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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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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That Camp at Digital Humanities 2010

March 30, 2010 at 11:10 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

That Camp, is a ‘user generated’ conference focussing upon the tools, methods, and theoretical issues within the Digital Humanities. It originates from the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in the US and has been held in a number of other locations. ‘That Camp’ London to be help immediately before the Digital Humanities conference at King’s College London on 6th and 7th July. Digital Humanities occurs on the 7th to 10th July. I hope to see you there (link).

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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).
Read the rest of this entry »

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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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