This is an interview with Lorna Richardson, one of the people behind the first ever Day of Archaeology (29 July 2011).

Lorna is a first year research student at UCL DIS, a member of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and an Honorary Research Assistant at UCL Institute of Archaeology.

Hopefully, the Day of Archaeology will grow to be as big as the Day of Digital Humanities, to which several DIS staff and students contributed this year.

Registration is now open for a free workshop run by MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser as part of their public engagement project, Playing the Margins.

If you are a drama student or an actor, you can sign up to take part. Full details on the Playing the Margins tumblog.

Image: Playing the Margins

18 March 2011 was the third annual Day of Digital Humanities, on which self-declared Digital Humanists share their diaries by blogging. From the project website:

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online. (Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011)

Several UCL DIS students took part (programme of study in brackets):

• Alejandro Giacometti (Affiliated to UCLDH: PhD candidate in UCL Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering)
• Claire Ross (MPhil / PhD)
• Ernesto Priego (PhD)
• Lorna Richardson (MPhil / PhD)
• Paris O’Donnell (MA LIS)
• Paul Gooding (MPhil / PhD)
• Sian Prosser (MA LIS)
• Susan Greenberg (PhD)

MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser have been awarded funding through UCL’s public engagement scheme for postgraduate students, Train and Engage.

Working with UCL Library Services Special Collections, Sian and Paris will invite actors and drama students to explore and experiment in annotation practice, sharing their own play collections and annotating digital images of selected plays from UCL’s holdings.

Find out more about the project from its tumblog.

Image: Auntie P, copyright commons: some rights reserved

Why Libraries Are Great – by Katie Birkwood from chichard41 on Vimeo.

Katie Birkwood (MA LIS 2008) gave a presentation about the role of libraries at Ignite London 4, which coincidentally is co-organised by current research student Claire Ross.

You can read Katie’s own account of Ignite, and generally keep up with her news and acvitivies on her blog, Girl in the Moon.

First year MPhil / PhD student Sara Wingate Gray was supported by a choir singing the library song as she built the Itinerant Poetry Library upon Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for her alloted hour in One & Other on October 9th. You can see a video of her public engagement project on the One & Other website.

(A version of this item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Image: IREX