Last night, there was an excursion to the BASE King’s Cross, which is a brand new innovation hub (a.k.a. a place) for people with bright ideas to come and work. There is a similar venue in Shoreditch, called IDEALondon.  From what I understood, they are part of UCL Advances, which is the entrepreneurial arm of UCL, supporting students successfully launch their business. They offer funding, free training and some interesting events – check them out!

BASE King’s Cross communal area.   Photo: Sarah Davenport

We also heard some interesting people talking about their business…

Playbrush is a device that you can attach to any toothbrush and it will turn your brushing routine into a fun game, where you help a tooth fairy defeat some horrible bacteria. It’s to be used by children, but yeah, some grown people might enjoy it too (no self-pointing fingers). The device is a bit pricey, but because it’s detachable and reusable, you’ll only need one per household. In case you’re interested in buying, you can use the code base15, which will give you 15% discount until the end of November. The iOS version of the game launches next week and the Android version two weeks after, and they are shipping for Christmas.

Next, there was Interesting Content.  With clients like Disney, Tesco and 7thingsmedia, they are a digital video production agency, admittedly telling stories informed by data (our BFF in DH), creating online content.  They are located at BASE King’s Cross and are also hiring! Although I don’t remember the mention of an email address, there is a contact form in the website.

Before these two guys, there was a girl who spoke about how pitching her business idea to UCL Advances was the best decision she’s took. Maybe she said it was the best experience she’s had. Either way, she said it was really good, and spoke highly favourably about it. Like most of us, UCLDH students, she has a humanities background, but that didn’t stop her from pitching her tech business idea – and it should not stop anyone. If you are a UCL student and have an idea that you think it’s brilliant, get in touch with them. They might be able to advise you and point you into the right direction. You might even get some funding!

One extra thought!

I noticed that even though the speakers were into humanities and worked with digital, they had no clue what Digital Humanities is. Well, I guess most of us don’t really know, but we should at least aim to make it more fashionable (like using italics). We have a mixture of undergrad (and cultural) backgrounds and different academic and professional aims – and that’s a huge advantage! We know different things, look at problems from different points of views and will have different solutions. That probably means we will have different definitions of what DH is because DH will be applied differently by each one of us. But there’s one common thread, somewhere, beyond JavaScript and XML.

I’d love to know your thoughts about this, so if you’d like to get together to talk about this over a coffee, get in touch!

Authors: Christina Kamposiori & Vasileios Routsis

Monday 9^th December 2013 saw our conference ‘Affective Experiences: media art, design & research’ which took place at the Parasol Unit: foundation for contemporary art. This conference was a great opportunity to close the conversations we started on February on the context of the AHRC funded project ‘New Media, Audiences and Affective Experiences’.

The project aimed to establish a platform for creative dialogue and collaboration for doctoral students from City University London, Kings College London, Middlesex University, New London Graduate School (NLGS) and University College London in the academic fields of Creative Industries and Practice, Art and Design and Digital Humanities. In this context, we were honoured to represent UCLDH as a distinguished partner of this collaborative effort. During the lifetime of the project, we organised three seminars that took place at the City University London, discussing research methods in the direction of understanding audience engagement and cultural experience through digital technologies.

Through our one day conference we aimed to bring together artists, PhD students and established academics and researchers from a variety of disciplines, including art and design, cultural and creative industries, media studies, museum studies and the digital humanities. Participants presented their research and discussed new developments on understanding and measuring affect and audience experience in the digital age.

In particular, our keynote and panel speakers addressed issues from a wide and diverse spectrum of perspectives, ranging from the theoretical aspects of affect and perception in relation to audience experience to the more practice-based ones. For example, we had the opportunity to hear from artists and museum professionals on the innovative ways they used to engage with audiences, such as interactive installations, experiments and digital applications. In addition, we looked on methodologies and applications for furthering audience/user related-research; that is also when Professor Melissa Terras presented Textal.

Concluding, this conference was a stimulating experience and we hope that the end of this project will be a start for new collaborations and discussions on the issues of affect, audience/user experience and digital technologies in the Arts & Humanities and Culture.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Irida Ntalla, PhD Candidate at City University London (project’s principal co-ordinator), Marianne Markowski, PhD Candidate at Middlesex University (programme committee member), Anastasia-Yvoni Spiliopoulou, UCL Digital Humanities MA Graduate (conference volunteer) and Kathianne Hingwan (conference volunteer) for the great collaboration!

The 2014 OCWC Global Conference is being held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. One of the local organisers is a completing MA/MSc DH student, Davor Orlic.

The 10^th annual OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on April 23-25, 2014. The OpenCourseWare Consortium and the Knowledge for All Foundation are jointly organizing the event whose special theme is Open Education for a Multicultural World.

Submissions of papers are invited on all topics related to open education for the conference proceedings, and proposals for workshops.

The conference will be organised around four tracks:

• Research and Technology
• Open Educational Policies
• Pedagogical Impact
• Project Dissemination

Submission deadline: December 1st 2013.

Full details are on the conference website and downloadable as a PDF.

UCLDH and 4Hum have been very busy producing a new infographic, The Humanities Matter, using statistics and visualisations to show just how important the Humanities are. Please feel free to share!

We are really pleased to announce that Textal, our text analysis app created in collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, is now available for download!

Textal is a free smartphone app for iOS that allows users to analyze documents, web pages and tweet streams, exploring the relationships between words in the text via an intuitive word cloud interface. The app generates visualizations and statics that can be shared without effort, which makes it a fun and useful tool for both research and play, bridging the gap between text analysis and mobile computing. We also see it as a public engagement activity for Digital Humanities.

You can read more at www.textal.org, and download Textal for free in the iTunes app store and we’re also on twitter, at @textal.

If you have an iPhone or and iPad, please try it out and send us your feedback.

This week’s Digital Classicist seminar has a double bill with one of the speakers being a UCLDH PhD student at DIS.

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2013
16:30 Friday July 12 in room STB2, Stewart House (the far side of the courtyard towards Russell Square), Senate House.

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16:30
Eleni Bozia (University of Florida)
The Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project

This presentation will introduce the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project, a digital toolbox meant to assist individual epigraphists, archaeologists, institutions, and museums. Our project is an open-source, cross-platform web-application designed to facilitate the digital preservation, study, and electronic dissemination of ancient inscriptions and other archaeological artifacts. It allows epigraphists to digitize in 3D their squeezes using our novel cost-effective technique, which overcomes the limitations of the current methods. Also, it gives users the option to perform automatic morphological analysis and comparison between archaeological artifacts digitized in 3D, such as statues, coins, lamps, and vases.
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17:30
Greta Franzini (University College London)
A Catalogue of Digital Editions:
Towards a digital edition of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei

The oldest surviving manuscript of St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei dates back to the early fifth century, and most research on it predates the 1950s. Its much debated provenance and authorship, due to being contemporary with Augustine himself, are as intriguing as its rare palaeographical features and marginalia. I am creating a detailed catalogue of extant digital editions to examine best practice in the field of digital editions. Lessons from this catalogue will be presented to help scholars better understand the field of electronic editing, and further to inform the production of my electronic edition of De Civitate Dei.

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All are welcome

The seminars will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information, see the seminar website.

Thursday 6th June, 9:30am-5:00pm

Room G31, Foster Court

As part of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE), UCL, together with its project partners, is hosting a one day workshop on 6th June on the theme: Social Media and the Museum.

General workshop theme: how social media is changing museum practice and visitor experience; how social media can be integrated into museums and collections.

This is a one day workshop with talks from a range of academic and non-academic social media experts, targeted at doctoral students and early career researchers. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion as well as hands on practical experience. Workshop places are strictly limited and so early registration is necessary. Please register via Eventbrite.

Please see the SMKE website for full programme information.

Registration is also now open for the SMKE conference on 2 & 3 July.

Kim Martin from Digging Digital Humanities has written a blog post about her recent research visit to UCLDH. We’re glad to see our various mugs make such a prominent appearance!

Claire Ross writes about the Social Interpretation project:

The Social Interpretation project was a one year Research and Development exercise joint funded by the NESTA / Arts Council / AHRC digital R&D Fund, and Imperial War Museums (IWM).  At its heart, it aimed to bring successful social interactions already found online and apply them across IWM’s collections – making social objects out of museums objects.  The aim being to increase spread and engagement of  IWM collections.

Museums’ objects have too often been seen as purely historical objects. They aren’t. Rather, they are social objects, inspiring emotional attachment, discussion, debate and action. This project is at the forefront of capturing and representing what audiences feel and say in response to our collections and subjects.

Social Interpretation aimed to holistically represent the discussions about, and sharing of, our objects by audiences. The intention was to do this seamlessly across all of the museums digital outputs (in-gallery, on-mobile and on-line). Making museums objects truly social.

The project essentially applied the models and insight found in social networks, and successful interactions online generally, and applying them wholesale to museum collections.

You can find out more about the project process at http://blogs.iwm.org.uk/social-interpretation/.

Or Read the final report from NESTA: http://www.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/sites/default/files/case-study-documents/Digital_RandD_CaseStdy_SocialInterpretation.pdf

Or Watch a snazzy video.