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DIS Research Student Awarded Cross Disciplinary Training Scholarship

By Alexandra Eveleigh, on 20 April 2012

UCL DIS research student Alexandra Eveleigh has been awarded a one-year graduate research scholarship for cross disciplinary training and will spend a year from October 2012 at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC).  The scheme encourages PhD students from any discipline right across UCL to apply to study for an additional year in another UCL department, thus acquiring new research skills and knowledge which can be applied back into their normal area of research.  Up to four students are awarded scholarships each year.

Alexandra’s research focuses on the impact and implications of user collaboration initiatives for archival theory and practice.  She is particularly interested in online user participation or ‘crowdsourcing’ – in what motivates people to take part in projects such as UCL’s Transcribe Bentham or the Old Weather project, and in the interactions that occur on such sites between participants, professionals and the research users of these kinds of collaboratively constructed resources.  UCLIC is a leading UK centre of excellence in Human-Computer Interaction teaching and research, studying the interactions between people and technology.

Successful Upgrades

By Anne Welsh, on 12 March 2012

Three students have recently passed their upgrade from MPhil to PhD.

Congratulations to Lorna Richardson, Anthea Seles and Sara Wingate-Gray.

Student Award for Public Engagement

By Anne Welsh, on 26 January 2012

UCL Department of Information Studies and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities are proud of Claire Ross, who has won the student category of the Provost’s Awards for Public Engagement.

In this guest blog post, Hilary Jackson (UCL Public Engagement Unit) explains Claire’s award and highlights other public engagement opportunities for students.

For the Public Engagement Unit, the annual Public Engagement Awards are one of the highlights of our year.  Last night’s party was no exception.

The winner of this year’s student category was Claire Ross from the Centre for Digital Humanities and Department of Information Studies.

Claire was nominated for engaging museum visitors with collections at UCL and beyond, using innovative, digital methods and social media applications.  The selection panel loved the fact that this subject is plainly not just Claire’s PhD, but her passion.  What’s great is that Claire’s work, alongside colleagues on the QRator project (amongst others), has enabled the public to influence what’s going on in UCL’s museums and the university more widely.

There’s so much fantastic public engagement going on at UCL that the awards are really only the tip of the iceberg.  The Public Engagement Unit is here to help UCL students and staff to make the best of that work, ensuring there are benefits both for the public and for the UCL community.  We can help with funding, advice, support, recognition, and are working hard to make sure public engagement remains part of UCL’s agenda.

We’d love to hear from you so do get in touch – publicengagement@ucl.ac.uk

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/opportunities/awardwinners2011

The #tweetyourthesis story: from doodle to viral

By uczcslg, on 14 January 2012

I have spent a lifetime being interested in discovering new things; as a reporter, writer and editor; as a university lecturer; and currently, as a part-time doctoral student at UCL’s Department of Information Studies. For many reasons, I cannot claim to be one of the world’s most prolific twitterers. But from a single tweet on Wednesday January 11, it turns out that I helped launch a rapidly growing meme that has provided a fascinating glimpse into the world of early-career research, and sparked off a debate. Here is my story about the birth of #tweetyourthesis.

I am a member of faculty on a writing degree, where much of the teacher’s work consists of encouraging students to give very detailed attention to language, so that every word counts. It also involves showing the creativity made possible by constraint. Assessment can include not only creative work, but also the synopsis, story outline and single-sentence summary. One class exercise led to a competition for a t-shirt slogan about writing. The reflection sparked by such tasks helps the writer define the story and achieve creative distance and, as mentioned in a Day of DH 2011 post, helps to contextualise digital forms in the classroom.

On Wednesday January 11, I came to a dinner organised by Dr Melissa Terras for students connected to the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH). My head was full of that morning’s class. I had asked students to use a storyboard template, to help clarify the structure of their work; to show willing, I also storyboarded my own doctoral thesis.

That evening I showed the result to Professor Claire Warwick, head of the UCL department, who encourages innovation in communicating research work. In the playful discussion that followed, fellow research student and graphic artist Rudolf Ammann dashed off a drawing (left). I said it looked like a tweet, and perhaps we should go one better than storyboarding. Professor Warwick instantly suggested the #tweetyourthesis hashtag and I promised to kick it off when I got home. Within 24 hours there were contributions from around the world, and an interview request from the US Chronicle of Higher Education.

I am still digesting the experience, but can say for certain that it leaves me very appreciative of a rewarding and innovative research culture made possible by a combination of encouragement from above and an active network that – as Dr Ernesto Priego notes – involves both faculty and students.

It also confirms my feeling that the public engagement skills that come with practice-based disciplines are valuable, although probably still undervalued.

Finally, I have been reminded of the fears that social media still evoke, in academe and elsewhere, and the need to continue the dialogue about its impact.

UCLDIS Goes Viral

By Anne Welsh, on 13 January 2012

It started at a meal for PhD students in the Centre for Digital Humanities, based here at the Department of Information Studies.

A discussion of the importance of being able to state your research aims in a concise manner led student Susan Greenberg to tweet on the way home

Fun #ucldis dinner tonight for research students. Chat included usefulness of summarising your thesis in one sentence #tweetyourthesis

Meanwhile, Head of Department Claire Warwick asserted

If u can’t summarise ur research in a tweet u need to do a lot more work on ur question #ucldh #tweetyourthesis

which sparked some debate on the possibility and desirability of expressing a major research question in 140 characters or less.

To widen discussion out to members of the department who are not in  UCLDH but are active on twitter, yesterday morning I tweeted from the UCLDIS Student account, asking our students to take up the challenge:

One for the #UCLDIS research students: MT @clhw1 summarise ur research in a tweet #ucldh #tweetyourthesis #UCLDISstudents

Since then there have been hundreds of contributions worldwide to the #tweetyourthesis hashtag. I thought, for the record, it would be useful to collate tweets from research students here at UCLDIS, where it all began:

 

 

 

 

And one from a recent alumnus:

If you’re a UCLDIS research student or PhD alumnus and haven’t tweeted yet (or if I’ve accidentally missed your tweet), comment here, @, DM or # UCLDISstudents and I’ll add you to the summary here. As Claire Warwick has put it

——

Image: Snapshot of the dinner where it all started, by Dr Melissa Terras

Digital Humanities Summer Institute

By Anne Welsh, on 12 June 2011

Research student Claire Ross has spent the last week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria. As part of her Digital Fundamentals course, she has been digitizing images of title pages for us to use in teaching Historical Bibliography. You can read about the techniques she tried out – photography and flatbed scanning – on her blog, Digital Nerdosaurus.

Image: by Dr Melissa Terras for UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

Breaching the Digital Divide

By Anne Welsh, on 3 June 2011

This week’s Guardian Higher Education Network Panel included Claire Ross, a first year research student in the Centre for Digital Humanities. The issue discussed was how Higher Education uses the Internet. You can read about it on Claire’s blog, Digital Nerdosaurus.

Image: by Dr Melissa Terras for UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

MPhil to PhD

By Anne Welsh, on 19 May 2011

Research students initially register for an MPhil and then progress to full PhD study following an upgrade meeting at which they defend a part of their thesis.

This week the Department held two successful upgrade meetings, and we are delighted to congratulate Alexandra Eveleigh and Melissa Adams on passing the requirements to upgrade to full doctoral status.

Melissa is researching the impact and implications of truth and reconciliation commissions on archives, under the supervision of Andrew Flinn and Elizabeth Shepherd.

Alexandra is The National Archives Collaborative Award Winner, working on a thesis entitled ‘We think not I think: harnessing collaborative creativity to archival practice; implications of user participation for archival theory and practice.’ Her supervisors are Elizabeth Shepherd and Andrew Flinn of the Department of Information Studies and Valerie Johnson of The National Archives.

Bright Club Podcast

By Anne Welsh, on 26 April 2011

First year research student Claire Ross is one of the recent interviewees in a Bright Club podcast. You can hear Claire talking about museums, twitter, QRator and just what it means to be a Digital Humanist, on the UCL Museums site.

You can keep up with Claire on her blog.

Image: Claire’s departmental webpage

International Conference on Latin American Cybercultural Studies

By Anne Welsh, on 21 April 2011

Next month, Ernesto Priego (UCLDH) and Ernesto Priani (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) will present a paper at the International Conference on Latin American Cybercultural Studies.

From the conference abstracts posted in January:

Re-mapping the Total Library: An End-User Comparative Critique of the Biblioteca Digital Mexicana and the World Digital Library // Ernesto Priani (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) and Ernesto Priego (University College London, UK)

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the newly-launched Biblioteca Digital Mexicana (Mexican Digital Library or BDMex, http://bdmx.mx/; made public on 23 November 2010) and the World Digital Library (WDL, http://www.wdl.org/) from the perspective of the academic end-user.

The Mexican Digital Library is the result of the collaboration between four major Mexican memory institutions and the World Digital Library, sponsored by UNESCO. The BDMex has digitized and made freely available online documents of historical, artistic and literary value dating from 500BC to 1949, presumably with the technical and financial help of the WDL, but this is not made explicit or even apparent from the comparison
of both sites as they currently exist.

The appearance of the BDMex seems belated for at least a decade in comparison to other similar institutional initiatives (Amis, 2000), and the authors present a series of hypotheses based on the end-user experience of its interface in order to interrogate its technical, cultural, financial and political implications.

This paper presents the results of user-testing carried out by the two authors in different contexts, including teaching and research in Mexico and Britain, and presents a series of suggestions for the projects’ improvement, including questions of markup, text analysis, transcription, classification, ontologies, datamining, data curation, searching capabilities, visualisation and user-interface interaction.

Beyond the strictly technical critique, the authors provide practical examples of how both web sites are not precisely “digital libraries” per se (Smith, Dongqing, McAulay, et al 2007) but can nevertheless be used as interesting case studies for textual, cultural and political analyses. Both the BDMex and the WDL raise interesting issues about institutional digital constructions of national identity, and give illuminating insight into the role of digitization as an act of interpretation (Terras 2006; Tarte 2010).

Ernesto is in the final stages of his PhD in the department, and is one of UCL’s HASTAC Scholars.

 

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