We are pleased to announce that UCLDH will be working with the Slade School of Fine Art on a pilot project to see what is held in the Slade Archive and to look at ways in which the information can be made available to a wider audience.  The project is funded by a UCL Arts & Humanities Small Research Grant.

For further information please see the project blog.

On Saturday 17 September,  HIDDEN HISTORIES: SYMPOSIUM ON METHODOLOGIES FOR THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES c.1949-1980, will talke place in UCL, sponsored by HKFZ and UCLDH.  Presentations include, in the following running order:

• Opening Keynote: Beyond chronology and profession: discovering how to write a history of the Digital Humanities, Willard McCarty, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

• Knowledge Spaces and Digital Humanities, Claudine Moulin, Universitaet Trier, Germany

• Unwriting the history of Humanities Computing, Edward Vanhoutte, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature – Ghent, Belgium

• Crowd sourcing: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history, Melissa Terras, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Different stories to be lived and told: recovering Lehmann James Oppenheimer (1868-1916) for the narrative of the Irish Arts & Crafts movement (1894-1925), James G.R. Cronin, School of History & Centre for Adult Continuing Education, University College Cork, Ireland.

• Oral History and acts of recovery: humanizing history?, Andrew Flinn, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Lost origins of Information Science, Vanda Broughton, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• Plus ça change: a historical perspective on the institutional context of Digital Humanities,  Claire Warwick, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

• (Virtual presentation) DH pioneers and progeny: some reflections on generational accomplishment and engagement in the Digital Humanities, Ray Siemens, Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria

• Closing Keynote Data vs. Text: forty years of confrontation, Lou Burnard, Oxford University Computing Services (Emeritus)

• Discussion: towards an oral history of Computing in the Humanities, Chaired by Anne Welsh and Julianne Nyhan, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Thanks to funding from UCLDH and HKFZ, we are now able to invite approximately 10 extra participants, waive their cover fee, provide them with a light lunch and invitation to our evening reception (beginning at c.18:00 on Saturday 17 September). Please contact Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh directly if you are interested in attending: places will be allocated on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. Unfortunately places are otherwise by invitation only but podcasts / videos of some presentations will be posted online after the event.

The DHOER project was represented at OER11 (the annual Open Educational Resources conference) held at Manchester by Simon Mahony and Ulrich Tiedau with a presentation titled: Open Educational Resources in Digital Humanities. This talk highlighted the UCLDH take on digital humanities and the rationale for what we do. This was followed by some examples of the teaching materials that we plan to release and a discussion of the many benefits to be gained from doing so.

This three day event at the Manchester Conference Centre, with an international array of speakers, showcased innovative projects and thinking in three main strands: strategy and sustainability; academic practice and scholarship; collaboration and communities. As always, this proved a great opportunity for networking and exchanging ideas with other practitioners in this growing field.

It was very pleasing to hear from the organisers that they considered that DHOER had the best logo and graphics (with thanks to Rudolf Ammann!).

On Thursday 10 February Professor Philip Schofield and Valerie Wallace of UCL Laws will be talking about ‘Transcribe Bentham: Taking the Bentham Edition into the Digital Age‘. Venue: Room G32 (Senate House, Ground Floor) from 17:30 – 19:30. Transcribe Bentham is a very exciting project that we at UCLDH are proud to be part of. It uses crowd sourcing techniques to encourage people outside academia to become part of the Bentham project; reading and transcribing scans of original manuscripts which then become part of the digital archive. Come and hear all about their work, and of course sign up to take part in transcription.

A Brief introduction to one of the UCLDH projects

I’m the research assistant (Claire Ross) on project LinkSphere, which is a joint research project with the University of Reading , funded by the JISC Virtual Research Environment 3 programme. The project is aiming to develop a virtual research environment (VRE) which will allow cross-repository searching across various digital collections and archives including (just to name a few) the Silchester IADB, Film Collection, Film, Television and Theatre archive, the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology collections, The Museum of English Rural Life collections and the Cole Museum of Zoology collections) producing a useful user interface to various disparate digital collections. Within this project we are also integrating a social network for researchers within the University of Reading to enable collaboration and ensure that it is possible to work more closely together on cross-disciplinary projects.

Development of the VRE will be undertaken at the University of Reading, with user analysis and usability from us at UCL.

My role is to focus on the user centric design aspect of the project.  The UCL team are on board to ensure that the project is a fully user driven design process, and that all user requirements are met and fed directly into the development of the project.  User centric design explicitly and actively includes users in the development process form an early stage.  Focusing on user requirements will hopefully enable the LinkSphere project to become embedded and owned by the users, creating a comprehensive collaborative tool specifically designed to the requirements of the users.

User research is currently split into two themes:

• Research into the use of digital resources within institutional repositories with particular focus on usability and functionality
• Academic use of Web 2.0 applications and Social Networks, with particular focus on usability, requirements gathering and functionality.

We will post regular updates atbout the usability side of the LinkSphere project on this blog. Further information about the whole project can be found at:

http://www.linksphere.org/about