Date: Wed 2nd June

Time: 13:00 – 13:45

Location: Room 433, SSEES, 16 TAVITON STREET, LONDON, WC1H 0BW (map)

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities painless introductions are a series of brief lunchtime talks to introduce researchers to basic concepts and techniques in digital humanities.  As the name suggests, we hope that these talks will be informal and entertaining, speakers will not assume any knowledge of their subject, and there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion. So please do come along, if you are curious about a particular topic or want to find out more about digital humanities without being mistaken for a geek.

Henreitte Bruun is the School Research Facilitator for Arts and Humanities, Social and Historical Sciences and Laws. She will be talking about the practicalities of applying for research funding, especially for digital projects. She will discuss different types of funding, and how to choose the appropriate call or funding body, as well as providing insight into how the process of grant applications works at UCL.

A Brief introduction to one of the UCLDH projects

By Valerie Wallace

Transcribe Bentham is a unique project funded by the AHRC DEDEFI fund and hosted by the Bentham Project in collaboration with the new Centre for Digital Humanities. Its purpose is to engage the public in the transcription of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham, the great philosopher and reformer. There are 60,000 Bentham papers in UCL’s library, many of which are untranscribed and unstudied, but which are potentially of immense intellectual importance. The project is unique in that it is harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing – a relatively new phenomenon – to aid transcription; something which has never been attempted before. We are designing a new on-line transcription tool using mediawiki which will be made available for use by others at the conclusion of the project. Transcribe Bentham is also a public engagement initiative as its aim is to promote Bentham studies generally and to encourage school learners and enthusiasts to participate. It is a heritage learning exercise which engages the community in the preservation and documentation of the nation’s history. An online discussion forum will encourage  input and social interaction thus widening  participation in the field. The community will be actively involved in shaping the presentation of history as the transcriptions will eventually form the basis of new printed editions of Bentham’s works, as well as a fully searchable on-line database. The project will, moreover, raise awareness of UCL, with which Bentham is intimately attached.

For more information about Transcribe Bentham you can visit the Transcribe Bentham blog, Twitter and facebook page

XML? TEI? RDF?        Eh?

Ever wondered what on earth Digital Humanities is?  Who we are? What we do?

Come along to our painless introduction, a brief seminar designed to introduce researchers to basic concepts and techniques in digital humanities.

Date: Wednesday 26^th May

Time: 1pm – 2pm

Venue: Wilkins Haldane Room, North Cloisters, UCL

For information about the event  see, www.autopsiesgroup.com/events and to find out more about the Autopsies Project or The Film Studies Space, see www.autopsiesgroup.com

Events are free and open to all. To register for the study day, please
write to deadobjects@gmail.com

Wednesday, 26 May 2010, a Joint LFAS and Digital
Text & Scholarship  Seminar.

Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:30 – 19:00
Speakers: Michael Whitmore (University of Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Profiling Genres in the Corpus of Early English Drama’

Jointly organised by  London Forum for Authorship Studies and the Digital Text & Scholarship Research Seminar.

In this talk, Michael Witmore (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde University) will discuss their research into the underlying linguistic matrix of early modern dramatic genres using multivariate statistics and a text tagging device known as Docuscope, a hand-curated corpus of several million English words (and strings of words) that have been sorted into grammatical, semantic and rhetorical categories. The talk will focus particularly on the place of Shakespeare’s work in the broader context of early modern drama. Details on this research can be found at www.winedarksea.org.

Michael Witmore is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is the organizer of the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a research collective that is mapping the prose genres of Early English Books online using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics (www.winedarksea.org ). His most recent books are Shakespearean Metaphysics (Continuum) and Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cornell). In addition to serving as textual editor for the Comedy of Errors with the new Norton Shakespeare, he is currently at work on a collaborative study of Shakespearean scenes, characters and objects with the photographer Rosamond Purcell entitled Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare, to be published by Norton in December.

Jonathan Hope is Reader in Literary Linguistics at Strathclyde University, Glasgow.  His The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays appeared in 1994 from CUP, and Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance will appear late this year from Arden.

Digital Classicist 2010 summer seminar programme
Institute of Classical Studies

Meetings are on Fridays at 16:30
in room STB9 (Stewart House)
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU (map)

*ALL WELCOME*
Seminars will be followed by refreshments

• Jun 4 Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
  Reading Between the Lines: unearthing structure in Ptolemy’s Geography
• Jun 11 Hafed Walda (King’s College London) and Charles Lequesne (RPS Group)
  Towards a National Inventory for Libyan Archaeology
• Jun 18 Timothy Hill (King’s College London)  
  After Prosopography? Data modelling, models of history, and new directions for a scholarly genre.
• Jun 25 Matteo Romanello (King’s College London)       
  Towards a Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Canonical References
• Jul 2 Mona Hess (University College London)  
  3D Colour Imaging For Cultural Heritage Artefacts
• Jul 16 Annemarie La Pensée (National Conservation Centre) and Françoise Rutland (World Museum Liverpool)
  Non-contact 3D laser scanning as a tool to aid identification and interpretation of archaeological artefacts: the case of a Middle Bronze Age Hittite Dice
• Jul 23 Mike Priddy (King’s College London)
  On-demand Virtual Research Environments: a case study from the Humanities
• Jul 30 Monica Berti (Torino) and Marco Büchler (Leipzig)
  Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors
• Aug 6 Kathryn Piquette (University College London)
  Material Mediates Meaning: Exploring the artefactuality of writing utilising qualitative data analysis software
• Aug 13 Linda Spinazzè (Venice)
  Musisque Deoque. Developing new features: manuscripts tracing on the net

For more information on individual seminars and updates on the programme, see http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2010.html

We officially launched the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities yesterday! James Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gave a brilliant speech with strong opinions on creativity, culture, and online content.

We are eagerly awaiting responses from cultural and heritage institutions, making the case for freely available digital content as opposed to the paid for model he championed by – as well as considering our thoughts on the matter. We are also seeing what we can do to facilitate that response. Watch this space.

you can read some of the press coverage:

• Why James Murdoch was wrong to attack the British Library, in the Guardian
• “British Library newspaper archive plan riles Murdoch” in the Independent
• Google knows internet can no longer be free, says News Corp’s James Murdoch
  in This is London

Salina Christmas suggested the idea of technoromanticism
Coyne, R., “Introduction” pp. 2-15 and “Ch. 1 Digital Utopias” pp. 19-45 in Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real
Coyne suggests how narratives about the technology, computers are grounded in Enlightenment and romanticism.  He suggests that because of these digital narratives, discourse about technology is subject to similar critiques of romanticism.  This raises ideas about unity, multiplicity and the concept of a Digital utopia.

Unfortunately I was a bit late to the meetup – so I missed about half of the discussion, so if anyone wants to fill me and others in about what I missed that would be great.
When I got there, the discussion was focusing on Pink Floyd and the changes in the way we listen and share music; whether it is a ‘you’ or a ‘we’ exercise. We then moved on to multiplicity on the internet and the construction of multiple identities.

Questions were raised about the idea of the digital culture producing mediocrity and a lack of talent. Causing digital collectives emerging in London?  Suggesting that Technoromantism is a reaction to “the man” , a break away from the constraints provided by an increasingly standardised digital output.  Predominately using visualisations and images rather than text.

This then brought us on to the blending of the digital world with the analog world. Why when told the story about a man who embedded a RDFI chip into the palm of his hand to make his life easier, does it cause a negative reaction?    Do we need those digital identifiers? Is this the next step? Is resistance futile? Are we too far down the digital track?

Finally we discussed gold farming.  Now I hadn’t heard the term before. But is it really economically viable to sell digital games goods in the real world? It sounds bizarre, but its being done.

There is an interesting  Working paper:
Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games
Which is part of the Development Informatics series at the University of Manchester. Well worth a read.

• our new project @TranscriBentham has a facebook site! http://bit.ly/9VaCCn #
• Decoding Digital Humanities #3 meeting is on monday! http://bit.ly/dd1JTp hope to see you there! #
• University of Nottingham 18th May, Robert Allen ‘Going to the Show’: An Experiment in Cultural Archaeology http://bit.ly/clEnVq #
• and Wednesdat 19th May,Robert Allen “Main Street, Carolina”: Digital Tools for Cultural Heritage http://bit.ly/9Lrgcp #

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