Four students have recently passed their upgrades from MPhil to PhD.

Congratulations to Paul Gooding, Elaine Penn, Alicia Ramirez Gonzales and Claire Ross

Anyone who follows UCL news cannot have failed to read about the Grant Museum‘s spectacular win at this year’s Museums and Heritage Awards. At the heart of the QRator team who devised the iPad-based initiative is PhD student Claire Ross, pictured here with supervisor and QRator team member Dr Melissa Terras.

Claire has blogged about the night on the UCLDH Blog and her own blog, the appropriately-named Digital Nerdosaurus. You can also read perspectives from Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith (UCL CASA and QRator Co-Principal Investigator); Dr Melissa Terras; and, of course, the Grant Museum itself. If it’s pictures you are after, UCL News has posted a set on its flickr account.

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

Pub-based DH discussion / social evening Decoding Digital Humanities London has a meeting coming up. Anyone with an interest in DH is encouraged to attend.

DDH founding member Claire Ross has posted full details on the UCDH Blog.

Research students Alexandra Eveleigh and Claire Ross are speaking at the Fifth Bloomsbury Conference on e-Publishing and e-Publications at UCL this week.

Alexandra is speaking today in the session on the role of intermediaries’ role(s) in the research process, while tomorrow Claire will be presenting how Humanities scholars use social media.

Images: Alexandra: @ammeveleigh ; Claire: by Dr Melissa Terras for UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

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.

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.

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

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.