Today is the official launch of the Poetry Center Digital Archive, for which second year research student Sara Wingate Gray has been a consultant. This is Sara’s second visiting fellowship at the Poetry Center (San Francisco State University) – her first was in 2007-8.

From the Archive’s website:

Poetry Center Digital Archive makes available significant portions of early audio recordings from the Poetry Center’s American Poetry Archives collection, supplemented by select archival texts and images. New files will be added incrementally as recordings are prepared and as we proceed through the collection from the 1950s onward.

The Poetry Center, founded at San Francisco State College (now SFSU) in 1954 by English professor Ruth Witt-Diamant, has been recording and archiving tapes of its public events for nearly six decades … This collection, together with the Poetry Center housed within the SFSU College of Humanities (Department of Creative Writing), today holds over 4,000 hours of unique original audio and video master-recordings, 1954–present. (Poetry Center Digital Archive. About this collection).

Sara’s short video about the Poetry Center is available on its website.

Image: Poetry Center Digital Archive

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.

Susan Greenberg (UCL DIS PhD student and University of Roehampton academic) will be speaking at an event in London for The Failure Files (Triarchy Press, 2011), to which she has contributed a chapter.

Event details on Susan’s blog.

Image: @gloryoffailure

PhD student Susan Greenberg has contributed a chapter to The Failure Files(Triarchy Press, 2011). Susan writes:

Among other things, the essay explains the purpose of the critical reflection essay, a key element of most practice-based disciplines in higher education. This form is still not fully accepted in more traditional subjects, but in today’s contested ground of shrinking HE spending, it is more critical than ever to explain and persuade sceptics of its value, and to raise the standard in our own classes. The CRE allows the process behind the practice to be documented, separately from the creative work itself, analysing the choices made and making explicit what would otherwise remain tacit. It is a way of acknowledging the inevitability and value of failure, squaring the professional and educational process which calls for demonstration of ‘research-equivalent’ activity . (‘Knowing what you don’t know’. oddfish, 13 March 2011).

As well as researching acts of editing for her doctorate, Susan teaches on the Creative Writing Programe at Roehampton University, and this latest publication has relevance to all three of the research centres of which she is a member – UCL Centre for Publishing, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Roehampton’s ReWrite – Centre for Research in Creative and Professional Writing.

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)

We are holding an open evening on Thursday 25 November 2010 17:00–20:00. If you are considering doctoral study in librarianship, information science, archives and records management, publishing and digital humanities, we would like to talk to you! We are currently recruiting students to join our doctoral cohort from September 2011. We have a doctoral scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for which we are also inviting applications.

To join us; hear more about the Department of Information Studies, and ask questions about studying for a PhD, email to : infostudies-enquiries@ucl.ac.uk or see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/research-students/

(This item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Jenny Bunn has been appointed to a one-year Teaching Fellow post which will support the additional student numbers on the MA ARM and RAMI programmes. Jenny has worked as an archivist at the National Archives and in several banking and specialist archive services. She will be teaching archival description, principles of archives and records management and an option in digital description. Jenny is currently in the writing up phase of her PhD.

(This item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Image: UCL Media

First year MPhil / PhD candidate Sara Wingate Gray has been awarded a $7,500 IREX fellowship to fund a research trip to Romania, presenting her work in Washington at the ALA conference, and at IFLA.

(This item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Image: IREX

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

Peter Williams has recently completed a study with The Committee on Publication Ethics, examining how and why journals retract articles. By exploring editors’ experiences of the retraction process and the nature of retraction statements COPE hopes to develop guidelines for authors. The study was featured in a recent THE article on the ‘Publish or perish’ factor in withdrawal of science papers. article

Pete was awarded an Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Research Studentship for 2008-2009.

(This item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Image: Pete’s departmental webpage