The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities was founded in 2010, and to celebrate the achievements of the centre over the last five years we are launching a named lecture series, The Susan Hockey Lecture in Digital Humanities. We are especially pleased to announce that Professor Susan Hockey will be giving the inaugural lecture.

Digital Humanities: Perspectives on Past, Present and Future

Wednesday 27 May, 6pm

Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theare, Roberts Building, UCL

In our first installment of the series, Professor Susan Hockey discusses the trajectory of digital humanities from its many years on the fringes to its current position at the centre of the humanities scholarly arena, and its future challenges. Today, conferences, courses and publications in digital humanities abound, and jobs are advertised almost every week. The advent of the World Wide Web shifted emphasis from analytical software to communication and publication tools bringing humanities resources to a much wider audience in classrooms and in the home. The groundwork for many of these new ways of working is in place now. Some time in the future, humanities information sources will be mainly digital. What are the implications of a much broader user community for these resources, and for libraries and archives, the traditional custodians of humanities information sources? How can research in digital humanities contribute to future developments? And what should our students learn in order to build successfully on what has already been achieved?

All welcome, the lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Roberts Foyer.  Please note that registration is required.

For the last year I’ve been co-chairing an ICANN working group on Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information,
an issue which will arise once the current ASCII-based Whois directory of domain name contacts is replaced by a system
allowing domain name holders to input data in their own languages and scripts.

Yesterday was the big day, as the WG’s initial report was opened to
public comment and will stay open till February 1.

At the UCL DigiFest 2014 (ucldigifest.org), the Music Systems Engineering Research Team led by Dr Nicolas Gold (UCL Computer Science/UCLDH) ran a 1.5hr session for people interested in digital music.  Participants learned about building digital instruments using the Pure Data programming language, explored the sonic possibilities of synthesised sounds, and then came together as a laptop orchestra to perform a new work composed by one of the team.

Laptop orchestras are an emerging type of ensemble (beginning about ten years ago with Princeton’s PLOrk) characterised by novel musical controllers, custom-built digital instruments, and hemispherical speakers that give each instrumentalist a strong sense of their own instrument and how it fits within the orchestra.  In keeping with this tradition, the UCL Laptop Orchestra (UCLOrk) uses custom-built hemispheres that were constructed by the Computer Science Department’s Technical Support Group.

We are hoping to make the ensemble a more permanent group as a platform for artistic work and performance research.  More information can be found at bit.ly/UCL-UCLOrk and anyone interested in future participation is warmly invited to contact Nicolas Gold (n.gold@ucl.ac.uk) for more information.

For our final seminar of this series we have four students from King’s and UCL presenting their current research (including one from the current UCLDH cohort).

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014

Friday August 15th in room G37, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU

Wilma Stefani (Masters, King’s College London)
‘Online narratives and public engagement: opportunities and challenges for Public Archaeology.’

Aikaterini Plati (Masters, King’s College London)
‘The Acropolis Museum and its digital engagement.’

Stavrini Ioannidou (Masters, University College London)
‘Lessons to be learned from the Classicists: Instilling a Digital-Humanities mentality among the members of the Modern Greek Studies community.’

Elisa Nury (PhD, King’s College London)
‘Automated collation – is it for Classicists?’

Full abstracts

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme

Details of this week’s Digital Classicist seminar:

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014

Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford) & Gabriel Bodard (King’s College London)
Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names (SNAP:DRGN)

Friday August 1st in room G37, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU

SNAP:DRGN (snapdrgn.net) is an AHRC-funded exploratory project which aims to address the problem of linking together large prosopographies (datsets containing information about persons, names and person-like entities) managed in heterogeneous systems and formats. This paper will explore the background to and results of the work, describe the problems, the data and the tools we can produce to illustrate of the value of the data, and demonstrate research methods for working with the new material and information produced.

Full abstract

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme

Details of this week’s Digital Classicist seminar follow:

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014

Marja Vierros (Helsinki)
‘Papyrology and Linguistic Annotation: How can we make TEI EpiDoc XML corpus and Treebanking work together?’

Friday July 25 at 16:30 in room G35, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Greek documentary papyri provide a rich source for linguists who wish to study Ancient Greek as it was written in everyday texts, preserved directly from antiquity. The corpus is already in digital form, but it does not contain linguistic annotation that would help linguists find interesting structures and forms. This paper presents a preliminary phase of a project focused on annotating the fragmentary and manifold papyrus material using a Dependency Treebank model.

Full abstract

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014

Thibault Clérice (King’s College London)
‘Clotho: Network Analysis and Distant Reading on the Perseus Latin Corpus’

Friday July 18 at 16:30 in room G34, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

How do we handle Latin texts with digital tools? How do we apply to Latin sources technologies and algorithms which have been developed for the linguistic study of modern languages? Clotho is a resource which aims to address these questions in an Open-Source format, providing network analysis, data extraction mechanisms, and document statistics. Using these tools, Lasciva Roma, a project of cultural network analysis around the lexical field of terms related to sexuality, was launched in 2014. This seminar will explore and review this project, focusing on how the community can use these tools, and how to ensure the tools and the data will not be lost.

Full abstract

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme

This week’s Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar:Pietro Liuzzo (Heidelberg)

‘The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy (EAGLE) and Linked Open Data’.

Friday July 4th at 16:30 in room 102 (Athlone), Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU

The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy aims to provide historians and the general public with a curated online multi-text edition which has high quality contents and related contents as well as high quality data in multiple interoperable formats. Linked Open Data principles aim at bringing things together so we have tried to follow those guidelines. EAGLE considered two standards: TEI – EpiDoc and CIDOC CRM and we work towards tools to facilitate wilful alignment as well as coordinated linking via third parties annotations or through the alignment to common vocabularies (of contents), gazetteers and bibliographies.

Full abstract is available.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme is at the Digital Classicist.

This week’s Digital Classicist seminar is given by UCLDH research student Lorna Richardson.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014

Lorna Richardson (University College London)
‘Public Archaeology in a Digital Age’
 
Friday June 20 at 16:30 in room G37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

This paper will discuss the need for diverse archaeological communities to widen participation and engage new audiences on a more collaborative platform. The paper will discuss the results of my doctoral research, which has provided data that can be used to improve user experience, engagement and participation with archaeology and other heritage subjects via Internet technologies, and embed usability and sustainability within digital archaeological projects. Understanding the impact of participatory media will aid archaeologists and those in the heritage fields to promote the advantages of digital engagement and public collaboration, in terms of economic benefit, social justice, learning outcomes, diversifying audiences and the promotion of social inclusion.

Full abstract

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

The full 2014 programme is on the Digital Classicist website.

Julianne Nyhan and the other founding members (Geoffrey Rockwell, Stan Ruecker, Peter Organisciak, Megan Meredith-Lobay and Kamal Ranaweera) of A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) (2009-2012) have won the 2014 CSDH/SCHN Outstanding Contribution Award.  The following description of the project and award is given on the CSDH/SCHN site:

Day of DH is an annual community documentation project that brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day in the spring of each year. Its goal has been to have participants reflect on a fundamental question, “just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants document their day through photographs and commentary using one of the Day of DH blogs.

The Day of DH initiative has received significant attention far beyond its evolving community of participants. The team published an essay on the project in Digital Humanities Quarterly. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on it. Definitions of the digital humanities from the project have been republished in collections such as Debates in the Digital Humanities and Defining Digital Humanities. It has directly inspired projects such as the Day of Archaeology. It has also inspired other communities within digital humanities. The first DíaHD (Día de Humanidades Digitales) was held on June 10, 2013 for those who speak and work in Spanish and Portuguese.

Day of DH has now become a centerNet initiative that moves from institution to institution. The successful transition to a sustainable international initiative is a sign of the impact of this initiative’s origins in Canada.

CSDH/SCHN is honoured to commemorate this founding Canadian group and its extraordinary contribution to the global digital humanities community.