As the clock ticks to midnight, I thought I would start the Day of Digital Humanities with a post about Playing the Margins, a public engagement project led by MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser. Sian and Paris have both taken Digital Resources in the Humanities and Historical Bibliography, and we are delighted to see them putting their learning (and previous experience) into practice in this project, funded by UCL’s Train & Engage Scheme.

Paris and Sian write:

The aim of Playing the Margins is to bring drama students and actors into UCL Special Collections to engage with early printed books relating to their interests. The project is being supported by the Public Engagement Unit and Special Collections at UCL. The workshops concentrate on readers’ marks and annotations, and give participants insights into how earlier readers left traces of their engagement with dramatic (as well as non-dramatic) texts. Inspired by our studies of digital humanities and historical bibliography at UCL DIS, Playing the Margins is an experiment in using digital tools to explore reading practices and dramatic performance.

In the workshop, participants will be invited to reflect on their own marking practices in scripts and play-texts, and to think about taboos or proscriptions relating to writing in books. Then, participants are presented with examples of interesting annotations, ownership marks and other readers’ marks taken from UCL’s Special Collections, so they can explore the continuities between their reading/annotating practices and those of early readers. The workshop concludes with participants inscribing virtually a photographic image of a text they have encountered, using a digital tablet which captures handwriting. Their recorded hand-written engagements will form the basis for an online blog and exhibition, which will also showcase participants’ further written and/or spoken reflections on the workshop.

We’re really looking forward to hearing more about Sian’s and Paris’s experiences and findings through the project, and especially, to following the blog that they are in the process of setting up. Watch this space (and Sian’s Day of DH blog) for more.

The next DDH, number 11, will be held on the 23^rd March.  The topic of this Decoding Digital Humanities will involve discussions about “A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities 2011”.

Start: Mar 23, 2011 5:30:00 PM

End: Mar 23, 2011 7:30:00 PM

Location: G24, Foster Court, UCL

A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (Day of DH 2011) is a project documenting a day of computing humanists around the world on March 18th, 2011. More details about Day of DH 2011 can be found at: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities_2011.

You can get a feel about what some of the UCLDH team got up to last year here.  We want to hear peoples experiences, who took part and why.  Is it a good project, how could it be expanded?

There is also a reading:

Rockwell et al 2010: A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities 2010. (pp.208-211). London: Office for Humanities Communication. in HTML, PDF,or  XML

We have also decided to change locations of DDH.  The Wheatsheaf was incredibly noisy, despite it serving a decent pint, we couldn’t hear ourselves think. So we shall be trying inside UCL for a change.  Foster Court has a new Common Room, with lovely red sofas.  Wine will be provided!

Hope to see you there.