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.

On Monday 9^th May a group of actors, teachers and researchers joined us for the first Playing the Margins workshop. We gathered in the tranquil setting of the Petrie Museum to discuss annotation practices, past and present. The participants had brought along examples of texts or scripts they had annotated, and described their habits and preferences (or, in some cases, their habit of not writing in books) to the group. This discussion gave us valuable insights into the codes of behaviour governing their annotation practices. These codes varied considerably from one participant to another but were internally consistent and strongly related to the context and purpose of annotation and the ownership of the books or scripts. (more…)

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

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