tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post2743581042745040174..comments2024-02-22T06:54:45.079+00:00Comments on Melissa Terras' Blog: Inaugural Lecture: A Decade in Digital HumanitiesMelissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-64774455195807606312014-05-28T01:36:10.576+01:002014-05-28T01:36:10.576+01:00(Continued)
The next generation of digital humanis...(Continued)<br />The next generation of digital humanists has a difficult task, because it won’t have so much pioneering fun (although it will still I hope have some), but will instead need to provide wise and mature leadership as we try to establish digital humanities in a stable way in the academy. In her lecture tonight, Mel has shown that she has the capacity to provide such leadership for the field and I hope she will indeed do so. Digital humanists have always been good at building bridges, and that will continue to be the key to success in the future. We will need to build bridges within the schools and departments where digital humanities activities takes place and it will be vital to ensure that we connect strongly with our closest colleagues. As digital methods become more mainstream, we will see new centres of excellence emerging in many universities, which will provide the older centres with stiff competition. It will be up to us in such older centres as Glasgow, UCL and King’s to build connections with these new areas of activity and to warmly and supportively welcome the many new academic faces who will enter our field. We have been talking for many years about the moment when digital methods start to be adopted on a large scale by humanities researchers. That is now at last starting to happen, and it will be Melissa and her generation who will have the job of integrating digital humanities into that new wave of activity. This is a huge and daunting task, because we will be confronted by a wave of enthusiastic and high-achieving young scholars with no knowledge of our early traditions and achievements, to whom Busa is a closed book and TEI baffling. To ensure that digital humanities as it has developed to date continues to play an active part in the new digital academy will require special skills, involving tact, diplomacy, liberality of outlook, strong personal empathy, intellectual enthusiasm and energy. It will need bridge-building on a vast scale, and that’s what we look for from the next generation of DH pioneers and I hope that Mel will use her time as Professor of Digital Humanities which so has so successfully inaugurated here tonight to pursue such a leadership agenda.<br /><br />I am delighted to see younger scholars like Mel stepping up to the plate to provide the next generation of leaders in DH. I must admit that, while my enthusiasm for digital humanities is undiminished, I am beginning to run out of puff, and will be glad to see the younger generation take up the baton of leadership. My message to Mel is that she should make sure that, during the next ten years, digital humanities is led wisely and well. <br /><br />So, many thanks to Mel for an enthralling and thought-provoking overview of ten years of digital humanities, and I ask you to join me in thanking her again. Andrew Prescotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-89093076550739122952014-05-28T01:35:45.203+01:002014-05-28T01:35:45.203+01:00Well done, Melissa, in passing through a demanding...Well done, Melissa, in passing through a demanding rite of passage with such élan. Here is the text of my vote of thanks after the lecture:<br /><br />For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Andrew Prescott from the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and it is a great honour and pleasure for me to be the first to congratulate Melissa on her splendid lecture and to convey to Melissa the best wishes and felicitations of the wider digital humanities community on her well-deserved elevation to a professorial chair. <br /><br />I was previously at the University of Glasgow, Mel’s alma mater, and when I started there in 2010, I hadn’t been involved closely with digital humanities for a few years, and wanted to see how things had developed. In some ways, what I found was disappointing - the same people saying the same things they had been saying fifteen years ago - but there were other developments which were more exciting. Among these were the use of social media, and I quickly realised that key resources for understanding current trends in digital humanities were Melissa’s twitter feed and blog. It was very striking to me how the debates about the role of computational methods in the humanities were being taken forward through such social media, and it was clear that Melissa was the most prominent UK participant in those debates. My admiration for Melissa’s leadership in the field was further increased by her remarkable plenary lecture at the 2010 DH conference, one of the most exciting events in DH in recent years.<br /><br />Mel’s advocacy of digital humanities is of course rooted in innovative research of the highest standard, in particular her work on imaging to explore a range of difficult textual objects ranging from papyri to the Great Parchment Book of Derry. Mel is one of the remarkable cohort of digital humanities specialists who have begun their career at the University of Glasgow, and there can be no greater tribute to the work at Glasgow of Professor Seamus Ross, who I’m delighted to see here tonight, than the way in which he helped set Mel on such a successful academic path when he supervised her first Master’s dissertation. Likewise, Mel’s profound technical understanding was due to her excellent doctoral training at the University of Oxford, which of course has been another outstanding centre of the digital humanities for many years. It was the institutional infrastructure established by such pioneers as Seamus Ross and Alan Bowman which has enabled younger scholars such as Mel to flourish. And it is now an enormous pleasure for those connected with the older digital humanities centres at places like Sheffield, Glasgow, Oxford and King’s to see a new chair established in UCL and to see a digital humanities centre created here.<br /><br />Of course, for those of us like Seamus and myself who were involved in the heady days of the first wave of humanities computing, in some ways it was much easier. When most humanities academics hadn’t even seen the world wide web before, as was the case twenty years ago, it was easier both to do something innovative and to get the funding for it. However, in our first wave of digital humanities, I’m not sure we have always got it right. In particular, we haven’t always built up the best career structures for younger colleagues. Too often talented digital humanities practitioners are left in an awkward void between the academy and professional services, in a no man’s land of short-term contracts, with no clear way forward. That is why it is a particular pleasure that Mel has so clearly demonstrated what a successful academic career path in the digital humanities should look like. A lot of the reason for that is that Mel has worked in the settled framework of the oldest Department of Information Studies in the country, and the way in which DH should fit into such existing structures is worth further reflection. <br /><br />(Continued in next comment)<br />Andrew Prescotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com