We are delighted to report that Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh, of UCL Information Studies and UCLDH have been awarded funding from the University of Trier’s Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungszentrum (HKFZ) for a project entitled ‘Digital Humanities as Wissensraum: uncovering hidden histories (c. 1949-1980)’.

The application of computing to the Humanities is not new and can be traced back to at least 1949, when Fr Roberto Busa began researching the creation of an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors. Notes and contributions towards a history of the computer in the humanities have appeared in recent years; however, our understanding of such developments remains incomplete and largely unwritten.

Anne and Julianne will gather and make available sources to enable the social, intellectual and cultural conditions that shaped the early take up of computing in the humanities to be investigated. The project will draw on an interdisciplinary method bundle from oral history, digital humanities and historical-cultural studies. With the aim of capturing memories, observations and insights that are rarely recorded in the scholarly literature of the field they intend to carry out interviews with ‘pioneer’ or ‘early adopter’ scholars and practitioners from c. 1949 until 1980 (that is, from main frame computing to the coming of the personal computer).

An international symposium in summer 2011 will address all aspects of the project’s methodology as well as bring together a small group of ‘early adopter’ scholars to discuss and record the early days of DH. This will be followed by online and print publications to support future research into the topic.

This should be a great initiative and we at UCLDH are very much looking forward to taking part in it. Watch this space for announcements of the project’s website, Advisory Board and the symposium.

— forwarded by Tim Davies,  Events and Administrative Officer from the Oxford Internet Institute —

The Remix Cinema workshop is organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, (University of Oxford, UK) in collaboration with UNIA Prácticas y Culturas Digitales (Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, ES), and is funded by the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Beyond Text programme.

Website: www.remixcinema.org

Abstracts deadline: January 7, 2011.

Context

In August 2010, the remix movie Star Wars Uncut was the first user-generated production to win an Emmy Award. Other online platforms such as wreckamovie.com enable online communities to form for independent and open source filmmaking, harnessing distributed forms of collaborative co-creation rather than relying on traditional organisational structures. Cloud-based editing suites have begun appearing: Stroome.com was launched in April 2010 by USC Annenberg with the tag-line “mix it up. mash it out”. Digitalised photos, videos, and sound, easily accessible through popular websites, constitute a diverse online repository of content that is being used for artistic remix purposes. Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a court case giving exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions to amateur remix video artists sharing their works on e.g. YouTube. VJ’s and live cinema artists (e.g. Dj Spooky, Eclectic Method or SOLU) have permeated multiple cultural settings, ranging from mainstream contexts of entertainment to museums and other spaces devoted to the institutionalisation of art practices.

The examples outlined are just a few fitting under the umbrella term of “Remix Cinema”, and point to ways in which networked devices and resources are facilitating new artistic audiovisual practices and cultures. The concept of ‘remix’ describes a broad set of social and cultural practices centered around the fragmentation and re-ordering of already existing and new content, whether text, sound or images. This 2-day multi-disciplinary workshop focuses on these diverse creative practices, particularly in the context of the contemporary socio-technical media environment. It brings together people interested in understanding and shaping remix cinema: doctoral students, established scholars, practicing artists, and anyone else interested in addressing themes related to questions including:

• How is the contemporary media-scape influencing artistic audio-visual creation?
• What can we learn from the changing practices in remix cinema?
• How are new models of economic support (e.g. crowdfunding) changing productions of cultural objects?
• What methodological and theoretical challenges arise in empirical studies on remix cinema, and how do we overcome these?

Call for presentations & papers

The workshop committee welcomes proposals on any social, critical, cultural, aesthetic, political, technical, economic or legal aspects of remix cinema practices, cultures and works. We particularly welcome contributions that report on empirical studies and adopt innovative methodological approaches. Each presentation should last for a maximum of 15 minutes. Participants may present finished studies or works-in-progress, as the workshop also serves as a forum for gaining valuable feedback and exchanging ideas. All proposals will be peer reviewed by at least two members of the workshop’s academic committee (Oxford Internet Institute faculty).

Presenters are invited to submit full papers which will be eligible for review and possible inclusion in a subsequent ISBN publication on remix cinema.