We are delighted to announce the second edition of the Sloane Lab symposium series commencing on the 16th of April 2024, facilitated in collaboration with the Humanities Data Science & Methodology (HDSM) Oberseminar of TU Darmstadt, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS). This seminar invites international speakers whose work is situated at the intersections of collections as data, cataloguing histories and critical archival studies, heritage infrastructures, critical digital heritage, and information science.

The seminar papers explore and foreground:

• Computational approaches as means for historical inquiry, critique and creative takes on data driven research paradigms.
• The potential of digital tools and data aggregations to shed light on the geographic spread, collectors, and knowledge in historical cultural heritage collections.
• Reflections on the contested nature of museum and archival collections and the role of collections as data research in foregrounding overlooked or ignored and marginalised issues like imperialism, colonialism, slavery, loss, and destruction, that have shaped collections.
• The role of digital archives in addressing historical and present-day injustices.
• Creative approaches for virtual exhibition and collection data platforms design.

Paper presentations take place online between the 16th of April and the 16th of July, on Tuesdays at 15:30 BST/16:30 CET.

Register for the event and view the programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.

In a year dominated by a global pandemic and both remote working and teaching, we lost many of the traditional ways that we as scholars could stay connected. One of those, the traditional extra-curricular seminar series that was a coming together space for people at different stages of their career, had to go online. And that’s just where we went.

While elements of the seminar culture have not been easy to replicate online, the shift to virtual did present some opportunities, one of which was to work collaboratively across what would otherwise be prohibitively wide distances. In this case, it was a chance for the UCLDH team to work together with colleagues at Stanford’s CESTA (Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis) to co-host the Digital Humanities Long View seminar during the spring of 2021. It was a chance to share scholarly culture, to build new bridges, and to help postgraduate students get involved in networking and professional development opportunities that were increasingly difficult to arrange during a pandemic.

Logo of the Digital Humanities Longview Seminar, with a world map showing the location of each of the seminar’s speakers and of the two co-host organisations (Stanford CESTA & UCLDH).

The Long View for us was about understanding that research happens in context. About asking questions of how Digital Humanities (DH) got where it is today. Our seminar series explored some of the key socio-historical, political and cultural contexts of DH research as a means of building understandings of how we all ended up here and what that means for the future of the field. It’s been an opportunity for newcomers to understand how the field has developed, and for established practitioners to consider their work as part of a larger movement with competing influences, ambitions, and blindspots.

Having finished our first programme of talks, we’re incredibly pleased with the Long View series. We were grateful to host 11 wonderful speakers from five countries and three different linguistic backgrounds. We had the support of 17 different postgraduate students and early career researchers who acted as respondents to the papers and co-hosted the proceedings. And we had tremendous and engaged audiences from around the world, reaching 650 people across the series.

Some of the talks have been video recorded and remain online on the CESTA website, and we invite you to watch them if you missed them live: https://cestastanford.github.io/schedule.html

And we’re pleased to announce that we plan to continue our collaborative seminar series next year, building upon what we’ve established with our friends at Stanford.

That means we’ll once again be on the lookout for postgraduate students who want to get involved and build both their skills and professional networks. If any UCL postgraduate students or offer holders for 2021-22 would like to represent UCLDH as a postgraduate respondent at next year’s events, please contact Dr Adam Crymble directly for an informal conversation.

Finally, a huge thanks to our speakers, convenors, colleagues, and respondents, who supported this seminar: Ian Milligan (Waterloo), Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins), Zephyr Frank, Quinn Dombrowski, Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford), Riva Quiroga (Programming Historian), Scott Weingart (Notre Dame), Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara (Colorado), Amy Earhart (Texas A&M), Valérie Schafer (Luxembourg), Jane Winters (London), Agnieszka Backman, Amanda Wilson Bergado, William Parish, Daniel Bush, Giovanna Ceserani, Laura Stokes, Anna Toledano, Victoria Rahbar, Maciej Kurzynski, Yunxin Li, Lakmali Jayasinghe, Merve Tekgurler, Mae Velloso-Lyons (CESTA); Adam Crymble, Julianne Nyhan, Lucy Stagg, Hannah Smyth, Nenna Orie Chuku, Madeline Tondi, George Cooper, Jin Gao, Malithi Alahappruna, Opher Mansour, Marco Humbel (UCL) and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger (KCL). It has been a wonderful and collegial opportunity and we valued it tremendously.

The Digital Classicist London 2018 seminar programme is now confirmed and published online. The seminar series this year addresses the tension between standardisation and customisation in digital and other innovative and collaborative classics research. The topic encompasses all areas of classics, including ancient history, archaeology and reception (including cultures beyond the Mediterranean). Seminars will be pitched at a level suitable for postgraduate students or interested colleagues in Archaeology, Classics, Digital Humanities and related fields.

Institute of Classical Studies

Fridays at 16:30 in room 234*, Senate House south block, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
(*except June 1 & 15, room G21A)

ALL WELCOME

Seminars will be screencast on the Digital Classicist London YouTube channel, for the benefit of those who are not able to make it in person.

Discuss the seminars on Twitter at #DigiClass.

UCLDH recently hosted a fantastic talk by Victoria Van Hyning, Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Entitled ‘Humanities Crowdsourcing on the Zooniverse Platform‘, Victoria took us on an in-depth tour of the many crowdsourcing projects delivered by Zooniverse, which started with Galaxy Zoo, ten years ago. Zooniverse has since then grown rapidly, now reaching out to an amazing 1.5 million volunteers with over 50 bespoke projects, and a free DIY project builder option too. We discussed what inspires volunteers to take part (answer: penguins), how crowdsourcing gives access to content not normally available and quality control. Victoria has very kindly agreed to share her talk with all:

[slideshare id=75713896&doc=uclvvhmay2017-170505155122]

Last week I had the great pleasure to host our most recent UCLDH Seminar. Our guest speaker was Claudia Mendias, Manager of the Library Digital Services team at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), who addressed a full room of DHers and Librarians from across London and beyond. Entitled ‘Managing library collections with friends, favours and a spoonful of sugar’, Claudia took us on an enlightening journey of the amazing digital content SOAS holds, and the library systems and research tools which support scholarship. From the advantages and responsibilities of open source platforms, to the systems and tools used to manage the growing digital resources within the collections, you too can enjoy the talk.

[slideshare id=73603283&doc=ldsspoonfulsugarpublic-170324161021]

Many thanks to Claudia for agreeing to share her slides.

This week sees the final seminar in this Summer’s series.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2015

Friday August 15 at 16:30 in room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Sarah Hendriks (CISPE: Centro Internazionale Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi, Naples): ‘Digital technologies and the Herculaneum Papyri’

The technology available today could not even be dreamed of over 250 years ago when the Herculaneum Papyri were first discovered. Although technological developments have always been crucial for accessing the papyri, the dawn of the digital age and the subsequent innovations in technological resources have seen a dramatic increase in our ability to read these long-buried texts. Drawing on examples from PHerc. 78, the so-called Caecilius Statius, this paper will outline the history of technology and the Herculaneum papyri, and how changing resources have, and continue to enable, new discoveries among this unique collection.

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

The full abstract is available on the seminar programme page.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2015

Friday August 7 at 16:30 in room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Usama Gad (Heidelberg): ‘Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum Encoded Corpus (GALEN©)’

GALEN is a long-term project to produce the first comprehensive digital corpus of translations between Greek, Arabic and Latin. The project seeks not only to include the medieval translations from Greek into Arabic (8th-10th Century AD) and again from Arabic into Latin (11^th -13^th Century AD), but also to comprise the modern translations of Greek and Latin literature into Arabic (19^th -21^st   Century AD). Moreover, the project would ideally include Arabic translations of Greek and Latin Papyri found in Egypt. The main idea behind this project is then to integrate as much Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum sources as one could in both Arabic and classical studies, presenting these sources to both scholars and students in a digital format with open access license CC BY-SA.

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

The full abstract is available on the seminar programme page.

The full 2015 programme is available on the Digital Classicist London seminar page.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2015

Friday July 31 at 16:30 in room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Federico Aurora (Oslo): ‘DAMOS – Database of Mycenaean at Oslo’

DĀMOS is an annotated corpus of all the published Mycenaean texts, allowing for a corpus linguistics approach to the study of the earliest attested Greek dialect. Text files, reproducing the most updated editions of the texts, have been imported into a relational database (MySql) and are now being annotated for morphology, syntax and lexical information. Noteworthy is that DĀMOS allows for storing multiple, competing analyses of a given linguistic unity (e.g. a word). A rich set of metadata, including – automatically imported – detailed epigraphical information, is also available for searches and can, thus, be crossed with linguistic data. Online edition.

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2015

Friday July 24 at 16:30 in room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Saskia Peels (Liège): ‘A Collection of Greek Ritual Norms Project (CGRN)’

This talk presents the project A Collection of Greek Ritual Norms, abbreviated CGRN (University of Liège). The CGRN is an online collection and database of over 200 Greek inscriptions with a religious subject matter, notably normative texts concerning sacrifice and purification. Using the EpiDoc XML standard, we have lemmatized the inscriptions and encoded geographic, chronological and thematic information, so that this corpus will be searchable in many different ways. Thus, our website serves not only scholars wanting to study individual inscriptions, but we hope that our tool may further our understanding of what are usually called ‘sacred laws’ more generally.

As always the seminar will be followed by discussion over wine and refrshments.

ALL WELCOME

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2015

Friday July 17th at 16:30, in Room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Hugh Cayless (Duke)

‘Integrating Digital Epigraphies (IDEs)’

Integrating Digital Epigraphies (IDEs) is being developed as a Linked Data platform for digital epigraphy. The first round of development leverages data from partner projects including the PHI’s Searchable Greek Inscriptions project, the SEG, the Claros concordance of epigraphical publication data, and epigraphy articles in JSTOR to develop a set of web services. Identifiers from any of the projects may be used to retrieve related data from any of the others. The goal of IDEs is not to be a portal or aggregator superseding partner projects, but a data hub that allows all of them to leverage each other’s work.

As always the seminar will be followed by discussion over wine and refrshments.

ALL WELCOME