ST275 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
Andrew Prescott
‘Digital Manuscripts: Retrospect and Prospects’

Thursday 13 March 2008; 5.30pm; Room ST274 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
Charles Henry
‘The Talisman of Format: Celebrating the End of the Book’

Thursday 17 April 2008; 5.30pm; Room ST274 (Stewart House, 2^nd Floor)
Marilyn Deegan
‘I’ve read the news today, oh boy!’

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CHArt (COMPUTERS AND THE HISTORY OF ART) TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE

May 28, 2007 at 11:47 pm · Filed under art, conferences, design, digital humanities, events, history, humanities computing, web2.0

DIGITAL ARCHIVE FEVER

Thursday 8 – Friday 9 November 2007
Central London Venue to be confirmed

Museums, galleries, archives, libraries and media organisations such as publishers and film and broadcast companies, have traditionally mediated and controlled access to cultural resources and knowledge. What is the future of such ‘top-down’ institutions in the age of ‘bottom-up’ access to knowledge and cultural artifacts through what is generally known as Web 2:0 – encompassing YouTube, Bittorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, Google, MySpace and more. Will such institutions respond to this threat to their cultural hegemony by resistance or adaptation? How can a museum or a gallery or, for that matter, a broadcasting company, appeal to an audience which has unprecedented access to cultural resources? How can institutions predicated on a cultural economy of scarcity compete in an emerging state of cultural abundance?

For the twenty-third CHArt conference we are looking for papers that reflect upon these issues, particularly in relation to visual culture. We particularly welcome contributions from those working in either ‘traditional’ cultural organisations or those involved in new forms of cultural access and distribution.

We welcome contributions from all sections? of the CHArt community: Art Practice; Art History; Museums; Galleries; Curation; Archives; Libraries; Education; Media and Broadcast Production; Cultural Assets Management and Access; Hardware; Software; Theory.

CHArt also hopes to offer a bursary scheme again this year (supported by the AHRC ICT Methods Network) to Post Graduate students presenting papers.

Please email submissions (a three hundred word synopsis of the proposed paper with brief CV of presenter/s and other key figures) by 30 June 2007 to Hazel Gardiner (hazel.gardiner@kcl.ac.uk).

Dr Charlie Gere
Chair, CHArt

CHArt
c/o Centre for Computing in the Humanities Kings College, University of London Kay House
7 Arundel Street
WC2R 3DX

- CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 30 JUNE 2007 -? CALL FOR PAPERS -

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International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments

May 18, 2007 at 1:52 am · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working in the areas of virtual research environments¹ (VREs) and collaborative work environments (CWEs). Both concepts are characterised as providing consistent and dependable work environments for particular kinds of work organisation, emphasising the dynamic establishment of collaborative work contexts between independent partners. Further aspects such as the mobility of work activities and requirements such as security and confidentiality also play a role in both concepts. Despite these similarities, it would seem that the development of research programmes and the establishment of research communities within these fields has to date progressed independently. As a consequence, there is a danger of wasteful duplication of effort, conceptual divergence and technical incompatibility. The workshop’s aim is to address these concerns by soliciting contributions from the research community dealing with topics such as (link).

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400 Years of Jamestown and ‘Virtual Jamestown’

May 9, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under digital humanities, education, events, history, humanities computing

It is 400 years since the British first landed in North America and none other than the Queen of England is in the United States to celebrate. And here is a site that I worked on some years ago produced by the Virginia Centre for Digital History at the University of Virginia. I did the navigation for the site way back in the year 2000 and it seems to have moved about a little since then (but I had yet to learn about CSS). Sorry about that…hope you can look beyond the design because the site contains some extraordinarily important documents about one of America’s most important events (link).

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JISC Workshop at EVA Conference, London: New directions in e-Science and visual perceptions

May 2, 2007 at 9:53 pm · Filed under art, digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, web2.0

This free workshop is part of the EVA Conference held in London on the 11th July at the London School of Communication in Elephant and Castle.

This proposal is led by JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk) and the Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC – www.ahessc.ac.uk ) to profile and encourage discussion around the creative and research uses of e-Science tools and methods in the Arts & Humanities within the UK.

Within this context, e-Science is defined as a specific set of advanced technologies for collaboration and sharing resources across highly distributed network environments: so-called grid technologies, and technologies integrated with them, for instance for data-mining, simulation and visualization.

The half day workshop will be comprised of several thematic areas which will focus on how the take-up of e-Science is developing new areas of research in the Arts & Humanities community, including the performing arts and humanities research.

There will be three plenary sessions to introduce key topics and provide contextual background information to a variety of work being undertaken. A set of presentations will further offer demonstrative examples of activity by projects funded by JISC, AHRC and EPSRC under the e-Science ‘umbrella’.

The outcomes of the workshop will contribute directly to a special issue in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, and a THES themed article (link).

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