Text Encoding in the Digital Humanities

March 12, 2010 at 12:18 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

I was recently looking for a good article on Text Encoding in the Humanities and found this article written by Allen H Renear. It is a good introduction to Text Encoding and posits a excellent argument on why it is important.

This chapter will provide a general orientation to some of the historical and theoretical context needed for understanding both contemporary text encoding practices and the various ongoing debates that surround those practices. We will be focusing for the most part, although not exclusively, on “markup”, as markup-related techniques and systems not only dominate practical encoding activity, but are also at the center of most of the theoretical debates about text encoding (link)

Cite as: A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

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Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

March 11, 2010 at 1:46 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

http://www.dariah.eu/

What is DARIAH?

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is a project to support the digitisation of arts and humanities data across Europe. (((Strictly speaking, that should be “DRIAH.” Maybe history was dry enough already.)))

DARIAH brings together researchers, information managers and information providers. It gives them a technical framework that enables enhanced data-sharing among research communities. (((One quails at the awesome power of state-supported European digital culture.))) (link)

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The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities

February 24, 2010 at 3:15 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

This conference recently held at Yale looks very interesting. One of the organisers, Miriam Posner, also has a Digital Humanities blog (link).

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)

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Digital Classicist

February 22, 2010 at 2:28 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

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/

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DHO Summer School 28 June – 2 July 2010, Trinity College, Dublin

February 22, 2010 at 10:26 am · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, humanities computing

Registration is now open for the 2010 Summer School. Please see the registration page for further details.

The Digital Humanities Observatory in conjunction with NINES and the EpiDoc Collaborative is pleased to offer the DHO Summer School 2010. It will bring together 60 Irish and International humanities scholars undertaking digital projects in diverse areas to explore issues and trends of common interest. Workshops and lectures will offer attendees opportunities to develop their skills, share insights, and discover new opportunities for collaboration and research. Activities focus on the theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues relevant to the needs of digital humanities projects today.
The full summer school package offers participants four week-long workshop strands to choose from, a second day–long workshop and two lectures all on innovative topics by leading experts and theorists in digital humanities with additional options of private consultation time with a digital humanities specialist and evening social activities.
For those unable to attend the full Summer School, it is possible to register for the one-day workshop and/or one or both of the lectures (link)

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Manuscript account of Newton’s apple made public

January 19, 2010 at 12:53 am · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, humanities computing

The manuscript is one of a number published online to mark the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, and can be accessed at www.royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages (from the Age)

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TEI by example

January 16, 2010 at 2:23 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

The Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) of King’s College London, and the Department of Information Studies of University College London, are pleased to announce that funding has been secured to develop the online resource “TEI by Example”. Featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), these online tutorials will provide examples for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts (link).

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Digital Humanities in India

November 29, 2009 at 4:29 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

I am  not sure if there is a defined ‘Digital Humanities’ field in India (where I am at the moment), but there is activity occurring in numerous places. The Library Science is one area to find Digital Humanities activities in India as per this International Conference on Digital Libraries in New Delhi early in 2010.

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).

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On being critical…

November 17, 2009 at 4:19 pm · Filed under digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing

A recent post I placed on Humanist; one of the most important academic initiatives in the Digital Humanities run by Professor Willard McCarty of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. In this post, I sort of hijacked the subject somewhat but this needed to be said because as I see it, the otherwise wonderful infrastructure agenda in the Digital Humanities in this instance lacks clarity and purposefulness.

From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: critical thinking

What I think all this has to do with computing is in our understanding
better what computing has to do with the culture in which it has surfaced.
The utilitarian argument (”the computer is useful”) is so trite, so dull, so
incapable of supporting for long the professional activity we would like to
see given a better place in the sun. The principle of reprocity that governs
human relations says we need to be useful for sure, but to attract the sort
of students we want as well as keep ourselves alive intellectually I’d think
we need to offer something with a real bite to it. What has that bite? Not a
totally paranoid vision, though the thrill of the threat of it is a start.

Dear Willard and Humanist,

This is an interesting argument and given the institutional arrangements of the Digital Humanities, they aren’t going to be resolved quickly. I think where we find ourselves in the Digital Humanities is wedged somewhere between a contemporary version of CP Snow’s Two Cultures argument. But rather than wedged between ‘Science’ and ‘Humanities’ we find ourselves stuck somewhere between highly skilled technical  labour and academic labour. They are both two very valuable and different cultures with divergent approaches to work, merit, aspiration, and research significance. This division is especially problematic in the UK context given the history of the class system where working class kids went to technical school and middle class kids were given the opportunity to become academics. This of course changed significantly with mass tertiary education and the rise of the Polytechnics.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Call for Nominations for the 2011 Antonio Zampolli Prize

October 27, 2009 at 5:35 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

The Antonio Zampolli Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organisations (ADHO). Now in its inaugural year, the prize will be given
every three years to honour an outstanding scholarly achievement in
humanities computing. It is presented by the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organizations (ADHO) on behalf of its constituent organizations: the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association
for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital
Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI).
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What to do with 30 million books?

October 26, 2009 at 7:07 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, eresearch, humanities computing

(Posted to that wonderful Digital Humanities list, Humanist).

Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:22:57 +0100
From: Jockers Matthew <mjockers@stanford.edu>
Subject: Possible Text Mining Opportunity at Stanford

Friends,

As I’m sure many of you already know, Stanford has been closely
involved with Google’s book scanning project, and we (Stanford) are
currently preparing a proposal for the creation of a text mining /
analysis Center on campus. The core assets of the proposed Center
would include all of the Google data (approx. 30 million books) plus
all of our Highwire data and all of our licensed content. We see a
wide range of research opportunities for this collection, and we are
envisioning a Center that would offer various levels of interaction
with scholars. In particular we envision a “tiered” service model
that would, on one hand, allow technically challenged researchers to
work with Center staff in formulating research questions and, on the
other, an opportunity for more technically advanced scholars to write
their own algorithms and run them on the corpus. We are imagining the
Center as both a resource and as a physical place, a place that will
offer support to both internal and external scholars and graduate
students. We are looking at creating fellowship opportunities and
post docs as well as other ways of encouraging and supporting
scholarship.

I am writing to you specifically because I think this will be
something you are interested in but also because at this stage of the
proposal we are looking for some external validation that this corpus
would be of value and that the research it would support would inspire
new questions and new knowledge. I have already polled our Stanford
faculty, and the response (especially in the humanities and social
sciences) has been very enthusiastic. My hope is that you might be
able to send a few words (at most a short paragraph) that I could add
to a section of our proposal that is titled “Scholarly Interest and
Research Potential”.

Hope you are all well and getting your abstracts polished for London
in 2010.

Matt

–
Matthew Jockers
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers

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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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Call for papers:Digital Humanities 2010

October 4, 2009 at 5:14 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

Next years Digital Humanities Conference is to be held at King’s College London (c0-hosted by CCH and CeRch). The call for papers is now out.

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Explore 44,500 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments

September 30, 2009 at 8:25 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, humanities computing

(A wonderful new resource from the JISC Digitisation Programme)

Previously unpublished recordings of Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
talks from the 1980s online go online today at the JISC-funded Archival
Sound Recordings website of the British Library at <http://sounds.bl.uk>

Featuring talks and debates with top cultural, artistic and political
figures of the day, this latest addition the archive offers a chance to
explore in detail cultural directions in the UK from 1981 to 1994.

Alistair Dunning, JISC’s digitisation programme manager, said: “The rich
intellectual heritage embedded in the spoken word is an often neglected
source for research and learning. JISC is delighted to support the British
Library to release the vivid ideas, resonant discussions and crucial issues
that make the ICA Talks such a powerful library of ideas.”
Read the rest of this entry »

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