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Archive for history

New postdoc position at Monash University, Australia

*Post-Doctoral Research Fellow*

*Centre for Electronic Media Art*

*Clayton School of Information Technology
Faculty of Information Technology*

This ARC funded research position investigates the application of
Artificial Life and nature inspired methods to problems in creative
design. The successful person will work cooperatively on all aspects of
the research and will take particular responsibility for the development
of biologically inspired developmental algorithms and interactive
ecosystem models. For this position, candidates should have a PhD or
equivalent doctoral research qualification, or expect this qualification
to be awarded by the time of appointment. Research experience in one or
more of the following areas is essential: Artificial Life, Adaptive
Systems, Evolutionary Computing, Biological Modelling and Simulation,
Computer Graphics, Java or C++ programming. Knowledge and experience
with artistic, design-based or musical applications of technology are
also required.

Salary range: AUD$61,820-$66,360 pa Level A plus superannuation and benefits

Duration: 1 year fixed term appointment

Location: Clayton campus

Contact: Dr Jon McCormack on 9905 9298 or email
Jon.McCormack@infotech.monash.edu.au
<mailto:Jon.McCormack@infotech.monash.edu.au>.

Applications close: Friday, 31 October 2008

—-
Dr Jon McCormack
Co-Director, Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA)
Rm. 144A, Building 63
Clayton School of Information Technology
Faculty of Information Technology
Monash University • Clayton 3800 • Australia
Phone: +61.3.9905.9298 • Mobile: 0412 682 136 • Fax: +61.3.9905.5146
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc
<http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/%7Ejonmc>


The Desmond Tutu Digital Archive

(Another ambitious project from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities here at King’s…see other CCH projects at link)

The purpose of the Desmond Tutu Digital Archive project is to create a multimedia digital archive of the personal papers and recordings of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, which will be made available over the internet free of charge. The Archive will be fully interactive, with tools to facilitate access by people of all cultures, all ages and all levels of learning and experience, not only in South Africa but all over the world. The project is fully endorsed and supported by Archbishop Tutu.

A multi-phase project is envisaged: in the first phases, archive materials held in a number of locations in South Africa will be digitised. These include more than 200,000 pages of documents, over 1,000 hours of live audio recordings, potentially hundreds of hours of video and large collections of photographs (link)


Henry III Fine Rolls Project

The Henry III Fine Rolls Project is a three year enterprise commencing in April 2005, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It aims to publish the Fine Rolls of Henry III from 1216 down to 1248. It is hoped that a second three year project will complete publication down to the end of the reign in 1272.

There is a fine roll for each of Henry III’s fifty-six regnal years held in the National Archives at Kew in the record series C 60. Containing offers of money to the king for a multiplicity of concessions and favours, as well as a great deal of other material, they are of the first importance for the study of political, governmental, legal, social, and economic history.

With the aim of making the material accessible to a wide audience, the rolls are being published in English translation, both in book form with Boydell and Brewer, and on the KCL Website where they are linked to a sophisticated search engine and the digitised images of the rolls.

The project is the result of close co-operation between the The National Archives and the History Department and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s (link).


Peer review and evaluation of digital resources for the arts and humanities

The mechanisms for the evaluation and peer review of the traditional print outputs of scholarly research in the arts and humanities are well established, but no equivalent exists for assessing the value of digital resources and of the scholarly work which leads to their creation. This project proposes to establish a framework for evaluating the quality, sustainability and impact over time of digital resources for the arts and humanities, using History, in its broadest sense, as a case study (link).


What is InscriptiFact?

I am at the e-science earlier adopters forum for Arts and Humanities researchers at NCSA (the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications)  where this project is being presented. It is possible to search the photographs in this project by inscription. Pretty nifty huh?

The InscriptiFact Project is a database designed to allow access via the Internet to high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean Worlds. The target inscriptions are some of the earliest written records in the world from an array of international museums and libraries and field projects where inscriptions still remain in situ. Included are, for example, Dead Sea Scrolls; cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and Canaan; papyri from Egypt; inscriptions on stone from Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus; Hebrew, Aramaic, Ammonite and Edomite inscriptions on a variety of hard media (e.g., clay sherds, copper, semi-precious stones, jar handles); and Egyptian scarabs. These ancient texts represent religious and historical documents that serve as a foundation and historical point of reference for Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the cultures out of which they emerged (link).


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

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 -


Darwin’s letters on the Web

The AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) provided some of the initial advice for this project. And boy did Charles Darwin write a lot of letters!

Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin thought the voyage of the Beagle was a “magnificent scheme” allowing him to spend time “larking round the world”. His delight at the five-year cruise is chronicled in a letter, available online for the first time.The note is one of nearly 5,000 from and to the scientist held in a database at the University of Cambridge (link to BBC).


400 Years of Jamestown and ‘Virtual Jamestown’

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).


What is the digital preservation coalition?

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) was established in 2001 to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base (link).


The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945

The Reading Experience Database is about 10 years old now. It seeks to gather and provide access to (from a community of scholars) evidence of the history of reading in the UK over a 500 years period (pretty ambitious huh?). It is built on some solid conceptual and scholarly ideas, and has just undergone a technical re-fit and will be re-launched in a few days.

Newsflash: At present, we are completing a substantial technical upgrade of the Reading Experience Database. We would like to apologise in advance for any difficulties contributors may encounter while completing online forms during this period. Within the next few months we will be launching a new, more user-friendly interface which we hope will make the process of contributing electronically both easier and faster. In the meantime, we suggest that if you are interested in providing any material for the database, you contact either Rosalind Crone (R dot H dot Crone@open.ac.uk) or Katie Halsey (Katie dot Halsey@sas.ac.uk). (link)


Genevan Sex Crimes Database

Thanks to Alistair Dunning for the Link

Exhibit is a tool from MIT. It “enables web site authors to create dynamic exhibits of their collections. The collections maybe browsed using facetted browsing. Assorted views of the collections are provided including tiles, maps, etc”. It allows anyone to put tabular data online with astonishing ease.
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit

One of the datasets that the AHDS has in its catalogue is the
Genevan Sex Crimes database. A temporary online test version of this database using Exhibit is available online.

http://ahds.ac.uk/collections/exhibit-test/exhibit.htm

Have a go. There a lots of little flaws but the underlying idea is
fantastic.


How to record and transcribe interviews

From the AHDS blog:

One of the increasingly common project outputs is for recorded interviews to be made available as audio files and or transcriptions. There are numerous sources of advice for those planning to do such interviews

http://blogs.ahds.ac.uk/?p=26 


NINES: Networked Infastraucture for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship

Nines is a very interesting Digital Humanities project that utises ‘Web 2.0′ concepts and tools.

NINES includes various kinds of content: traditional texts and documents — editions, bibliographic entries, and critical works of all kinds — as well as “born-digital” materials relating to all aspects of nineteenth-century culture. NINES is a model and working example for scholarship that takes advantage of digital resources and internet connectivity, while allowing scholars to integrate their contributions fully into their local IT environments. It provides scholars with access to a federated digital environment and a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools. A key goal of NINES is to go beyond presenting static images or transcriptions of manuscripts on-screen. Software tools that aid collation, comparative analysis, and enable pedagogical application of scholarly electronic resources expose the richness of the electronic medium.

Over the past ten years a growing body of digital scholarly work has appeared online, nearly all of it executed without peer review processes and none of it integrated except by hyperlinking. NINES is working to establish an integrated publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American. NINES was created as a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, published, and recognized by the discipline (link).


US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

I will have to think about this one and get back to you. I like it a lot, but I have to think about its accuracy; the process is only half the story (and some academics build their career on advancing only half the story) (link)


NSW Migration Heritage Online Projects

The Migration Heritage Centre at the Powerhouse Museum is a New South Wales Government initiative supported by the Community Relations Commission. www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au

They do some excellent online oral history work. See some of the sites that they launched last year (thanks to Annette Loudon Website Coordinator).

Belongings

http://www.belongings.com.au

A Place For The Friendless Female: Sydney’s Female Immigration Depot

http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/friendlessfemale

Objects Through Time

http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/objectsthroughtime

The World Cup Dream: stories of Australia’s soccer mums and dads

http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/worldcup


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