A reminder: in this week’s Painless Introduction on Wednesday, 2 March, Pete Williams will talk about creating usable websites for people with learning disabilities. This lunchtime event will take place from 13:05 to 13:50 in Room G31, UCL Department of Information Studies, Foster Court, London [announcement | map].

See you there!

We’ve been working on the UCLDH Events section. New and improved, the section now offers a chronological view of upcoming events and sports separate feeds for the individual event series: Decoding Digital Humanities, Painless Introductions and Digital Excursions. UCLDH events will no longer be announced here on the DH blog but event reminders will continue, and weekly batches might be one way of posting such reminders.

Without further ado, here’s the week’s programme:

• On Tuesday, over lunchtime, Simon Mahony and Uli Tiedau will speak on the effort to make higher education course materials available to the general public at no cost via the internet: Open Educational Resources.
• On Thursday, in the evening, Philip Schofield and Valerie Wallace will present on one of UCLDH’s most widely acclaimed current projects: Transcribe Bentham: Taking the Bentham Edition into the Digital Age.

Both events are held in Bloomsbury, they’re open to the public, they’re free of charge, and we hope to see you there!

Many thanks to all those who came along to the painless introduction to paper in the brave new digital world.

The object of the painless introductions is to spark discussion and collaboration. Some of the topics covered today included:

• content versus carrier and the impact of format on text and text on format
• Darnton’s communications circuit
• case study: Watermarks in incunabula printed in the low countries (WILC)
• case study: the Scottish Government’s Burns iphone app
• case study: Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing – Robert Burns. Poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect
• versioning online and in print
• the Wicked Bible
• the impact of book design on e-book design – Van de Graaf’s secret canon
• the Reading Experience database (RED)
• archiving publishing and other corporate records
• what happens when records are destroyed?

The slides are available here, and you can also download a copy of Van de Graaf’s secret canon of book design if you would like to try it on your ebooks / images of books.

If you are a book historian who would like to give a guest talk to our MA LIS / MA ARM / MA Digital Humanities Historical Bibliography students, or who would like to speak about other potential collaborations, please get in touch (email or twitter works best).

The next event in the Painless Introduction series of lunchtime talks will take place on Tuesday, 25 January, in Room G31, UCL Foster Court, 13.05-13.50 hrs. Anne Welsh will speak on Paper in the brave new digital world:

In this Painless Introduction Anne Welsh will discuss the impact of the computer on Historical Bibliography (the study of the book, its manufacture and use). From online catalogues and full-text digitization of rare books and manuscripts to the analysis of large collections of texts, we will look at new ways of accessing and understanding books and their readers.

We hope to see you there!