Job Alert – Lecturer in Data Science for Society

By Adam Crymble, on 25 January 2023

UCL’s Department of Information Studies is seeking a Lecturer in Data Science for Society for a full time academic post. Deadline for applications is 26 February 2023.

“We are seeking an innovative researcher to appoint to a full-time lectureship beginning in August 2023 who can teach and research in the broad field of data science and its role in a well-functioning society. We are particularly interested in applicants who could contribute to ongoing or new research in one or more of the following areas: data-driven research in the humanities, addressing social issues arising from the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning, data-driven decision making and social justice, or emerging related interdisciplinary areas. The purpose of the research should be to contribute new interdisciplinary data-driven knowledge of relevance to a humanities or social science discipline.”

Full Details available on the UCL Jobs portal: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-ucl-jobs/details?jobId=5061&jobTitle=Lecturer%20in%20Data%20Science%20for%20Society

Job Reference: B03-01494

Dickens Letters Hackathon

By Lucy Stagg, on 13 January 2023

6pm on Friday 3 February to 5pm on Sunday 5 February
Birkbeck (University of London)

Interested in digging into datasets? Looking to meet like-minded hackers and software enthusiasts? Have ideas for digital approaches to literary and historical data you’d like to try out? Join us for a two-day event where, working in small teams, you can develop exciting ideas using the letters of Charles Dickens.

Expressions of Interest are invited for IT professionals, programmers, hackers and digital humanists. No significant prior knowledge of Dickens is required: an introduction to the context of the letters will be provided. You will work in teams of fellow hackers with a TEI-encoded dataset of Dickens’s letters over a weekend, with the aim of producing an idea for an innovative piece of software, an app or a game based on the letters of one of the most famous writers in English.

The event will include a free tour of the Charles Dickens Museum, and a chance to work intensively with other like-minded hackers over the course of a weekend. The event is free of charge, and refreshments will be provided. Prizes will be awarded for the best app or game, together with an opportunity to take your idea forward. The Charles Dickens Museum will be open to participants to visit at their leisure on the afternoon of Friday 3 February, before the start of the hackathon. If you have any questions, please contact editor@dickensletters.com.

You can register your interest here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSI7EiyMLbybpYcSbn-682dNgbI-HQ32lJLea_2yE3zHMGFQ/viewform

Leon Litvack & Emily Bell
Editors, the Charles Dickens Letters Project
https://dickensletters.com/

The Sloane Lab Community Fellowships Round One

By Lucy Stagg, on 5 December 2022

The Sloane Lab are seeking to appoint Community Fellows (ten in total until summer 2024) to contribute to “The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections”, led by University College London (UCL) in partnership with the Technische Universität Darmstadt, British Museum (BM) and Natural History Museum (NHM). The fellow will undertake creative, critical, practice and/or research-led projects with the Sloane Lab, demonstrating the new forms of analysis and interpretation the project will unlock.

The fellowship comes with an award of £7,500. We welcome applications from outside as well as inside the United Kingdom. The tenure of the fellowship does not require residency in the UK. All fellowships will be hosted remotely online.

This advertised role offers an exciting opportunity for individuals with an interest in contributing to the Sloane Lab (https://sloanelab.org/), including but not limited to, digital humanists, artists, computer and data scientists and heritage practitioners (community or institution based). The Fellows will exemplify the research capacity unlocked by the Sloane Lab by undertaking creative, critical and/or research-led projects. Research areas may include but are not limited to local and family history, object biography, critical heritage, indigenous and devalued knowledge, or the transferability of the technology developed by the Sloane Lab.

Start Date (round one): 27^th March 2023 or based upon negotiation

End Date: The post is funded for 3 months

Application deadline: 9^th January 2023

Application details and the application form: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-ucl-jobs/details?jobId=3089&jobTitle=Community%20Fellow%20

For questions and queries please contact: sloanelab@ucl.ac.uk

The Sloane Lab is aligned with UCL’s commitment to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where all belong (for more information see: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/equality-diversity-inclusion/equalityucl). We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce, including people of the Global Majority, disabled people, LGBTQI+ people, and women.

Job Alert – Lecturer in Digital Archives

By Adam Crymble, on 27 October 2022

UCL’s Department of Information Studies is seeking a Lecturer in Digital Archives for a full time academic post. Deadline for applications is 20 November 2022.

“We are seeking an innovative researcher and lecturer to appoint to a full-time post beginning on January 2023, with a teaching focus of relevance to our MA/MSc Digital Humanities and MA in Archives & Records Management programmes. We are particularly interested in applicants who take Post-Colonial or Non-Western centric approaches and offer one or more of the following: Digitisation; Digital Inequities; Digital Ethics; Anti-Opressive Approaches to Digital Cultural Heritage; Artificial Intelligence and its use in Cultural Heritage; Digital Communities and Activism; the Impacts and Affects of Big Data and Data Modelling, Representation, Visualisation and Simulation and interdisciplinary applications of these areas to other research activities within the Department.”

Full Details available on the UCL Jobs portal: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi

Job Reference: 1888211

Job Alert – Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Humanities

By Adam Crymble, on 25 October 2022

UCL’s Department of Information Studies is seeking a Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Humanities for a full time academic post. Deadline for applications is 20 November 2022.

“We are seeking an innovative researcher to appoint to a full-time lectureship beginning in January 2023. We are seeking applicants who answer research questions of relevance to a humanities discipline, by applying or developing digital research methods in an interdisciplinary way. This may include methods such as but not limited to network analysis, stylometry, computer vision, machine learning, data modelling, text-mining, textual analysis, corpus linguistics, sound or video analysis, or emerging interdisciplinary methodological areas. The purpose of the research should be to contribute new interdisciplinary knowledge to a humanities domain.”

The full details are available online.

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CUI638/lecturer-in-digital-methods-in-the-humanities

Looking for DH Jobs in London 2022

By Adam Crymble, on 8 July 2022

My postgraduate digital humanities students are working away diligently on their dissertations, but understandably they’ve also got one eye on what might come next. For most of them, that means a transition into the world of work.

With a great set of interdisciplinary skills, the ability to talk tech, and an aptitude for humanistic ways of thinking, there are a lot of pathways a DH graduate might pursue. But going on the job market, particularly if you’re non-local, can be a bit overwhelming. For UCL’s DH graduates, there is a great UCL Careers team who can help support you with the transition, including how to develop key skills around CVs and interviews. If you are a UCL grad, please make them your first port of call.

I also wanted to reflect on some places I might go looking if I was in your shoes, interested in something that can put your new DH skills to use. So I’ve compiled the following non-exhaustive list of ideas aimed at those graduating with an MA/MSc. I hope it proves useful, and please share it with others on the lookout.

• Guardian Jobs: A job board that is popular with arts & heritage, charities, education, technology, social enterprise, and media companies. You can also set up free email alerts to hear about jobs within your area of interest.
• Knowledge Quarter: a group of organisations around UCL that are interested in knowledge and culture, many of whom that work at the intersection of DH and other fields. It’s worth checking out their member organisations and exploring opportunities with them. They include organisations such as the British Museum, Charles Dickens Museum, Google, UCL, and the Wellcome Foundation. It’s a great way to get a list of organisations that might like to employ someone with your skillset.
• Jobs.ac.uk: A job board aimed at the university sector. This includes both jobs that require a PhD, and those that do not, in a wide range of roles such as student support services, marketing, and library services. There are some international opportunities, but most jobs are UK-based. You can set up free email alerts based on your criteria.
• Big Tech: don’t be afraid to check out the big tech companies, many of which have London offices. Google, TikTok, and many other big companies have a footprint in the UK, and it’s worth keeping an eye on them and offering your skills to their teams.
• LinkedIn: having spoken to some of our graduates from the previous cohort, they suggested having a good presence on LinkedIn, which can be a great way to find out about job opportunities and connect with people hunting for graduates.
• Talk to DH Labs: There are a number of universities working in digital humanities and you never know when they’ll have roles available. Sometimes that’s short-term teaching or research support, and sometimes it’s in a range of other capacities, from project management to more technical work. Don’t feel bad about reaching out to your tutors to ask about things coming up, or to send an email to one of the other DH groups in London.

I’m sure there are other ideas that are worth pursuing, but I hope this helps some DH graduates in their search.

Seeking a new UCLDH Associate Director (ECR), a voluntary role

By Lucy Stagg, on 19 May 2022

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) was founded in 2010 as a cross-faculty research centre that brings together a vibrant network of people who teach and research digital humanities in a wide range of disciplines, in the heart of London.

We are seeking a new Associate Director – Early Career (ECR) from within the UCL community to help shape the strategy and direction of UCLDH in its second decade. We define ‘Early Career’ broadly, and include those currently registered on a PhD programme. We particularly welcome expressions of interest from candidates with the following interests or expertise:

• Early career researcher support
• DH skills and training
• Community building
• Accessibility in DH
• Multilingual DH

As an equal member of the UCLDH Management Group, you will participate in meetings and decisions, and setting the agenda for future activity. Meetings usually take place remotely, approximately six times per year. You are welcome to participate fully or co-lead in the range of activities UCLDH offers, as well as to help establish new ones. However, as an unpaid leadership role, you will not be expected to contribute to day-to-day tasks that would better be classed as employment. The successful candidate will receive mentorship from one of the fellow directors.

The Centre hosts a number of initiatives, including the collaborative Digital Humanities Longview seminar and the Susan Hockey lecture, as well as physical infrastructure in the form of a digitisation suite. UCLDH is led by a management group: Steven Gray (CASA – Director), Adam Crymble (Information Studies – Deputy Director), and Ulrich Tiedau (Dutch – Associate Director), and coordinated by Lucy Stagg (Institute of Advanced Studies). UCLDH is committed to a harassment-free space for all members, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or technical experience. The new member of the Management Group will be expected to champion these values.

This post is linked to the UCL community and candidates should be a student or member of staff at UCL.

How to Apply:

Please send a 1-page cover letter and 1-page CV to lucy.stagg@ucl.ac.uk by Monday 20th June 2022.

Candidates are encouraged to seek the support of their supervisors if relevant, but UCLDH does not need evidence of that support.

Informal Queries:

Informal queries can be made to Dr. Adam Crymble, Deputy Director UCLDH at a.crymble@ucl.ac.uk

Penultimate DH Longview Seminar

By Adam Crymble, on 18 May 2022

Join us 5-6:30pm Thursday (19 May 2022) via Zoom for our very own Professor Tim Williams (Archaeology), for the next Digital Humanities Longview seminar, which explores digital scholarship and the Silk Road. Professor Williams’ research considers urban archaeology, especially in Roman, Islamic, and Central Asian contexts. He’s the Director of a long-running research project at Merv, Turkmenistan, which has been operating since 2001. This collaboration between the Turkmenistan Ministry of Culture, the Ancient Merv State Park, and the UCL Institute of Archaeology aims to research and conserve the remains of one of the great historic cities of the Silk Roads.

This webinar is open to the public. Registration is free but required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ko_LDqfrRKeigtE5S4Ci2w

The Digital Humanities Longview seminar is a joint seminar series co-hosted by UCLDH, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (Stanford, USA), and the Centre for Digital Humanities (Uppsala, Sweden).

Vision for Art (VISART) Workshop for interdisciplinary work in Computer Vision and Digital Humanities

By Lucy Stagg, on 26 April 2022

The VISion for Art (VISART) workshop is an interdisciplinary workshop held with the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) on a bi-annual basis. The workshop is now on its 6th edition and has had great success over ten years since starting in Florence (2012), with the 2022 edition in Tel Aviv, Israel. The success has led to VISART becoming a staple venue for Computer Vision and Digital Art History & Humanities researchers alike. With the workshop’s ambition to bring the disciplines closer and provide a venue for interdisciplinary communication, it has, since 2018, provided two tracks for both the technological development and the reflection of computer vision techniques applied to the arts. The two tracks are:

1. Computer Vision for Art – technical work (standard ECCV submission, 14 pages excluding references)
2. Uses and Reflection of Computer Vision for Art (Extended abstract, 4 pages, excluding references)

Full details are available at the workshop website: https://visarts.eu

Keynotes

In addition to the technical works presented it regularly attracts names that bridge the disciplines including (but not limited to):

Keynote speakers from across the years of VISART, images from 2022 public institutional profiles and current affiliation logos.

The inclusion of such a varied collection of Keynote speakers has provided a fruitful discussion on the use of technology to investigate visual content. From its style and perception (Aaron Hertzmann, Adobe) to how is the “hard humanities” field of computer image analysis of art changing our understanding of paintings and drawings (David G. Stork).

VISART VI Keynotes

The VISART VI (2022) workshop continues this tradition of high profile keynotes. It will add Prof Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel of the University of Geneva and Prof Ohad Ben-Shahar of Ben Gurion University to this list and the return of Prof John Collomosse of the University of Surrey.

VISART VI Keynotes

Prof Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is Full Professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland (Faculté de Lettres – School of Humanities), chair of Digital Humanities. From 2007 to 2019 she was Associate Professor (maître de conférences) in modern and contemporary art at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France (ENS, PSL). She is a former student of ENS (Alumni 1996, Social Sciences and Humanities), and got an Agrégation in History and Geography in 1999. She defended her PhD in 2005 at the université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and her Habilitation at Sciences Po Paris in 2015. Joyeux-Prunel’s research encompasses the history of visual globalisation, the global history of the avant-gardes, the digital technologies in contemporary art, and the digital turn in the Humanities. Since 2009 she has founded and managed the Artl@s project on modern and contemporary art globalisation ([https://artlas.huma-num.fr](https://artlas.huma-num.fr/)) and she coedits the open access journal Artlas Bulletin. In 2016 she founded Postdigital ([www.postdigital.ens.fr](https://visarts.eu/www.postdigital.ens.fr)), a research project on digital cultures and imagination. Since 2019 she has led the European Jean Monnet Excellence Center IMAGO, an international center for the study and teaching on visual globalisation. At Geneva university she directs the SNF Project Visual Contagions ([https://visualcontagions.unige.ch](https://visualcontagions.unige.ch/)), a 4 years research project on images in globalisation, which uses computer vision techniques to trace the global circulation of images in printed material over the 20th century.

Prof John Collomosse

John Collomosse is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research where he leads the deep learning group. John’s research focuses on representation learning for creative visual search (e.g. sketch, style, pose based search) and for robust image fingerprinting and attribution. He is a part-time full professor at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey (UK) where he founded and co-directs the DECaDE multi-disciplinary research centre exploring the intersection of AI and Distributed Ledger Technology. John is part of the Adobe-led content authenticity initiative (CAI) and contributor to the technical work group of the C2PA open standard for digital provenance. He is on the ICT and Digital Economy advisory boards for the UK Science Council EPSRC.

Prof. Ohad Ben-Shahar

Ohad Ben-Shahar is a Professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science department, Ben Gurion University (BGU), Israel. He received his [B.Sc](http://b.sc/). and [M.Sc](http://m.sc/). in Computer Science from the Technicon (Israel Institute of Technology) in 1989 and 1996, respectively, and his M.Phill and PhD From Yale University, CT, USA in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He is a former chair of the Computer Science department and the present head of the School of Brain Sciences and Cognition at BGU. Prof Ben-Shahar’s research area focuses on computational vision, with interests that span all aspects of theoretical, experimental, and applied vision sciences and their relationship to cognitive science as a whole. He is the founding director of the interdisciplinary Computational Vision Laboratory (iCVL), where research involves theoretical computational vision, human perception and visual psychophysics, visual computational neuroscience, animal vision, applied computer vision, and (often biologically inspired) robot vision. He is a principle investigator in numerous research activities, from basic research animal vision projects through applied computer vision, data sciences, and robotics consortia, many of them funded by agencies such as the ISF, NSF, DFG, the National Institute for Psychobiology, The Israeli Innovation Authority, and European frameworks such as FP7 and Horizon 2020.

Call for Papers

The workshop calls for papers on the topics (but not limited to):

• Art History and Computer Vision
• 3D reconstruction from visual art or historical sites
• Multi-modal multimedia systems and human machine interaction
• Visual Question & Answering (VQA) or Captioning for Art
• Computer Vision and cultural heritage
• Big-data analysis of art
• Security and legal issues in the digital presentation and distribution of cultural information
• Image and visual representation in art
• 2D and 3D human pose and gesture estimation in art
• Multimedia databases and digital libraries for artistic research
• Interactive 3D media and immersive AR/VR for cultural heritage
• Approaches for generative art
• Media content analysis and search
• Surveillance and Behaviour analysis in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

Deadlines & Submissions

• Full & Extended Abstract Paper Submission: 27th May 2022 (23:59 UTC-0)
• Notification of Acceptance: 30th June 2022
• Camera-Ready Paper Due: 12th July 2022
• Workshop: TBA (23-27th October 2022)
• Submission site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/VISART2022/

Organisers

The VISART VI 2022 edition of the workshop has been organised by:

• Alessio Del Bue, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
• Peter Bell, Philipps-Universität Marburg
• Leonardo Impett, University of Cambridge
• Noa Garcia, Osaka University
• Stuart James, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) & University College London Centre for Digital Humanities (UCL DH)

VISART VI 2022 organisers

Extending the history of digital humanities by 510 million years

By rmapapg, on 30 March 2022

UCLDH was fortunate to be awarded funds through UKRI’s Research Capital Investment Fund in 2019 in a bid led by our previous director Prof Simon Mahony. The bid funded the purchase of a Bruker Tornado M4+ x-ray fluorescence scanner. This is a unique system that uses x-rays to excite the atoms making up a substance which then emit x-rays that are characteristic of the elements making up the sample. The beam is narrow and scans across an object, allowing an image to be built up of the elemental composition. It is situated in the UCLDH Digitisation Suite, with radiation safety provided by the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering.

The system was delivered in February 2020. Events then conspired to delay its commissioning until Summer 2021. It is now fully functional and we are familiarising ourselves with its performance. Importantly, the system is capable of running under a vacuum which allows lighter elements to be detected than is possible with other similar systems. We are in the process of installing a helium pump which will mean we can image objects containing light elements without needing a vacuum.  This is important for many objects of relevance to DH including paper and parchment documents which can be damaged by a vacuum.

Figure 1: The UCL Bruker Tornado M4+ X-ray spectrometer

We were approached by colleagues at the Natural History Museum who had prepared a paper describing a new fossil that needed an image of the elemental composition, exactly what this system can provide. The fossil was of a edrioasteroid, a relative of starfish and sea urchins. With the help of Tobias Salge from the Museum, we scanned the fossil overnight. The x-ray scans supported their other analysis, which showed that its skeleton was partially mineralised and partly soft. Its ancestors had had fully mineralised skeletons which mean that this was the earliest example of an organism that had lost a previously mineralised skeleton. The x-ray fluorescence imaging was able to show that some elements (phosphorus and calcium) were enriched throughout the fossil, but others (iron, zinc and silicon) were enriched only in the hardened regions, suggesting a different elemental composition in life.

Figure 2: Showing the visible fossil (in greyscale) and the heightened levels of iron (in red)

This was an exciting departure for a system that was purchased to support research in DH, but imaging this fossil was too good an opportunity to miss. The work has been published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B:

Zamora Samuel, Rahman Imran A., Sumrall Colin D., Gibson Adam P. and Thompson Jeffrey R. (2022) Cambrian edrioasteroid reveals new mechanism for secondary reduction of the skeleton in echinoderms Proc. R. Soc. B. 289: 20212733 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2733