Melissa Terras' Blog

Number Crunching Historians

2012-01-30T18:42:00.007Z

Only three projects left to cover in my retrospective look of papers I have published, now they are all going up on UCL's open access repository. This time, its time to go back, way back, to 2005, when e-science and cyberinfrastructure were all the rage.

A call came out from the AHRC, looking for workshops on this topic - how can we use e-science technologies in the Arts and Humanities? Now, UCL have one of the best Research Computing facilities in the world, so the question was, how could we apply this facility to humanities research? The biggest data set in the Humanities at the time (that I could think of at the time of grant writing) was the historical Census data, held at The National Archives, which was digitised by the commercial genealogy firm, Ancestry. We formed a research collaboration to hold three different workshops to look at how useful, possible, or feasible it would be to analyse the historical census data using the high performance computing facilities at UCL.

I have to say that this is one of the most intellectually stimulating projects I have worked on since completing my doctorate, as we grappled with the academic, technical, managerial, and legal issues when attempting to apply HPC and scientific methods to historical data sets. We brought together disparate expertise on history, records management, genealogy, computing science, information studies, and humanities computing, to ascertain how useful or feasible it would be to set up a pilot project, applying e-science methods to the dataset.

However, whereas scientific data tends to be large scale, homogenous, numeric, and generated (or collected/sampled) automatically, humanities data has a tendency to be fuzzy, small scale, heterogeneous, of varying quality, and transcribed by human researchers, making humanities data difficult (and different) to deal with computationally. The conclusion of the series was that there was not the quantity nor quality of information available to allow useful and usable results to be generated, checked, and assessed. Automatic record linkage was the main thing on the wish list from the historians, but this was impossible given the gaps in the historical information. The problems were not technical (we could mount everything on the system and run matches), but methodological (because of inherent issues with census data, the results of any analysis would be problematic).

Some things to say about this: It would be worth revisiting the historical data that is available soon. Crowdsourcing wasnt a terribly well adopted technique at the time - the FreeBMD had just started, for example, transcribing the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales. Since then, there has been a huge uptake and interest in contributing to these resources - what historical data sets exist nowadays that didnt then? What can we use to do useful research, and what of that research, can we automate across a large scale?

I still plan on doing something, at some point, with Research Computing at UCL. I'm signed up to their next training course so I can get retrained on how to mount data on the system. I still think we need to think carefully about how and why we need to use this level of computing on humanities data - but if there is anyone out there with a huge data set that needs some number-crunching, you know where to find me if you fancy talking collaboration...

The grant was put in in 2005, the research was done in 2006, the paper accepted in 2007, but even for an online journal there was a bit of a time lag and it didnt come out til 2009 - just goes to shows you that online journals dont always publish quicker than print. (I'm one of the general editors of the journal in question, I should say, so its as much my fault as anyone elses).

So here's the paper. It's one of the ones I'm most proud of, even if the result of the workshop series was "its never gonna work!":

Terras, M (2009). The Potential and Problems in using High Performance Computing in the Arts and Humanities: the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) Project. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3 (4). PDF.

Who ya gonna call? DH Winebuyers

2012-01-30T18:22:00.004Z

Claire Warwick has blogged about the, erm, adminstrative snafu that meant no wine appeared
after her inaugural. So its probably ok to post this pic of the team undertaking the wine run to the nearest supermarket (right to left): Me, Simon Mahony, Andy Hudson-Smith and Steven Gray, with Tim Weyrich on camera duty plus wine carrying duty. Also thanks to the Dean, who dealt with payment, and choosing the vintage of the red.

We like to think no-one noticed. Until we told them. and tweeted. and blogged...

Congratulations, Claire Ross!

2012-01-26T20:16:00.004Z

Image (c) Matt Clayton/UCL Grant Museum. The QRator project in place - the brain-child of Claire Ross. The skulls are not Claire's, you'll be relieved to hear.

I'm terribly proud and excited to share the news that one of my PhD students, Claire Ross, has won the student category of the UCL Provost’s Awards for Public Engagement.

As Hilary Jackson (UCL Public Engagement Unit) explains:

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.

Its important to note that this award is competed for from the whole student body - around 18,000 students - currently at UCL. Its a real honour for Claire to win, and shows the fantastic work she has been doing in her research, but also for UCL Museums, and UCLDH. Well done Claire, I'm proud to be your supervisor!

On that there infographic: some critical discussion

2012-01-23T11:28:00.004Z

The reception to the infographic I put together on Quantifying Digital Humanities has been very positive. In the first 12 hours of it being online, 2600 people had viewed it. At time of writing, 3665 people have looked at it. Which amuses me - many more people have viewed it than are self confessed members of the "Digital Humanities" community.

I've had many notes saying "this is great", some suggestions for other sources of information, particularly financial information from other countries, and the spotting of the one typo that managed somehow to get through our rounds of proofreading. Its all good, keep 'em coming.

There was some chat on the twitters about whether this was up to date. Thatcamp, for example, already has over 2000 subscribers. The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities joined ADHO on the 1st of January, as did Centernet, but these are not reflected in the counts here - I had to draw a line somewhere, and lets give them a chance to get their members all signed up before we start counting them, eh? There was also some discussion about the fact that these figures are.... well... so small? Have I shot my discipline in the foot by pointing out that there arent actually that many of us, self identifying as Digital Humanists?

I'm also aware of the things that aren't in there. I feature, for example, Digital Classicist, and Digital Medievalist, and Antiquist. Are these part of "Digital Humanities"? Is "Digital Humanities" just the group of people, and events, allied to ADHO and its respective societies? I'm very aware of Digital Classicist and Antiquist - these are the lists I hang out most on, most aligned to my areas of interest. But in the infographic, where is the Association for Computing and History? Where is the Computers and History of Art association? Where is the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference? (and if anyone has a better, centralised URL for that, do let me know, they suffered spectacular failure to renew their domain name). Where is the Association for Computational Linguistics? The list goes on and on. What else would you count as Digital Humanities that didnt make it on?

Why didnt I include these different things on the infographic? Partly because no-one from these organisation or domains came forward to give me stats, as I'm not on their radar. Partly because of my own personal bias, I suppose: my Digital Humanities is going to be different from yours. And partly because I did try to focus on the associations which make up ADHO, and their related initiatives. Or things that call themselves "Digital Humanities".

Which leads me to think, there is a lot of stuff out there which is Digital Humanities (the use of computers and computational techniques within the humanities), but only a subset of that which calls itself so, or identifies itself with the community. Which is fine. But we at ADHO may have to work at better reaching out to the constituencies we dont currently reach, if we are to be the voice of DH at any level. Or should we not? Should we just continue to work on the type of activity which self identifies as Digital Humanities?

There are other gaps in the infographic. The funding section - there is a lot more investment in infrastructure worldwide than featured here. But look at the stacks o' cash already listed. We're so bad, as a community, at showing where the successes are, and the use and usefulness of that investment. I'm almost scared to ask, quite frankly, for usage statistics from the projects mentioned, or outcomes, etc. That is the nature of research, I know, but if I am presenting piles of cash as a good thing - look! see! DH exists as it has had money thrown at it! - then surely we should be better versed in saying what the results of all this were?

I started the timeline from 2000, as I had various stats beginning there, but as we all know (we all know, dont we?) DH has a much longer gestation than that. Something I need to mull over.

Overall, its been great fun putting together this infographic on Digital Humanities. It is, however, an infographic on DH, not the infographic on DH. What would your mapping of DH look like? Are you someone who does "Digital Humanities", or someone who does Digital Humanities? Does this even matter?

Enough navel gazing. Time to get to work.

Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities

2012-01-20T10:10:00.004Z

You may remember I gathered some stats about Digital Humanities. Well, I turned them into an infographic, which is available in full technicolour and much higher res than blogger will allow, over at the UCLDH Flickr account.

Wait! You want a print version? Well, find a 300dpi CYMK version here.

I have to say, when I started this, I thought that there must be some software out there that turns statistics into these type of posters pretty easily - there are so many of these about, that have this look about them. I thought it would be a fun thing to do in class - and I've dabbled a fair bit in photoshop and the like - but it turns out that everyone is hiring graphic designers to turn their stats into posters that look "like infographics". So what they hey, we hired a graphic design firm that specialises in infographics. As a result, this is courtesy of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, as they paid for the graphic design.

We at UCLDH are going to get some printed up for to stick on walls -more about that soon, hopefully, once we figure out the costs on that.

Just a few words on the process. This was an inclusive, not an exclusive, attempt at trying to pull together available statistics on Digital Humanities. I'm aware there are a lot of things that dont appear on the infographic - major individual projects, for example. But it was the best that I could do, with the information available. I'm still collecting statistics, and interested in anything else that comes to light - I need to dig out the subscription numbers for LLC in the early 2000s, for example - but if you are not represented here, and are narked about it, or pleased to be included in any future iterations, let me know. Depending on reception, we may do an updated version of this.

Additionally, I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions on other things we can do in this vein to scope out and promote our field. Its been fun to put together - even if snow in Seattle stopped play for a week or so in the round of final edits with the designers - and after I've done some serious academic work, like write books and stuff, I plan on doing some more of these.

Hope you like it!

Digging Your Scene, Vera

2012-01-12T13:43:00.009Z

My next couple of papers come from the VERA project: Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology. VERA was based at the still ongoing dig at Roman Silchester, managed by the Archaeology Department at the University of Reading. The project aimed "to produce a fully-fledged virtual research environment for the archaeological community". Basically, we took the Integrated Archaeological Database system and took it into the trench, by putting wifi over the dig and experimenting with people uploading information right into the database (instead of capturing it with pencil and paper in the usual archaeological way, for digitisation after the dig ended) using Nokia 800s and digital pens. This was in 2007/8.

The project was funded by JISC as part of phase 2 of the Virtual Research Environments programme, and the reason for us at UCL getting involved was their doing: they specified that in this round of the programme, there should be user studies and user testing embedded into the project. Shortly after the call came out, I was chatting with Professor Mike Fulford, who manages the dig, at a conference, and he mentioned something about this and said something like, you dont know any people who do user studies do you? Why yes, yes we do, I said, and UCL promptly signed up to do this. Its the kind of thing that goes to show why you should bother networking...

It was great fun to be involved, and we visited the dig on various occasions, having a researcher on site to look at how users could use tech in the trench. The british weather was a bit of an issue, there were all kinds of shenanigans involved in keeping live wifi over the dig, and the technology was met with both excitement, and Not On My Land opinions. A picture I took on the site, above, even made it all the way to passiveaggressivenotes.com, and got featured in the Guardian newspaper. What larks.

Since then, of course, the market for handheld technology has changed dramatically - there was no iPhone at the start of this project when we were making decisions about tech, for example. I do also wonder if it is easier now to provide wifi over an external area - you would hope - although British Summertime weather is probably never going to be conducive to having hand-held tech in the trench (we did wonder if we should buy everyone waterproof sombreros, to keep screens in the shade, or to keep the rain off....)

We've also got another stack of papers on this that we simply haven't had the time to finish up, so there may be more to come, although time is ticking on that one, as the tech we are talking about is rapidly changing, and 2008 to 2012 is a long time, in technology circles. The dig at Silchester still continues. I bumped in to Mike at a service station half way up the M6 a few months ago, and we said we'd keep our ears peeled for future funding calls to work together again...

And here are the published papers:

Warwick, C., Fisher, C., Terras, M., Baker, M., Clarke, A., Fulford, M. Grove, M., O'Riordan, E. and Rains, M. (2009) iTrench: a study of user reactions to the use of information technology in field archaeology. LLC , 24 (2): PDF.

Terras, M., Warwick, CLH and Fisher, C (2010) Integrating New Technologies into Established Systems: a case study from Roman Silchester. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) March 22-26 2009, Williamsburg, Virginia, US. CAA: The Netherlands: PDF.

Twitters and research paths

2012-01-06T16:19:00.004Z

Happy New Year, folks!

Right, lets resume my posting about previous research. I have only 5 more projects to write about, (well, that had papers emanating from them, I'll do book chapters after that) and I'm going to do it in reverse chronological order.

Sometimes when you get a new research assistant, its good to give them a really defined task to get their teeth into, and to also see how they work - can they write? can they do self directed research? What are their strengths, and what's the most useful support can you give them? We hit the jackpot when we employed Claire Ross, to work on the Linksphere project, which was a joint project with Reading University to create a unified system that would provide a single virtual interface for searching across all the repositories and collections at Reading. We were asked to give advice about use and users of museum online catalogues and museum related social media, and the platform they were developing at Reading. Whilst the folks at Reading were starting to program up the interface to be tested, we set Claire a task: analyse the twitter feeds from the various DH conferences held in 2009 (this was at the end of 2009) and see what we can say about the use of twitter. At the time, there were relatively few methodological investigations into how twitter was being used, and what we came up with was really interesting:

Ross, C and Terras, M and Warwick, C and Welsh, A (2011) Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists. J DOC , 67 (2) 214 - 237. PDF

The Linksphere project itself proved to be problematic - the linking of different collections isnt as easy as it sounds, and the programming team will hopefully be publishing more about the difficulties that they faced in cross-collection searching, etc. Nevermind, though - we had Claire for a year, and after this study she did some excellent work with the British Museum, looking at use of their Collection Online, and also set up the QRator project, at the Grant Museum, which is looking at how people can add their own Interpretation to museum objects, as well as the research necessary on the Linksphere interface. Claire is now still with us doing PhD research - more about that soon.

The twitter paper got a lot of interest at the time (it was up in pre-publish much sooner than the print version) as it was one of the first to look at the methods for studying tweet streams, although there are now hundreds of papers out there that have looked at the methodologies since, and developed and refined them in ways we couldn't do all the way back in 2009. It does seem like an awfully long way away, even though its less than 3 years ago. And is interesting to see that when you do get a great research assistant to work with, that you can have spin offs and publications from the process that were not originally in the research plan. The joy of the research path: turny, twisty, unexpected.

Father Busa's Last Christmas Card

2011-12-16T10:57:00.006Z

2011 was a big year for Digital Humanities, but we also saw the loss of Father Roberto Busa (1913-2011), who pioneered the discipline of Humanities Computing by organising the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Index Thomisticus.

I've been given permission to share with you the image above, and the story below, about Father Busa's last Christmas card. It came through on email last week and made me well up - and I asked permission from Marco Passarotti (on behalf of the CIRCSE research centre)to share it here so it reached the wider Digital Humanities community. Enjoy the last Christmas card from Father Busa.

Dear friends of father Busa,

For many years, our beloved father Roberto Busa entrusted the painter and caricaturist Marina Molino to illustrate his message of Christmas greetings with a caricature representing him along with St. Thomas.

Over the last years, the drawing (each time suggested by father Busa himself) had one recurring element: father Busa climbing a mountain with increasing difficulty, but with undiminished enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal, where St. Thomas was waiting for him.

On August 9th father Busa has reached that goal, giving, until his last day, large and clear testimony of peace on the ground of his faith and certainty of eternal life.

The research center CIRCSE - which pursues the work of its founder - has asked Marina Molino to realize once again the traditional drawing. In a moving caricature, the artist has represented father Busa, finally come on top of the mountain, while meeting his St. Thomas. We send you the drawing as a nice memory of father Busa, with our best wishes for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all who have loved him.

Cari saluti,

With best wishes,

(on behalf of CIRCSE)

Marco Passarotti
Head of the ‘Index Thomisticus’ Treebank
Secretary of CIRCSE
Largo Gemelli, 1
20123 – Milan
Italy

Tel. 02-72342380
e-mail marco.passarotti@unicatt.it
CIRCSE: http://centridiricerca.unicatt.it/circse

Marco tells me they are planning to publish a book in 2012 which collates all of Father Busa's Christmas Cards. I look forward to seeing it.

Digitisation Studio Setup

2011-12-14T14:38:00.012Z

I was asked recently about guidelines for setting up a digitisation suite. I'm a bit rusty on the very latest guidelines for this, so turned to the twitters, where a discussion surround #digstudio quickly happened, mostly co-ordinated by Simon Tanner who is an expert in digitisation and frequently advises institutions on their digitisation processes. Now, we all know the fragility of twitter feeds, so I thought I would post the main points here (indeed, it was Simon who suggested I post it here). The bullet points below were all made by Simon - thank you!

The JISC Digital Media - Still Images: Setting up a Workspace for Digitising Images document is a good overview on how to set up a digitisation suite http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/setting-up-a-workspace-for-digitising-images
Use standards: comply with the ISO 3664:2000 "Viewing conditions - Graphic technology & photography"
Replace fluorescents in the room. CIE Standard Illuminant D65 tubes correspond roughly to mid-day light in Europe
LED Lighting is the way to go. They are small, portable, with extremely high control. The top place to get these is here http://www.cdiny.com/LEDproducts.html
However, you might have price issues! Simon suggest's procuring a standard LED. There is a good guide here: http://www.diyphotography.net/studio-at-home-introduction-to-led-lighting
Complying with the ISO 3664:2000 "Viewing conditions - Graphic technology & photography" standard also allows for good colour management
The Colour of the workspace should always be NEUTRAL grey - no tones or colours & doesn't screw with camera's white point settings
AVOID post-it notes & other colourful things round the working areas - it distracts the eye, and messes with calibration
The same goes for clothes - avoid overly colourful clothes & shiny things for the operators.
Control light: think about if can exclude daylight/control light (with curtaining for instance) for a stable lighting environment
Remember: think lots of space & look after the operator!
Simon's paper on the Dead Sea Scrolls includes content on the studio: http://bit.ly/vvLW5u (PDF)

@fletcherdurant pointed out that the Federal Agencies Digitazation Guidelines Initatives' main set of guidelines gives some (if limited), set-up advice on page 5 http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/digitize-technical.html

@ernestopriego pointed out that the New Opportunities Fund has some guidelines http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/papers/digitisation_process/ - these were written by ... SimonTanner!

Multi-Spectral Connections

2011-12-13T09:08:00.008Z

One of Alejandro's many test images, looking at the characteristics of multi-spectral document imaging. Used with Permission.

Another interdisciplinary research project I am currently working on is with Adam Gibson, from The Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at UCL. Adam and I started at UCL at the same time, and met on the teaching training course that all new staff have to do. At one point he remarked that he did some work in multi-spectral imaging, to which I replied "oh yeah, we look at documents sometimes using that technique" - although I described our usually laissez faire approach of sticking things under the filtered lens and seeing what you can see, which turns out to differ greatly from tried and tested benchmarked multi-spectral methods used in medical physics to, for example, measure blood flow through the body.

5 years later, Adam won a very prestigious EPSRC Challenging Engineering grant on "Intelligent image acquisition and analysis". He got in touch to wonder if we could use a small slice of money to investigate the potential crossovers between the medical physics methods of multi spectral analysis, and the approaches we used in document imaging analysis. Can the robust, tested, techniques used in medical physics be used in document analysis? Can we benchmark the process of multi-spectral imaging of documentary material?

Our PhD student working on this is Alejandro Giacometti. Alejandro has a background in computer science, and came highly recommended from the MA in Humanities Computing under the supervision of Stan Ruecker at the University of Alberta. Alejandro is really well placed to carry out this research, having the technical background as well as appreciating the Humanities angle. Simon Mahony from UCLDH has also joined us on the team, and he brings his knowledge and expertise in Digital Classics.

Alejandro is now almost half way through his thesis work - and as well as being really eye opening, this project is turning out to be so much fun. We are now in the phase of starting to test our hypotheses on real world examples, and building up our practical expertise in multi-spectral document imaging. It also turns out that we have a lot in common with both the work of Tim Weyrich from UCL Department of Computer Science (who I also jointly supervise a student with) who uses multi-spectral imaging to model skin surfaces, and Stuart Robson from the UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (who I also jointly supervise two students with, but shall talk about them at some later point) who is interested in a huge variety of image capture techniques both for industry and heritage. We're talking between teams, departments, and disciplines, now, and learning a lot from each other, while cooking up plans for future work.

I feel very lucky to work in an institution such as UCL which has such diverse expertise - but also such interested colleagues, willing to work together across disciplinary boundaries. Its also great to have such an opportunity for PhD study, which could potentially contribute to many fields.

Me under the spotlight at DISH

2011-12-12T12:57:00.005Z

Here I am, giving my pitch for Transcribe Bentham in the opening session of DISH. Thanks to Inge Angevaare, of the digitaalduurzaam blog, for sending this, and others, onto me. You can see the size of the crowd here.

Greetings from DISH

2011-12-08T06:25:00.007Z

Hullo from Rotterdam, where I am at DISH2011, "the conference about digital strategies for heritage". There are over 550 delegates at the Rotterdam WTC, across a wide range of libraries, archives and museums, predominantly across Europe. Its a really interesting mix of people, and not so many of the usual suspect academics here (one of the key notes yesterday did a show of hands, about who was here from libraries, who was here from museums, who was a student, who was in industry, and.... no show of hands for who was at a university. Nice to be in the minority for once, and to meet lots of heritage professionals!) Its been really enjoyable, so far.

Yesterday was a fairly big day: Transcribe Bentham was one of the 5 international projects nominated for the Digital Heritage Award 2011 (you can see our specific nomination here). I had to give a 3 minute pitch in front of the entire crowd on behalf of the project team, bright lights and all, in the opening plenary session, followed by manning an information booth, above, in all the breaks to solicit votes. You can see the voting system above - people had to place a sticker on our sheet. By the end of the day we had filled quite a few of these - fantastic to have such support, and I talked to a lot of very interesting and interested people about the project. The winner of the award was Digital Koot, well done all! - a little bird tells me we came a close runner up. But to be honest, having the opportunity to pitch to such a large audience, and meet so many interesting people, was wonderful, and it was an honour to be nominated. All good fun.

Today I am actually giving the proper paper about Transcribe Bentham! 45 minutes rather than 3. So another big day, but standing up in front of a normal lecture hall in daylight is nothing compared to 3 minutes with the cameras and lights on you, so it will be fine.

I hope to visit DISH again. Its usually difficult for me to travel at this time of year due to the teaching schedule, but its definitely been a useful conference for me so far. And now to go and tackle another conference day...

On Killing Metaphorical Birds with Statistical Stones

2011-12-06T18:47:00.007Z

All this talk of DH stats (and the many emails and tweets I am firing off to gather up the evidence DH can muster) has both distracted me from posting anything from the back catalogue, and reminded me of a paper I wrote trying to articulate what Digital Humanities is by analysing the conference attendees and abstracts of the ALLC/ACH conferences (which is now known as Digital Humanities).

Its a bit of a right of passage that those working in DH attempt, at some time or other, to write a paper on what is Digital Humanities, or Humanities Computing as then was. My attempt was prompted by the fact I had to achieve a Postgraduate Certificate on Learning and Teaching in Higher Education as part of my probation when I first joined UCL. We had to write a 10,000 word dissertation on some aspect of learning and teaching. I have to say, undertaking that course in the first couple of years of an academic role was a bit of a millstone - it used up huge amounts of time at a time when I was writing whole courses from scratch and trying to turn my thesis into a monograph. I'm not one for wasted effort, so I tried to see if I could write a dissertation that would then become a publication. Killing three birds with one stone, I got the PGCLTHE, a conference paper, and a journal paper out of it. Bingo. To be honest, I would never have written the "what is humanities computing?" paper without having to do a dissertation for my teaching qualification.

I looked at trying to define the scope of our discipline, and therefore what we should be teaching, with the available evidence to hand. This was the conference abstracts from 1996-2005 of ALLC/ACH, plus the archive of postings to Humanist. I then number crunched them using the usual statistical methods that we teach as DH. Heh heh. Using DH to analyse DH! Again, birds with one stone. Why teach a methodology if you cant use it for your own dissertation? It was a quick win for me.

We can see, from the graph above, that Humanities computing research up to 2005 was pretty much text-o-centric. So we should be teaching that in our programs, goes the theory. Discuss. And you have the paper.

I wonder how much has changed now, actually. It would be fun to do another analysis.

This year I missed DH2011 as I was on maternity leave with the boys. I woke up one morning to find lots of new followers on twitter - always a sign that someone has been talking about you - to find that Lisa Spiro had cited this paper and methodology in her Making Sense of 134 DH Syllabi paper. A nice surprise - you never know if what you are working on is ever useful to anyone else.

And here it is:

Terras, M. (2006). "Disciplined: Using Educational Studies to Analyse ‘Humanities Computing'." Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 21. 229 - 246. PDF.

Imaging the Great Parchment

2011-12-01T10:06:00.003Z

Image © City of London, London Metropolitan Archives. Used with Permission.

One of the things that I am enjoying most in my current incarnation is the interdisciplinary work I am doing with various doctoral students, scattered across many of UCL’s computational and engineering science faculties. I’m delighted to be working as secondary supervisor alongside, as primary supervisor, Tim Weyrich, from UCL’s Department of Computer Science, on an EngD project that is sponsored by London Metropolitan Archives, to aid in reading one of their unique holdings: The Great Parchment Book.

The Great Parchment Book contains a survey of forfeited Irish estates claimed by Charles I in 1639, consolidating all contracts and particulars of all rental lands in the county into one volume. The resulting book holds invaluable information about the County of Londonderry in the early 17th century. The book was apparently passed to the Irish Society in London when it was reconstituted by Charles II in 1662, but a fire in 1786 at Guildhall caused extensive damage to their historical collections, destroying a large proportion of the 17th century material entirely, and causing dramatic ‘shrivelling’ and fire damage to the vellum pages of the Great Parchment Book. 165 folios of the volume survive, in 6 boxes such as the one featured above. This hugely important document has therefore been unavailable to historians since the date of the fire, as the pages cannot be handled because of their state of conservation.

Our task is deceptively simple – can we use image capture and processing techniques to make the rippled, twisted, and buckled text readable? Can we produce digital image surrogates which scholars can use to access the content of the document? A ever, the devil is in the detail. Our EngD student, Kazim Pal , has started (after a one year taught component of the course) to investigate approaches that can be used to digitally reconstruct the manuscript. We hope to work with the online edition team at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities to produce an online, transcribed edition of the text in time for the 400 year anniversary of the incorporation of the Irish Society by the Corporation of London in 1613.

It’s really useful for me to work on the development and application of technologies in this area: it keeps pushing the limits of my understanding of the way we can use imaging with documentary material. I’m learning a huge amount from working with Tim and Kazim, and it is really great fun to step from beyond the textbooks/computer screen back into a real archive, to work on a real document, with real archivists and conservators, on approaches that will potentially benefit many scholars in the future. For me, personally, this is the joy – and excitement! of Digital Humanities.

Stats and the Digital Humanities

2011-11-28T09:20:00.053Z

Update 01/12/2011: do read the comments! lots of good stuff below this post.

So yesterday, I was having a relatively laid back day, rolling about the living room with the bairns, occasionally seeing what was happening on the twitters. A few people were retweeting How To Design Your Own Infographics and I thought "hey, I should make an infographic." I concede that the world does not need any more infographics, but its just my line of work that it pays to play and tinker with these kind of things, before we start talking about them in class. What should I make an infographic about? I thought. Digital Humanities, of course!

But then you run into the problem... where are the stats about Digital Humanities that could be used for such a thing? There is nothing about it on the (problematic) wikipedia page, and facts and figures arent terribly close to hand. Now, I may never get round to making that infographic, but it would pay, I think, to start to gather up information about our discipline. Here is a list of some things I have come up with - or at least, could track down pretty quickly. I also asked the twitters, so have credited some people, below, who were quick to answer.

The growth in interest could be charted by the growth in subscriptions to the Humanist discussion list, 2002 onwards, which is available here, although Willard would have to be prodded for the more up to date figures, or they could be gleaned from the AHDO minutes from the past few years. (Willard has emailed me stats - current subscription is 1831 on the list!).

Update: Willard has provided me with the number of posts to humanist over the years:
Year Messages
1993-4 646
1994-5 489
1995-6 775
1996-7 919
1997-8 727
1998-9 617
1999-2000 576
2000-1 841
2001-2 640
2002-3 668
2003-4 847
2004-5 776
2005-6 765
2006-7 610
2007-8 680

Willard has also supplied the number of members of the list:
year members
2003 1385
2004 1300
2005 1383
2006 1458
2007 1537
2008 1650
2009 1359
2010 1518
2011 1831

Lou Burnard has also pointed me to a report he made about early use of Humanist, between August 1987 and January 1988. There are some crucial stats there about both individuals and topics in that period. As Lou says... "I leave it to the reader to determine whether anything much has changed".

The number of submissions to the DH annual conference (formerly ALLC/ACH), compared with the acceptance rate, could be gathered, from the ADHO minutes. (I'm digging on this. Paul Spence has told me there are just under 400 submissions for dh2012).
John Unsworth gave me the keys to the kingdom to generate the stats from conftool myself:

	long papers	accepted	%accepted
DH2007	90	68	75.6
DH2008	156	95	60.9
DH2009	210	114	54.3
DH2010	231	86	37.2
DH2011	122	53	43.4

DH2011 was the first conference to have short paper formats in addition to the long papers: 57 were submitted. 21 of those were accepted, which was an acceptance rate of 36.8%. (Thanks, Matthew Jockers for the prod on that one).

The number of people on twitter identified as Digital Humanities scholars, in Dan Cohen's comprehensive list. (It currently stands at 359 individual scholars doing Digital Humanities who are on twitter).

Rachel Murphy pointed out that 46 phd students are currently enroled in the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD Programme in Ireland.

The number of people subscribing to Literary and Linguistic Computing, which means they are part of at least one membership association tied to the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, and the individual numbers for ALLC, ACH, and Sedi/semi. Dave Beavan has responded: as 2 Nov 2011 @LLCjournal subscribers: ACH 89, ALLC 78, SDH-SEMI 36, joint 172. Total is 375! (will dig out historical figures to show the trajectory).

Update: here is a table showing the growth in membership of ADHO through subscription to LLC, culled from Dave and I's membership reports:


type	Nov-07	Nov-08	Nov-09	Nov-10	Nov-11
ACH	73	57	87	76	89
ALLC	84	72	82	84	78
SDH/SEMI	n/a	13	17	39	36
Joint	67	92	121	115	172
Total	224	234	307	314	375

Update: Edward Vanhoutte tells me that as of December 6th, there are now 378 Subscribers to LLC. There are also 3,018 institutional subscriptions.

Edward has also provided some statistics regarding the home countries of authors who submit to the journal:

In 2011, the breakdown of the submitted papers per country shows that although most submissions come from Europe (81) and the US & Canada (27 & 14), Asia is
following with 22 submissions. There is potential growth in South America (3), the
Arab world (3), Africa (2) and Australia (1).

He also provided an overview of growth of total submissions to the journal:

2008 (65), 2009 (47), 2010 (41), 2011 (123).

The acceptance rate for papers submitted to LLC in 2010 was 54.84% coming down from 63.16% in 2009 and 71.70% in 2008. The acceptance rate for 2011 is 55.10%.

The annual hits and downloads to LLC online are thusly:

	Home Pages	TOC pages	Abstracts	HTML Full-text	PDF Full-text	Total Full-text
2008	32,413	13,120	93,619	6,109	17,404	23,513
2009	24,793	13,511	92,685	8,226	21,775	30,001
2010	28,644	15,341	101,649	7,476	20,770	28,246
2011 ytd	36,096	15,811	111,759	8,350	20,172	28,522

A list - and $ total - of all the grants that the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Office of Digital Humanities. This is via @brettbobley. I'm getting a total of 250 projects, with an outright award of $15,268,130 total (although I'm doing this on a tiny screen, so do correct me if I'm wrong, I need to see the spreadsheet on a much larger monitor to make sure that is correct!).

wow. thats a lot.

The list - and $ total - of the joint NEH and JISC grants awarded for Digital Humanities projects (via @brettbobley, and @alastairdunning ). I'm getting 8 projects with an outright award of $966,691 (although again, teeny screen and large spreadsheet issues, do check my working).

There is a list here of 330 projects funded by the AHRC between 1998 and 2004 that had some form of digital output. They dont include the funding amounts in the spreadsheet though (why? scared?) - I contacted them, and Ian Broadbridge, Portfolio Manager for the AHRC, provided me with this information

A list of AHRC-funded digital research resources is available on line at http://www.arts-humanities.net/ahrc. As you can see, it includes a wide range of browsing, sorting and filtering options, and connects to detailed information about each project, including content type and methods used. A report on this site gives a  some brief statistical information about the costs of the projects involved.  All these DRR projects also represent a significant investment of public money, to a total cost of approximately £121.5m across all the years and schemes covered. Taking, once again, Standard Research Grants for the years 2000-2008 as the more reliable basis for illustration, we can see that the average cost of DRR projects is significantly higher than that of all projects in this group taken together: £309,110 as against £232,948. The average costs increased substantially from 2006 because of the move to full-cost funding: in 2008 the respective figures for Standard Research Grants were £413,838 and £324,703: the cash difference remains in line with the overall figures, though the proportional difference is reduced as a result of a larger overhead element. The ICT Methods Network Award was £1,037,382 The Award amount for the ICT Strategy Projects is £979,364 The Award Amount for e-Science Workshops is £65,498 The Award amount for Research Grant (e-Science) is £2,014,626 The details of all of the individual value of the grants is  obtainable from http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundedResearch/BrowseResearch.aspx

There is also a review, by David Robey, of the AHRC ICT Programme here.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fund a large amount of projects in the Humanities which have a digital component. Their Scholarly Communication and Information Technology strand of funding paid $30,870,567 to projects in 2010 (gleaned from their grant report). I'm asking about previous years, as their reports work differently across other years.

Lisa Spiro identified 134 courses in Digital Humanities worldwide in her 2011 paper at DH. This can be compared to the 9 institutions offering courses in 1999 from McCarty and Kirschenbaum's overview of Humanities computing units and institutional resources in 1999, which I had to claw from the wayback engine. This needs a closer looking at, to see what comparisons can be made.

Mark Sample has been charting the growth of Digital Humanities sessions at MLA over the past few years. 2010: 27, 2011: 44, 2012: 58/753.

Alastair Dunning suggests we could look at http://arts-humanities.net for some more project information, although I think that takes some digging to get some stats.

There is the uber cool Network Visualisation of DH2011 which could be used to generate some useful stats, such as where everyone who came to DH2011 came from. which I have used above in this post. This was created by Elijah Meeks.

Centernet - an international network of Digital Humanities centres - "has over 200 members from about 100 centers in 19 countries". ~~I cant see any easy way to get an exact figure from the listings.~~ I emailed them - there are currently 167 digital humanities centres that are members of Centernet and "we get another couple every few weeks or so". Neil Fraistat has added "Member centers come from 26 countries and currently 247 folks are on its listserv". Karen Dalziel pointed me to the google map which plots all these centres. Should be relatively easy to export the KML file and datamine it to get the co-ordinates if you want to plot it in any other software.

Kristel Pent has pointed out that there is another list of centres of Digital Humanities on the ALLC pages, and these should be cross referenced with the list on Centernet.

Bethany Nowviskie has posted over at DH answers that there were:

28,837 unique visitors to DH Answers in the first year
from 164 countries
969 registered DH Answers users
contributing 1387 posts on 223 topics

And here are the numbers of Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities-related sessions held at MLA -- by count of the ACH: http://ach.org/mla-pages

1996: 34
1997: 34
1998: 45
1999: 42
2000: 59
2001: 55
2002: 44
2003: 36
2004: 39
2005: 37
2006: 48
2007: 56
2008: 65
________
604 panels over 13 annual conventions

Fred Gibbs did a lovely post categorizing Definitions of Digital Humanities, which would make a nice pie chart.

Dave Beavan suggested looking at the numbers of people contributing to the Day of DH, but the server always seems to be down. I'm emailing real people instead.

Peter Organisciak has provided me with the stats re those who registered for the Day of DH over the past few years:

Day of DH 2009: 103 Registered (83 participated) Day of DH 2010: 154 Registered Day of DH 2011: 244 Registered

There are some interesting visualisations of the Day of DH up there, too.

James Cummings tells me there are 700 subscribers to the Digital Medievalist Discussion List. Further details: DM-L started in 2003. 15th Jan 2005 there were 306 members, 28th April 2010 537 members, 27th August 2011 672 members, 5th December 2011 700 members.
There are also 584 followers of the twitter account.
James also gave me access to the user statistics of the Digital Medievalist website:
in 2011 there were 16,808 Visits, from 12,763 Unique Visitors, with 35,546 Pageviews. 25% were returning visitors.

James also gave me access to the stats for the Text Encoding Initative's website:
in 2011 there were 176,469 Visits from 107,320 Unique Visitors, with 537,750 Pageviews. 40% were returning visitors.

Syd Bauman tells me there are currently 949 people subscribed to TEI-L.

Gabriel Bodard tell me there are currently 374 subscribers to Digital Classicist email list.

Leif Isaksen has told me the subscriber counts to Antiquist discussion list:

Aug 2006 - 3 Jan 2008 - 180 Jan 2010 - 264 Dec 2011 - 330

@DHNow has 2676 followers on twitter. @Dancohen has told me that

last month the DHNow website had 14.5K visits from 5K unique visitors, and 48K page views.

@DHquarterly has 688 followers on twitter. A quick look at google analytics tells me that in the past 6 months (when google analytics was switched on in DHQ) there have been 23,636 visits from 15,547 Unique Visitors who have looked at 52,370 pages in total (average of 2 and bit pages per visit). There have been visits from 137 different countries.

@LLCJournal has 513 followers on twitter.

Boone Gorges provided me with some stats about the code behind Anthologize - code lines, files, and commits another great way to measure intellectual investment in DH! (It was Bethany Nowviskie who suggested this, actually). There are 61 files, with 8693 lines of code, and 1722 comments. That's some programming.

Ray Siemens has provided me stats about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute:

DHSI people stats: 2012 (300+ confirmed so far), 2011 (230), 2010 (180), 2009 (150), 2008 (125), 2007 (115), 2006 (95),  2005 (80), 2004 (75), pre-2004 (35-40 at each offering).   540 twitter followers @DHInstitute, 1429 members on the email announcement list.

Elisabeth Burr has told me that the European Summer School "Culture & Technology" at Leipzig had 85 students in 2009, and 2010, and 21 lecturers, from 21 different countries
(Brazil, Burkina Faso, Germany, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, USA, Cyprus)

Julianne Nyhan has provided me with stats about the Computers and the Humanities journal (commonly known as CHum) which ran from 1997 to 2004.
There were 1244 papers published in total, from 811 single authors, and 433 joint authors.

What other facts and figures exist about DH? I'm looking for some other stats that "exist" - ie, dont tell me "count all the projects that say they are DH!" - erm, yeah. Tell me the count, and how you worked it out. Otherwise its a research project, rather than a "grab the existing stats" thing, which we should, as a community, be able to do, right? right?

I'll ask the twitters, and DHanswers, but if you tweet me or message me or leave a comment here, I'll update the list, above. Maybe someone will make that infographic...

Update: Desmond Schmidt did an analysis of the jobs posted to Humanist
"There have been a lot of advertisements for jobs lately on Humanist.
So I used the Humanist archive to do a survey of the last 10 years.
I counted jobs that had both a digital and a humanities component, were
full time, lasted at least 12 months and were at PostDoc level or higher".

2002: 11
2003: 6
2004: 15
2005: 15
2006: 18
2007: 24
2008: 27 (incomplete - 1/2 year)
2009: 36
2010: 58
2011: 65 so far

Breakdown by country:
US: 133
GB: 65
CA: 35
IE: 18
DE: 13
FR: 8
IL: 3
NO: 2
NL: 2
ES: 2
AT: 1
AU: 1
BE: 1

Normalised by population:
IE: 4.0
GB: 1.051779935
CA: 1.038575668
US: 0.433224756
NO: 0.416666667
IL: 0.405405405
DE: 0.158924205
FR: 0.127795527
NL: 0.121212121
AT: 0.119047619
BE: 0.092592593
AU: 0.04587156
ES: 0.043572985

You can also see the Digital Humanities job trends from indeed.com but the percentages are so small I'm not sure its statistically worth including.

Computer Games and author lists

2011-11-25T09:05:00.005Z

One of the more unusual titles on my list of publications, that doesnt seem to fit in with my previous trajectory, is

Gooding, P and Terras, M (2008) ‘Grand Theft Archive’: a quantitative analysis of the current state of computer game preservation. The International Journal of Digital Curation, 3 (2). PDF.

Its an interesting one, this: trying to articulate the extent of the large-scale loss of the early years of gaming history (particularly in the UK), highlighting games' vulnerability. We did a quantitative case study - trying to get hold of copies of known games through every channel possible, highlighting the inadequacies of even available metadata. There is clearly a PhD study in this, should anyone want to take it forward. I also think its important work, that needs doing sooner rather than later. (For those interested in this area, do also see the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, although they didnt cite our previous work. grump).

So that's the topic, but there's an even more interesting point to be made about this paper. I'm second author, because it was the work of one of my Master's students at the time, Paul Gooding. Paul was on the MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL. I usually supervise around 10 student dissertations a year, previously from Electronic Communication and Publishing, and this year I'll mostly be supervising the cohort from the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities, which is running for the first time this session. I really enjoy supervising our master's students - most are really very bright, driven, and dedicated. I dont have to supervise any librarians or archivists: but occasionally I choose to take on a few extra students from these programmes for their dissertation, both to help my colleagues in LIS, and to work on interesting digital topics in those areas. Paul approached me with this topic, we worked up a methodology, and he did the leg work and the write up. I then encouraged him to submit this to a journal, and I spent a few days turning his masters dissertation into the published paper you see here.

The question is, then: when is it ok to be named as author on work which emanates from a student dissertation? When should you leave it, and say, "this is the students work"? This is a huge issue in graduate studies, and one I tread very carefully in. I hear tale, and have had colleagues, who insist on having their name as first author in anything their research groups publish, even when they havent had anything to do with the research in question. (I called him out on it for being morally wrong: he didnt answer any email from me for a year, which was slightly problematic, given he was superior to me and had to sign off on various things). What makes me want to put my name as co-author in this paper? Why havent I published more with students? Why are the guidelines on this all so woolly? Why do some colleagues insist on having their names on papers when they havent been involved in them? Why do some students feel so maligned by their supervisors when they ask to be included on an author list, even when the supervisor has done huge amounts of work on their project? Its such a touchy subject. And actually - this touchiness carries on throughout interdsciplinary projects: publications and named authors are often the sticking point. (I'd advise anyone to look up Ruecker and Radzikowska's work on project charters: they say, decide all this at the start of a project, not at the end).

With this paper, I could say, hand on heart, that it would not exist without my continued work and input. The dissertation itself was based on a methodology I devised, and I worked very closely with Paul to undertake the study. The paper itself, whilst based on Paul's dissertation, required rewriting: it would not have got to this stage without my time and effort, and prior knowledge regarding what journals expect and want. I have no qualms, therefore, in having my name as second author on this piece: I did the work. As far as I know, Paul is delighted that this paper got published. But I've supervised a whole lot of stuff - some of which was of publishable quality, some not, some that made it to publication, some not - that I would never, ever, ask to be second author on. I have witnessed at first hand colleagues who do not have my scruples.

After a few years out in the real world, Paul is back with us! He is heading into his second year of PhD study, supervised by Claire Warwick (first supervisor) and myself (as secondary supervisor), looking into large scale digitisation initiatives, particularly doing some user studies on the British Library's digital collections. It's a great project, and I'm glad he's come back to do some further study with us.

I'll continue to tread careful about author names, and publication, though, particularly when graduate student work is involved.

Incidentally, the journal that this is published in, The International Journal of Digital Curation, is open access - all articles are available for free. Its a good read.

Should We Just Send A Copy? On Digitisation... and the Mona Lisa

2011-11-14T21:34:00.007Z

In late 2008 I was asked to give a couple of plenaries/big guest lectures the next summer: one for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and one for the Art Libraries Society (ARLIS) 40th Anniversary Conference. I was getting a bit bored of standing in front of a powerpoint talking through bullet points of my research, and wanted to do something a bit more exploratory. But what to do? I had my antennae up for clues.

Around that time, Europeana - the online digital library - launched, and promptly fell over. Many people on the site were searching for "Mona Lisa" when it crashed.

Around that time, I was watching a lot of documentaries about art history on BBC4. I watched one by the critic Robert Hughes called "the Business of Art" (also called the Mona Lisa Curse in some listings), where he traces the obscene growth of the art world to the trip the Mona Lisa took to New York and Washington in 1963. 1,600,000 visitors – more than 30,000 viewers per day – filed past the painting. In particular, he remarked that Andy Warhol - then a struggling artist yet to have his major breakthrough -refused to join the hoardes queuing up to see it, remarking

“Why don’t they just have someone copy it and send the copy? No-one would know the difference.” (Hughes 2006, p. 223)

Put two and two together and what do you get? An overview paper on some of the issues on digitisation, use, and usefulness. What are we doing when we create digital surrogates of cultural and heritage material? What are they for? Should we just send a copy?

You can see me give the plenary in 2009 at the DHSI summer school on youtube (no I havent watched it myself) And here is the resulting paper. It's a gallop round the houses, but I am very fond of it:

Terras, M (2010) Should we just send a copy? Digitisation, Use and Usefulness. Art Libraries Journal, 35 (1). PDF.

Reference: Hughes, R. (2006). “Things I Didn’t Know”. Knopf. London. I've heard this quote repeated elsewhere, but this is the only source I can find. It may, indeed, be apocryphal.
The above image is Andy Warhol's "Thirty are better than one".

On missing out

2011-11-14T20:43:00.004Z

When you choose to go on leave from a University for a year, you make the choice to miss certain things. Meetings about your research. Team meetings about your centre. Grant writing sessions for projects you were previously on. Guest lectures. Project Launches. Having access to physical resources such as libraries. Hanging out in the pub with colleagues and students. Coffee. Lunch. Bumping into people in the corridor, and just saying hi. I didn't mind missing any of these things, really, when I was on maternity leave: it was my choice to have children, and to take almost the maximum (very generous) maternity leave I was granted from my job. It was all good. Except one thing.

The one thing I missed when I was on leave was the PhD Viva, and resulting celebrations, of my first PhD student to go through the system under my watchful eye: Ernesto Priego. I was Ernesto's secondary supervisor (Claire Warwick his first), on his PhD in web comics, where he researched

the impact of analog and digital technologies on comics... debating the manner in which theories of materiality illuminate the media-specificity of comics, webcomics, mobile comics apps, and how comic book culture fits within current debates about the future of the book.

Ernesto passed back in the spring, and I've watched on the twitters as he does corrections, hands in, gets things bound up, and gets the final letter through. Well done Doctor Ernesto! Sorry I wasnt there to help drink champagne. I know you know it was impossible for me to come into the city at that time. It really was the only thing I regret missing over the year that I was on leave.
Ernesto initiated and co-organises The Comics Grid, a web-based international collaboratory of comics scholars. You can also find him on the twitters, @ernestopriego. And tomorrow he is coming to see me, to catch up, and to start doing a little research assistant work for me on a Super Top Secret Project which we cant talk about until the Spring. I'm looking forward to it.
Which leads me to think... I have ten PhD students at the moment. A lot of my new research is focussing around what they are doing, and I'm having tremendous fun working with them, and colleagues across UCL who are also supervising. With their permission, I'm going to start blogging about the work that we are doing right now.

But Ernesto, as honorary PhD student (do we ever leave our PhD supervisors?) is the first to be mentioned on here.

The image above, btw, is taken from my autographed copy of PhD Comics. Ernesto took Jorge Cham on a tour of UCL and they swung by my office. It was like a medieval scholar meeting Chaucer, and the look on Ernesto's face, to be chatting with one of the people he had studied in depth, was one of my favourite memories of supervising Ernesto's PhD.

The Birth of TEI By Example

2011-11-07T20:14:00.010Z

Sometimes academic projects come about due to a combination of necessity and wishful thinking. TEI by Example was a product of needing to fill a gap in funding, whilst wishing something into existence that I wanted someone else to do in the first place.

I've talked before about a pop-stack of ideas that exist for "need further work!". As well as that I have a pop-stack, or wishlist, of Things I Wish Existed That Would Make My Academic Life Easier. One of these was an online set of tutorials to teach TEI.

The Text Encoding Initiative guidelines, as we all know, are one of the bedrocks of Digital Humanities. If you want to be in DH, you need to know XML, and TEI, and markup. Which means it has to be taught. Even if, like me, you are not terribly interested in markup per se, and you never use it in your research, and you are not part of the TEI community, you will still need to cover it at some point in a class in Digital Humanities.

Now, there are some excellent people within the TEI doing some excellent teaching. There is some good teaching stuff available online. But what I needed, really, was some point and click tutorials that I could direct my masters students to after an introductory lecture on TEI. When learning code, it's the done thing that you look at and play with examples of code. Where oh where oh where was TEI by example? Where were examples of marked up texts people could see to learn from?

In late 2005 I was chatting to Edward Vanhoutte about his team at the Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie, Ghent, about how things were going up in the Centre. Unlike me, Edward and Ron Van den Branden markup texts all the time, and have considerable expertise in the markup of correspondence material. Edward was saying there was a gap in funds coming up for Ron, as they would be between projects. He needed to find a couple of months of work to pay him. Easy, I said. Apply to the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing for a small grant, to build a set of tutorials for teaching TEI. Call it TEI by Example.
So we did. And we got the money, and we did.

It will take two months! we said. We started in 2006. Now, given I dont really do TEI, I couldnt really write the tutorials. Edward took that on, but he was in the phase of doing a lot of childcare with very young kids (and this was above and beyond our dayjobs). Ron built the infrastructure and did a fantastic job sorting out the quizzes, and set to building the online validator. I chivvied and tested and harangued. I was asked to give a plenary about the project at TEI@20: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities Conference, University of Maryland, in November 2007. It will be finished by then! we thought. Of course it wasnt. I gave the plenary when I was 8 weeks pregnant with the bump that turned out to be The Boy. (I cant recommend flying across the pond to give a plenary when the only thing you can stomach is salt and vinegar crisps. I was terrified that customs would take away my stash, and what would I eat when I was there? I also cant recommend giving a plenary when you think you are going barf over the front row's shoes. But I digress). We worked on the tutorials some more. 2008 came and went,with me mostly on Maternity leave. Then Ron also joined the parenting club! Hurrah! TEI by Example was finally born in July 2010, a mere 4 years late. Some gestation that was. Its like the closing credits of Toy Story 3, when they list all the kids born during the production phase.

Its worth also saying that we encountered a fair bit of resistance to TEI by Example from the TEI community. Folks were not interested, in general, in giving us access to fragments of their code. Promises were made and not kept, emails not replied to, snark was thrown on mailing lists. Who were we to build something beyond the TEI community! Who did we thinks we was!

Meanwhile, TEI by Example has been a quiet success. As Edward said in his plenary to this year's TEI meeting:

Fifteen months after the launch of the tutorials, the site has attracted close to 30,000 unique page views with 1,900 unique views for the modules on primary sources and critical editing together. The statistics and logs show that users are finding their way to the tutorials directly, via Digital Humanities courses or via the TEI website and we see that there is high activity from the US, Germany, the UK, France, and Canada: not surprisingly countries with a high digital humanities and digital editing profile. And we're particularly proud of our single visit from Vatican City. 18% of the visitors stay for more than 15 minutes on the site, which suggests that they really do some work. We also see a decent amount of returning visitors.

We hear its being translated into French. We know people within the TEI use it in their teaching. We're getting positive comments about it, and relationships with certain folks have improved dramatically. And I can sit my students in front of it for an hour, after an introductory lecture about TEI. Well I will do, when I return from my second maternity leave break to resume teaching next year.

As for the resulting paper? Here it is - my plenary which explains why we needed to go down this route.

Terras, M and Van den Branden, R and Vanhoutte, E (2009) Teaching TEI: The Need for TEI by Example. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 24 (3) 297 - 306. 10.1093/llc/fqp018. PDF

What happens when you tweet an Open Access Paper

2011-11-07T16:01:00.008Z

So a few weeks ago, I tweeted and posted about this paper

Terras, M (2009) "Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation". Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25 (4) 425 - 438. Available in PDF.

I thought it worth revisiting the results of this. Is it worth me digging out the full text, running the gamut with the UCL repository, and trying to spend the time putting my previous research online? Is Open Access a gamble that pays - and if so, in what way?

Prior to me blogging and tweeting about the paper, it got downloaded twice (not by me). The day I tweeted and blogged it, it immediately got 140 downloads. This was on a friday: on the saturday and sunday it got downloaded, but by fewer people - on monday it was retweeted and it got a further 140 or so downloads. I have no idea what happened on the 24th October - someone must have linked to it? Posted it on a blog? Then there were a further 80 downloads. Then the traditional long tail, then it all goes quiet.

All in all, its been downloaded 535 times since it went live, from all over the world: USA (163), UK (107), Germany (14), Australia (10), Canada (10), and the long tail of beyond: Belgium, France, Ireland Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Europe, UAE, "unknown".

Worth it, then? Well there are a few things to say about this.

I have no idea how many times it is read, accessed, downloaded in the journal itself. So seeing this - 500 reads in a week! makes me think, wow: people are reading something I have written!
It must be all relative, surely. Is 500 full downloads good? Who can tell? All I can say is that it puts it into the top 10 - maybe top 5 - papers downloaded from the UCL repository last month (I wont know until someone updates the webpage with last months stats).
If I tell you that the most accessed item from our department ever in the UCL repository, which was put in there five years ago, has had 1000 full text downloads, then 500 downloads in a week aint too shabby. They didnt blog or tweet it, its just sitting there.
There is a close correlation to when I tweet the paper and downloads.
There can be a compulsion to start to pay attention to stats. Man, it gets addictive. But is this where we want to be headed: academia as X-factor? Hmmm.

Ergo, if you want people to read your papers, make them open access, and let the community know (via blogs, twitter, etc) where to get them. Not rocket science. But worth spending time doing. Just dont develop a stats habit.

I'll feature the next one from my back catalogue, shortly...

Update 08/11/11: As a result of posting this, and this post getting retweeted far and wide (thanks all!) the paper got downloaded a further 120 times. See? See?

Update 08/11/11: The UCL stats page for downloads last month has now been updated: this was the 5th most downloaded paper in the UCL repository in October 2011. Yeah, I'm up there with fat tax, seaworthiness, preventative nutrition, and the peri-urban(?) interface. I'm not sure how many papers in total there are in the repository - I cant find that stat - but a search for "the" or "a" both brings back 224,575 papers, if that is anything to go by.

Update 10/11/11: The Digital Curation Manager at UCL, Martin Moyle, has been in touch to confirm that 6486 of the 224, 575 papers in the repository have downloadable full text attached. And told me where I can generate this stat. Whoops! (Thanks Martin).

Update 10/11/11: After this post, there is the predictable long tail happening with stats. Another 60 downloads on the 8th, 10 on the 9th. Its all quite predictable - yet nice that the paper is wending its way to interested parties!

Update 25/11/11: This post was mentioned in the Times Higher last week, and the paper has now been downladed 805 times in total.

Full Steam Ahead

2011-11-07T15:56:00.000Z

The people at UCL Discovery are now talking to me, and things are moving forward. I have lots of things ready to go and in the pipeline - which gives me, I reckon, at least one thing to talk about a week on here for the next academic year. I'm also feeding back usability issues to them (like, NO, dont delete the conference paper just because I published a paper in a journal with the same title! YES thats me in that record, even though my name isn't capitalised. NO, Melody Terras who works in Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland IS NOT ME).

You can tell I'm delighted by this whole state of affairs, huh?

Seriously, the whole process of sorting out my publication record on the institutional servers/ system is turning out to be a massive timesink. Previously, I had just been keeping a note myself of what I had been up to on my old webpage. That has to go, and I have to generate everything from their database. Which is taking me hours to deal with. Progress!

But, as someone once passive aggressively said to me, "lets move on". Lets talk about what I've been up to - and also, what I'm going to be up to in future. And let's talk about what happens when you tweet something...

On thumb twiddling

2011-11-01T13:41:00.004Z

Well. I bet you are wondering what has happened to my experiment in Open Access Publishing, where I am putting papers up online in our institutional repository, and sharing the best tales behind the papers here.

If it has stalled, its certainly not my fault. Finding drafts of things is much easier, so far, than I had imagined - I'm the messiest person in real life, but turns out I'm pretty organised, informationally. No. The slowness comes from - shall we call it a pipeline?

I'm currently waiting on over ten papers to go "live" in our institutional repository, since I have uploaded them. I've been waiting on them to go live for a month. I have no idea how the process works. I submit papers: I wait. I get no email to indicate progress. Sometimes the person (and it is a person, they make a note on the record) deletes the file, with no reason given. I upload it again. It gets deleted. I send emails. They are ignored. I send more emails. They get replies from an email address that doesnt give the person's name, just the "institutional repository". I reply to those emails. They are ignored.

And so it goes. Lessons in black-box service provision, if ever there was one. Absolutely infuriating. I can see how people give up on uploading things to institutional repositories. I simply dont have the time to hassle them into providing the service they are supposed to. I am not asking them to do anything difficult, after all: just to mount a file. Italics here means: grrrr.

But I shall plug on. I've started complaining further up the tree - hopefully it will trickle down and eventually I shall have something to show for all my hard work - which they say they want to show off. Hmmmm.

I didnt count on the institutional repository itself to be a barrier in making my work available through open access. It means I have actually stopped submitting things. What's the point? I have 100+ more papers to put up there. Why should I waste the time in submitting things if they are ignored?

I also made the decision to blog once about each research project, and tweet the remainder of papers that come out. The LAIRAH project, for example, which I blogged about below, also featured others papers that are freely available for download on the institutional repository. I'll list these at the end of this post: they made it through the barrier previously.

But for the more interesting stuff - and what tales I have to tell you! - you'll have to wait til someone (and it is a someone, not an anonymous pipeline, repository, or computer - how we hide behind these terms!) presses the button to make more stuff live. And stops deleting things willy nilly. Sigh.

Warwick, C., Galina, I., Rimmer, J., Terras, M., Blandford, A., Gow, J., and Buchanan, G. (2009). "Documentation and the users of digital resources in the humanities". Journal of Documentation. Volume:65, Issue: 1, Page: 33 - 57.

Warwick, C., Terras, M., Galina, I., Huntington, P., Pappa, N. (2008). “Library and Information Resources, and Users of Digital Resources in the Humanities”. Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems. Volume 42 Number 1. p. 5-27.

Warwick,C. Galina, I., Terras, M., Huntington, P., and Pappa, N. (2008). "The Master Builders: LAIRAH research on good practice in the construction of digital humanities projects" Literary and Linguistic Computing 23(3), 383-396.

Update: within 24 hours of throwing my rattles out the pram, things are moving, and we have action. Am pleased to say that finally we are making progress. I'll be able to start posting things again on here next week, as a result. Hurrah!

Sleep Deprivation + Deadlines = Wacky Paper

2011-10-18T10:23:00.002+01:00

Sometimes, its things happening in your real life that determine your academic direction.

Like most ~~undergraduates~~ academics I occasionally drop the "and this requires further work!" line into a conclusion of a book chapter or paper. I try and store these in a pop-stack in my brain for when I need a quick research output. When writing a chapter on digitisation for Digital Images, I made an aside about people beyond institutional boundaries who were carrying out systematic digitisation projects. This, I said, requires further work!

A year later, I'm on maternity leave with my firstborn. Late pregnancy and maternity leave is incredibly isolating and lonely. I, personally, looked forward to resuming my academic life, and making adult conversation. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to go to a conference soon after my return to work, and see everyone in the flesh? Wouldn't it be great to pitch up at Digital Humanities 2009?

But. To get funding to go to a conference, I needed to have a paper accepted. To have a paper accepted I needed to do some new research, and write an abstract. I had nothing new, and no time to do anything new. My brain was also quite, quite fried from dealing with the sleep deprivation that accompanies a newborn. A plan was hatched during 3am and 4am and 5am feeds to put in a rather promissory abstract (tut tut, they are supposed to report on something you've already done) on a small research project on "amateur" digitisation projects. If accepted, it would have the added benefit of giving me a little two-week research project to do as soon I got back to work, to kick start my brain. If it wasnt accepted, it could go back in the "requires further work!" pile. I could not gauge if this was a good idea, or not. It was an idea, and that is all that mattered.

Usually it would take me an afternoon to bash out a conference abstract. This took a painful four weeks of trying to get my head in the zone between baby mewling and nappy changing.

The abstract was accepted. I went back to work, and did the study. I went to Maryland, I gave a paper, I caught up with colleagues, I had a fabulous time. I was then asked to write up the paper for the conference proceedings (something I hadn't planned on doing). What the hey! So here it is:

Terras, M (2009) "Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation". Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25 (4) 425 - 438. Available in PDF.

Its a bit wackier than my normal stuff. Its very positive - I chose to look at the "best" of amateur digitisation, rather than the worst. It comes from a place of sleep deprivation and left-of-centre. And it's one of my most cited papers. (The book I spent 6 years on? Not so much...)

From the archive: the LAIRAH study

2011-10-12T13:13:00.004+01:00

I'm currently trawling through my research papers and submitting them to UCL Discovery to make them publicly available. It is taking more time than I had imagined: not to find the original texts, but for them to go through the system and go live. I'll talk more about this soon as I have a better idea of the issues behind putting research outputs online, but the first paper I want to report on (mainly as its one of the first to make it through the goalposts) is:

Warwick,C. Terras, M., Huntington, P., and Pappa, N. (2008). "If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data". Literary and Linguistic Computing.23(1), 85-102. Available in PDF.

This is one of the papers that emanated from the LAIRAH project: Log Analysis of Internet Resource in the Arts and Humanities. This was an AHRC funded project that ran from July 2005 to September 2006.

How quaint, I hear you say. Log Analysis! Why would you bother to do that? Wouldn't you just use Google Analytics? Now, of course, you would, but when we submitted the grant application, Google Analytics was just a idea called Urchin on Demand, and it didnt come on stream until the end of the project. We wanted to provide some robust measurements of how people were using digital resources, and what this meant for those creating resources for the humanities. As far as we knew at the time, we were the first to look at server logs in this way, for this domain. Or at least, the first to plan to look at server logs.

There were several issues in actually getting hold of server logs - turned out people didnt want to hand them over. I would have liked to get more into the nitty gritty of what exactly people were doing, but we had limited access, and access to portal data rather than individual websites.

The resulting paper draws some interesting conclusions, particularly our quantitative findings "that users from academic domains tended to be more persistent and use different search strategies to reach their goals" and the importance of nomenclature, documentation, and provenance in creating useful digital resources in the humanities. I like to think that this project began to address the fact that we have to understand user needs when creating digitised content, at a time when people were merrily digitising and creating websites without much understanding of how or why they would be used.

Nowadays, of course, you'd use Google Analytics to monitor how your digital project was used. But projects are still not keen to share access statistics with the wider community...

Open Access, UCL, and Me

2011-10-07T10:01:00.000+01:00

In the past couple of years, UCL has really been pushing the open access agenda in academia. Announced in 2009, the open access policy states

That, copyright permissions allowing, a copy of all research outputs should be deposited in the UCL repository in Open Access

and UCL is aggressively pursuing what is often called "Green OA", where research from subscription based journals is made publicly available in an online repository that hosts the final accepted versions of a writer's output.

UCL staff have been asked to manage their publications, and much of UCL's research output is now parked up at UCL Discovery, where full text of publications emanating from UCL academics can be found. There has been a fair amount of press coverage about this, and UCL is often mentioned as the trailblazer in Open Access when it comes up in discussion.

However, the archive is only as good as its holdings, and the holdings are only there if academics dig them out. For the past couple of years I've had it vaguely on the to do list to trawl through my personal archive to locate the last-but-one version of published material, and mount on UCL Discovery. Now is the time to do it, as I have also got to port over and manage all my websites, databases, and research records on systems that have changed in the year I've been away. Its a half-an-hour-a-day-for-three-months kind of tinker.

And I thought - why, wont you join me on this tour? When things go live, I'll post a little thing here about the research, how it came about, what the outcomes were, and link to the full text of the papers themselves. As I go further and further back, it's also going to be a test of my personal archiving strategy...

An example to get the ball rolling? My plenary at Digital Humanities 2010 "Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon" was originally posted on this blog, but I was asked to write it up for the conference proceedings, which appeared in Literary and Linguistic Computing, 26 (3). Discovery has a nice summary page which gives the abstract, etc, and the PDF of the full text is available from there.

The plenary got a fair amount of coverage at the time, so I wont talk too much about this one. I hope to post one or two "new" papers a week up here over the next few months, and will tell the story behind each one as I do.

Reviewing the Blog Situation

2011-10-07T09:26:00.000+01:00

One of the things I wondered in my last post before I started maternity leave was - what would the status of the blogosphere be when I got back to work, a year later.

Unsurprisingly, it's still here.

I've been thinking if there is a place for this blog, and how things have changed over the past few years. There's no doubt that a lot of the things I used to do here - post links to good online resources, make short comments - have been trumphed by twitter, and I'll continue to hang out over there. But I still have use for a place where I post, every now and then, something more than 140 characters. I've had comments in the past that some regular readers (or at least, regular before I took a hiatus) like to know what its like to be an academic, so I'll continue to post on what I'm up to. I'll park the text of plenary lectures and invited speeches here (they are quite a lot of intellectual work, and its good to be able to share them to a wider audience). Its also on my to do list to sort out my UCL web presence - more on that soon - so whilst I was doing that I thought I would chat on here about the work I've done previously, as I need to trawl through my personal archive over the next couple of months to get things ship-shape.

I'm not too keen to share too much personal information beyond my academic role (hey, that's for facebook, right?) and I was reminded of this with a review of my blog, posted online last year. It contains the genius line that made me smile

It's tough to evaluate Melissa Terras' Blog; I can't make fun of it, because I don't understand most of what she posts

but also liberally lifts my picture, and that of my newborn twins from here. You live by the sword, etc.... but it was a (non-threatening) reality check for me. At the moment, I dont have the personal need to address too much about non-work stuff up here, so I wont. I had me some babies. Everyone is doing fine, thanks. I am now back to work.

All this to say - normal service is resumed! and perhaps shall be even more organised on here than previously.

Removing Tumbleweed

2011-10-05T11:18:00.000+01:00

Well. I've been officially "back to work" for a couple of weeks, so its time to think about dusting off this blog, and putting it to good use. Until now I've been mainly fighting fires, and trying valiantly to climb the email mountain that has accrued in my year long leave. Its time to start being proactive, rather than just reactive though - once I get to the bottom of that email pile, that is.

I've popped into college a couple of times (I am on sabbatical for a term to get my feet back under the table before I take on full teaching and admin duties). It's probably worth me describing just how much has changed in the year I have been at home: our department moved buildings, so I have a new office, which I am having the pleasure of making feel like home, a year after everyone else did. (Given I was so disabled, our departmental administrator organised my old office to be packed up and shipped over, so I am merrily going through boxes now, going "I own that?") Its taken me a few days to get back on the network, locate cabling, etc. I still have no idea where lots of things are in the new department, and it will probably take a long time to know where to get X, Y, and Z. In addition, my old Head of Department left UCL with little warning, taking with him some colleagues. New appointments have been made, new faces, new routines. We also have just started the new MA in Digital Humanities, so there is a whole new course to sort out (although Simon Mahony is doing a stellar job of being Acting Course Director at the moment, until I get my act together). All change! In these respects, it is almost like going back to a new job - but with some very familiar faces and places thrown in too.

Research wise, I'm at an interesting juncture: the main projects I was working on before going on leave have all wrapped up, so I'm coming back to a phase of grant writing, and book proposal writing, and bootstrapping research again. I have plenty to read, plenty to catch up on - and plenty to write, too.

I'm also in the very, very final stages of putting together, with Brent Nelson, "Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture" (New Technologies in Renaissance Studies. Toronto: Iter; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.) We are at the final proofs stage - fingers crossed we can press the button on this shortly. Next up? Editing "Digital Humanities in Practice" - due in to Facet very soon.

I'm itching to *make* something, though. Itching to code, create, make computers do something, instead of just talking about computers doing something. Plans are hatching for my next research direction, and future research proposals - I want to rejoin the ranks of Digital Humanists who implement computational tools. Its been a while, but I have been on leave for a year.

In which time email has piled up. Best get back to it.

Peering Inside the Big Tent: Digital Humanities and the Crisis of Inclusion

2011-07-26T19:52:00.000+01:00

(This is an overview of what I hope – or plan – to say for my plenary talk at Interface 2011, 27th July 2011, UCL London. I’m not a fan of reading from the script, so may deviate, hesitate, repeat, and elide on the day. I am told a video will follow, if you'd rather...)

I’m delighted to be here at Interface 2011, and to be partaking – and mixing – with the Digital Humanities community. The title of my talk refers to a few things. Firstly, I’ve not actually done any Digital Humanities for over a year: I’ve been peering at DH from afar, due to being at home doing voluntary work with my own circus troupe (aka “maternity leave”). It is amazing, though, how much you can glean from the twitters, blogs, and email lists whilst up all hours with the bairns, so whilst I have not been hands on, I’ve been closely following the doings and goings on of those who have actively been Digital Humanitiesing.

Secondly, “The Big Tent” was – of course – the theme of DH 2011, which I was unable to attend and am frankly jealous of anyone who did. I was peering at it from afar, and this issue of “Big Tent Digital Humanities” seems to have galvanised discussion in the field about the changing nature of the discipline. I thought is a useful perspective, and definition, to explore (without criticising anyone who organised DH2011).

And finally, “Peering inside the big tent” alludes to the fact that Interface is primarily a conference for graduate students working between the fields of humanities and technology: so many, if not all, of those attending, although still backstage at the moment, aim to be performing front of house in an employed position in the academic circus sooner rather than later. I hope what I say is, then, of use to those nearing the end of graduate studies in DH.

But I want to start with something decidedly non digital. Pre-digital, even. I studied Art History in my undergraduate days, and was thinking of what a career in the humanities meant to students, then. It started with the slide test, where we learnt and memorised hundreds of paintings, and were expected to be able to mobilise knowledge about them expertly. (Note – In the lecture I undertake a slide test here of Degas’ Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, National Gallery, London). We would study 35mm slides, cramped round a slide cabinet perhaps 5 students deep, for hours, and back this up through print publications and gallery visits. If you caught the bug, you might do your undergraduate dissertation on, say, Degas and his circus paintings. You may then do a MA dissertation on the Impressionists and their circus paintings. If you were good enough, and fortunate to gain funding, you might do your PhD dissertation on the use of perspective in Degas’ circus paintings, and what this “means” for modern art. Eventually, after stiff competition, you may get a post teaching modern (used in the broadest sense) art, and your research would become highly specialised in perspective in impressionist paintings of performance. After years of hard graft you’d own this area, and write in this area, and have found and read every book and article on this area, and publish the elusive monograph in this area. You may have even travelled widely to see every painting in this area in the flesh, not to mention visiting many archives and libraries. It would take years to even piece together all the information you needed to become an expert in the field.

Let’s contrast that to today’s information environment. You are not sure of the exact painting you are interested in, and rather than remember it, a quick google of “degas circus painting” leads you to the Wikipedia page of Miss La La. You can find a link to it at the National Gallery, London, where you can zoom in in so much more detail that you could ever see in a 35mm slide, or even up close when visiting the gallery. You can see where this fits in to the pantheon of Degas’ – and the Impressionists’ – oeuvre by looking up the complete works of all Impressionist paintings, online. The complete works of Edgar Degas shows you every single known study for Miss La La, and you can see high definition images of a pastel study for the painting on the Tate website. You can look up historical newspaper archives to see if there was anything written about the painting or artist in the past, find relevant journal articles that refer to the painting from the comfort of your own laptop, and see if it had been mentioned particularly in any book published since the painting was painted. You could even wander up to the painting virtually using the Google Art Project (well, you will be able to once the NG expand their coverage of Google Art beyond the couple of galleries that have been digitised via street view technology). You can see other’s views and visits of the artwork by a simple Flickr search (which is something art historians love, in particular, for looking at alternative views of sculptures held in museums, beyond the official viewpoint in the print catalogues). If you are in the Gallery, and want more information about a painting, you can simply take a picture on your phone, and search Google with that image, or use Google goggles to tell you more about it. (I am aware that I am mentioning Google frequently: a) I am “not-working” from home and therefore unable to easily access other institutional resources, and b) they do provide an easy suite of tools to use in the first instance, even if there are shortcomings and limitations). You can do a reverse image search using Tin Eye to see who else is talking about that image/ artwork. If you have the access, and resources, you could use advanced imaging techniques to study both the creation and the current condition of the artwork, for conservation purposes and beyond. You could use computational methods to analyse the angles and perspectives of the human figure in Degas’ artworks. You could virtually recreate the Cirque Fernando in 3D to investigate the artist’s perspective of Miss La La. If you didn’t know how to do any of this, you could ask twitter for some pointers, and within minutes someone in the DH community would have responded. Post a question on DH answers, and within 24 hours you would have the best advice on how to study perspective in modern art, using computational methods.

What part of this is Digital Humanities? Is it the act of googling the painting? Using the zoom on the NG website? Using the complete works of Edgard Degas, Google Art Project, JStor, Flickr or even Wikipedia? Is DH the creation of the online resources? The digitisation of books and journals? Is DH the use of tools to study how the painting was created? Composed? Curated? Is DH the study of the use of these tools by users to study art? Is DH the development of techniques and algorithms to analyse the painting? Is DH the means to ask the wider community advice? Is DH the infrastructure which allows the advice to be detailed and delivered to even more scholars? Is DH the use of electronic images of art in powerpoint slides discussing DH? And who is the Digital Humanist? The creator of digital resources? The writer of algorithms? The user of programs? The person who analyses the action of the user? And should academia take any of this seriously?

What is Digital Humanities? And what is Digital Humanities for? To paraphrase Larkin, Ah, solving that question brings the doctors of philosophy in their long coats running over the fields. There is a lot written about this (it’s not the place here to give a history of the definition of DH, but emergent scholars could do worse than make themselves familiar with a lot of the arguments). It’s something to do with the Humanities, and digital technologies, but what exactly, we are slow – and even reluctant – to pinpoint. The latest definition, “Big Tent Digital Humanities”, deliberately obfuscates the focus of the field. Roll up roll up! Everything is Digital Humanities! Everyone is a digital humanist!

The concept of a “big tent” to demarcate a group of individuals is a pragmatic and flexible description usually used to give strength in numbers, permitting a broad spectrum of views or approaches across the constituency. The term has been around for a long time, actually originating from religious American groups in the 19th century (see also “broad church”) rather than the circus background the name implies. It is most commonly applied to political coalitions that have a wide spread of backgrounds, approaches, and beliefs. In some respect it is well suited to Digital Humanities – what are the “Humanities” if not a “big tent” of scholars interested in the human condition and human society? What are the “Digital Humanities” if not a broad spectrum of academic approaches, loosely bound together with a shared interest in technology and humanistic research, in all its guises?

In many regards, “Big Tent Digital Humanities” is a nice concept. It is true that the DH community is considerably more open, approachable, welcoming, and willing to embrace new approaches than many traditional areas of humanities academia. Big Tent DH, then, is an ecumenical approach, whilst giving the freedom for individual scholars to explore their own interests, wherever in the research and teaching spectrum they lie. And why would anyone want to limit the constituency of DH? Surely as technology becomes more and more pervasive in society, finding humanities scholars who do not use any aspect of digital technology in their research will become rarer. As recent blog postings have discussed, anyone who has the interest to do so can tinker with DH, and DH is one of the easiest disciplines to go DIY in. Big Tent DH provides a shared core of likeminded scholars who are exploring digital frontiers to undertake work in the humanities, and welcomes those interested in engaging and learning further about the application of potentially transformative technologies.

But. Just as political parties who are too “big tent” can be criticised for adopting populist policies without any clear remit, stance, or goal, “Big Tent Digital Humanities” has its issues when you look at the detail. It is all very well saying that DH is open and welcoming and encourages participation – but despite open platforms such as DH answers, and the DIY approach, it is still a very rich, very western academic field with a limited number of job openings for the growing number of humanities PhDs that are being produced that have some digital element to them. Let’s be honest: most people undertaking graduate research who want to continue doing research when their studies are finished would like to be paid for it and make it their livelihood, rather than go the DIY, in your own time after the day job, route. I don’t want to dwell on the numbers of PhDs that go onto have academic posts – as far as I’m concerned PhD students should have done their homework on that before undertaking a PhD, and there have always been limited openings. It’s probably true that DH, at the moment, still has more career openings than other, singular humanities subjects. We also have an increasingly popular “#alt-ac” trajectory, where individuals can go on to rewarding alternative academic careers that are not tenure track (what is the alternatives to #alt-ac? #ten-trac-ac? ) However, despite all this, there will be a lot of folk left peering into the Big Tent, without ever gaining full access of any paid employment in DH. Institutional support means access to computational infrastructure, journals, money for equipment, conference travel, paid sabbaticals to write up research, payment which enables you to subscribe to journals and scholarly societies, etc. We should be careful with our descriptions of how open DH actually is, and the resources required to participate in DH research and development, for those without institutional backing. Personally, I don’t like the associations that come with the “Big Tent” label: it paints DH as a transitory spectacle with all the connotations that come with the circus. Branding is important, and (given the experience we in DH have had in trying to be taken seriously by our traditional humanities colleagues) suggesting the field is best described using a big top metaphor, although it may be a bit of fun, is worrying. You don’t see many string theorists describing themselves as “Big Tent Particle Physicists!” – we should be careful what view of ourselves we are projecting into the wider academic world. Our acceptance, even our current fashionable status, has been hard won: and what goes up must come down. Is there really no better way to describe the strengths and objectives of our community?

In lots of ways, though, getting hung up about the term “Big Tent Digital Humanities” is a red herring. Like London buses, there will be another theory – or three – about Digital Humanities along in a minute. However, it is an acceptance that the field is changing, and growing. And therein lies the “crisis” in my title. The field can only continue to expand, as more and more people engage with the technology that allows them to undertake academic tasks, and who are we to ring fence the academic field that lets people discuss this and learn more? Who are we to limit participation in the field to those with paid full time jobs? But if everyone is a Digital Humanist, then no-one is really a Digital Humanist. The field does not exist if it is all pervasive, too widely spread, or ill defined.

As DH expands we run into issues chasing funding (there will always be limited resources, which are now competed for by larger and larger groups of scholars). But perhaps the sticking point that we all most keenly feel, when applied to our own research, is the effect the expansion of DH has on peer review – the essential sifting mechanism around which a discipline functions. There were many vocal complaints on twitter about reviews for papers submitted to DH2011. In some cases, including papers that I was co-author on, the returned reviews varied from high score to dismally low scores – with the comments from the low scorers making it clear that the reviewers did not have the foggiest what the research was about. There is no mechanism to appeal this – and one low score can mean a paper is rejected. The acceptance onto conference programs can spell the difference between attending and not attending conferences, or being published or not being published, and so, in the longer term, career progression. The problem of the Big Tent, or the Broad Church, is that the experience and knowledge of individuals is so loosely bound that “peers” can often have little real insight into the relevance of applicability of a given specific research topic (which, by its nature, should be specialised). As the community around the DH conference expands, this will become an ongoing problem. If everyone is DH, if the field is all encompassing, how can we trust the peer reviews (good or bad) that come from within the community? Does “Big Tent Digital Humanities” mean that DH peer review is broken?

I think there are other, more useful things to concentrate on when defining DH than the “Big Tent” idea. Going back to the pre-digital versus digital scenario given at the start of the lecture: I believe DH has been poor in articulating the changes the digital information environment and its related tools have wrought to humanities scholarship, and the changes and potential that this means for individual scholars. The roles and positions I find myself filling are not those I would have associated with a singular academic career in the pre-digital environment, nor does the publishing avenues of our research chime with the traditional views of the academy (although what did I know then of how academia worked?). Partaking in DH and building a career around its framework means that I have enjoyed researching in many fields: classics, archaeology, history, archival studies, computer gaming, high performance computing, image processing... but unlike the scholars of “old” (all of 15 years ago) I’m very aware I do not own a specialised field, or have a specific research remit, or have the will, means or opportunities to churn out the monographs. DH has allowed me to be jack of all trades, master of none – is this what the Big Tent really means? It is something I have occasionally struggled with, as it would be nice to lay claim to a research area and become noted for work in that area alone. Many digital outputs will never be found on library shelves. Many of the senior scholars in DH, though, have “portfolio” research careers, keeping up to date with developments in technology and applying them variously in different disciplines in ways that would not make tenure in the pre-digital world. Behind the scenes at the Big Tent there are people building interesting, diverse skillsets, and it would be useful at some stage to acknowledge the changing academic role and remit as personified by DH scholars, as well as saying “we’re all DH now”.

The irony is, of course, that the way for young scholars to gain full entry to the Big Tent (whether in #alt-ac or tenure track posts) is still through the specialised focus of PhD research. (Although there are plenty of established scholars in DH without doctorates, even the most perfunctory of positions now usually dictates that applicants hold a PhD in a relevant area). Like an individual circus performer, the individual scholar must become the expert in their chosen, niche area, and hone their own skill and approach. However, if there is one piece of advice I can give to those embarking on an academic career, it is to look around the Big Tent, and to see what skills are most needed, asked for, and employable, and to make sure that these are also part of your skillset. For example, I have no research interest in textual encoding and markup, but I make sure that I follow the gist of what is going on with the technology, and would be able to teach it. XML and TEI are such a core part of any DH teaching program that it would be remiss not to have experience in this area. Make sure you know the basics of Internet Technologies, Databases, and even GIS. Experiment with programming, at least just to see what it is about. You may not believe it at the moment, but Graduate students have the luxury of time to pick up and learn new skills beyond your immediate research. Use whatever training courses your institutions offers wisely, while you have the opportunity. Once you hit employed life, the time and opportunity to develop your skills in such a wide manner becomes severely rationed.

Make sure you are visible in Social Media circles (show that you are actively peering in, before applying for positions). Engage with others doing different DH research: use the Big Tent as a way to network with people, whilst seeing what new technologies are being appropriated within DH. Make sure you make yourself ready for employment: a cursory glance at employment adverts for DH will show that those with job openings are asking for a lot. I wonder if the spread of topics and skills demonstrated in the Big Tent constituency mean we are almost asking too much from individual applicants at the very start of their careers: you want to join the circus? Show us you know how it all works!

My second piece of advice would be – read “Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars” (edited by Bethany Nowviskie). Understand the arena you want to be employed in, and the various approaches there can be there to getting jobs there.

My final piece of advice is – learn to touch type. If you are planning to be a professional Digital Humanist, there is a whole lot of silicon-face time to be spent. Invest in your future by learning how to engage with the digital in the fastest and most efficient way possible (at the moment).

And then I should probably all wish you good luck out there, but I’m going to end with the painting of Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. It’s the analysis of such objet, and the potential for digital techniques and technologies to aid us in understanding different perspectives of the human condition that drives Digital Humanities. But it is also about tenacity, and application, and hard work, and expertise. There’s not much “luck” in the skill demonstrated by Miss La La in this painting: its sheer, hard won, strength and agility. Despite all the “Roll up! Roll up!” talk and advertising, the wonder comes down to whether or not she can actually apply herself, and undertake the task. It’s the same for Digital Humanists: despite the changing definitions and perspectives that surround our field, the value and usefulness of our skills are demonstrated through what we actually do, the research we undertake, the tools we build, the people we teach, the literature we write.

I am looking forward to actually doing Digital Humanities again. It is in the doing that we can explore what the changing information environment means for the Humanities, and scholars in the Humanities. We can argue the limits and boundaries of our constituency, and the list of essential skills that make up DH, over and over. But as digital technologies become increasingly pervasive, the work and skills of Digital Humanists become increasingly important. We are holding on tight to our place in academia – by our teeth, if needs be.

In which I tentatively start to think about work, again

2011-07-25T20:32:00.001+01:00

You know you've been away from your blog too long when a colleague emails you to say "so when were you thinking of updating it...?" I did say I would resurface in the Spring, but here we are mid Summer.... and here we are, above. Everyone is doing well, I'm back to full mobility, and life is settling into a chaotic but rewarding routine. I'm not back to work proper for another two months, but in walks around the Common with the buggy I'm starting to ruminate on what's next, what I want to research, etc. There are plenty plans up my sleeve.

It's not like I've been idle, either - I have been hanging out aplenty on twitter (@melissaterras) as the micro blog form seems to suit the 5 minutes here or there of peace I have whilst running after the three youngsters. There are also various other things that have been going on, which I will detail properly when coming back to work.

On Wednesday - I am actually leaving the house, to go into that there London, to the Interface Conference, where I will be one of the plenary speakers. Nothing like a baptism of fire when getting back into work things after a year away from the office, I find. I'm looking forward to seeing real people (I hope you look like your avatars). If you are there, say hi.

I'll post my plenary text here after the event. And be back to work, properly, in mid September. Looking forward to it.

Hello Worlds

2010-12-07T13:11:00.001Z

I am pleased to announce the safe arrival of non-identical twin boys on the 26th November 2010 at 3am (just a few hours after I posted the entry below - they must have known...). It was all a bit of a mad emergency rush, but we are all fine, and after a week or so in special care the twins are thriving.

Left: Edward Buckminster Terras Ostler, 7lb. Right: Fergusson James Terras Ostler, 5.5lb.

I expect to be off radar until the spring...

Shutting Up Shop

2010-11-25T11:06:00.000Z

Hey folks. My maternity leave starts tomorrow. I'm crossing off the to do list, battening down the hatches, making like a tree and leaving, etc etc. Twins are due in less than 3 weeks.

No doubt I'll be hovering on email and twitter (@melissaterras) but anything I do from now, workwise, is a bonus rather than mandatory. Back to work full time in September 2011. (Who knows what state the blogosphere will be in by then?)

I'll post here when there is any news - but probably nothing else terribly interesting for a few months. I hope to emerge in the spring sometime, when sleep routines should start to happen... fingers crossed. Wish me luck.

Sorry we're closed by threelittlecupcakes on Flickr

4Humanities

2010-11-19T11:39:00.000Z

You'd have to be hiding under a rock to not notice the attack on the Arts and Humanities in the UK, and beyond, recently.

As a response to the threads on Humanist in October on "industrialisation of
the digital humanities" (http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-October/001644.html) and "digital humanities and the cuts (http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-October/001649.html), I am part of an international collective of digital humanists that Alan Liu is coordinating. We have started an initiative and Web site called "4Humanities: Advocating for the Humanities" (http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/).

(Members so far in the U.S., Canada, and U.K.): Edward Ayers, Cathy N. Davidson, Patrick Durusau, David Theo Goldberg, Tim Hitchcock, Lorna Hughes, Alan Liu, Andrew Prescott, Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Lisa Spiro, Me, and William G. Thomas, III.

The 4Humanities Mission Statement goes as follows (http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/mission/):

4Humanities is a site created by the international community of digital humanities scholars and educators to assist in advocacy for the humanities.

Government and private support for the humanities—for research, teaching, preservation, and creative renewal in such fields as literature, history, languages, philosophy, classics, art history, cultural studies, libraries, and so on—are in decline. In some nations, especially since the economic recession that started in 2007, the decline has resulted in major cuts in government and university funding. Leaders of society and business stake all the future on innovative and entrepreneurial discoveries in science,engineering, biomedicine, green technology, and so on. But the humanities contribute the needed perspective, training in complex human phenomena, and communication skills needed to spark, understand, and make “human” the new discoveries. In the process, they themselves discover new, and also very old, ways to be human. They do so through their unique contribution of the wisdom of the past, awareness of other cultures in the present, and imagination of innovative and fair futures. Many people care about the humanities, not just in the educational and cultural institutions directly affected by the recent cutbacks, but also in business, government, science, media, politics, the professions, and the general public. They believe that society will be poorer, not richer, without the humanities to help us grasp, and evolve, what it means to be “human” and “humane” in today’s complex
world.

4Humanities is both a platform and a resource for humanities advocacy. As a platform, 4Humanities stages the efforts of humanities advocates to reach out to the public. We are a combination newspaper, magazine, channel, blog, wiki, and social network. We solicit well-reasoned or creative demonstrations, examples, testimonials, arguments, opinion pieces, open letters, press releases, print posters, video “advertisements,” write-in campaigns, social-media campaigns, short films, and other innovative forms of humanities advocacy, along with accessibly-written scholarly works grounding the whole in research or reflection about the state of the humanities.

As a resource, 4Humanities provides humanities advocates with a stockpile of digital tools, collaboration methods, royalty-free designs and images, best practices, new-media expertise, and customizable newsfeeds of issues and events relevant to the state of the humanities in any local or national context. Whether humanities advocates choose to conduct their publicity on 4Humanities itself or instead through their own newsletter, Web site, blog, and so on, we want to help with the best that digital-humanities experts have to offer.

4Humanities began because the digital humanities community—which specializes in making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching as well as to think about the basic nature of the new media and technologies–woke up to its special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy. The digital humanities are increasingly integrated in the humanities at large. They catch the eye of administrators and funding agencies who otherwise dismiss the humanities as yesterday’s news. They connect across disciplines with science and engineering fields. They have the potential to use new technologies to help the humanities communicate with, and adapt to, contemporary society.

So how can you help?

We are calling for participants and assistance from the digital humanities community. Some of the help we need most immediately is as follows:

(1) Before we become more public (i.e., recruiting talent and time from the general humanities community, itself a prelude to recruiting advocacy from people in the sciences, business, government, film industry, etc.), we need to build up more resources under the "Digital Resources for Advocacy" part of the site, (Lisa Spiro, for instance, will be helping by harvesting from her DIRT wiki: https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage)

(2) We are especially keen to begin collecting posts, images, podcasts, etc., in the currently empty category of "Students for the Humanities"--i.e., student voices.

(3) We'd really like to recruit some creative multimedia people to begin producing a video "advertisement for the humanities"--so that we don't stay only in the realm of essay-like advocacy statements.

Please write to Alan Liu at ayliu@english.ucsb.edu if you would be interested in helping. Please also help put out the word about 4Humanities.

Ask and Ye Shall Recieve

2010-10-13T11:05:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with a friend of mine who had done his PhD (in Philosophy) at the same time I had done mine. He is now in the financial sector, but keeps his creative mind active. His latest hobby, he announced, was learning Old English.

What surprised me was that, although he had been searching for a while, he said that he was really disappointed with the level of provision of online materials for Old English. Of course, my hackles went up a little - OE really isnt my area of expertise, or even passing acquaintance - but surely the DH peeps into OE and Medieval studies must have made something that was available for learners, that was decent?

Let not the good name of DH be besmirched! I cried. I shall prove you wrong!

First port of call for me was twitter. Within a few hours, I had been pointed to various resources, from various scholars - none of which my friend had been able to find on a Google search.
- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6072484486 for online teaching resources for Old English (via @hurricaneally)
- The electronic beowulf CD-ROM (via @dougreside)
- teachers upload Beowulf guides & other Old English resources to Woruldhord community collection http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/ (via @RunCoCo)
- recommend search for Stuart Lee Old English lectures on iTunesU & Oxford podcasts http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ (via @ltgoxford)
- Peter Baker's electronic intro to OE: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html (via @Rwelzenb)
- Not sure how accessible it is: http://www.wordloca.com/ (via @iridium)

Sometimes, I just love twitter. How else would I have been able to find these things in such a short time, with so little effort on my part apart from a 140 character question?

Then, of course, there's DH Questions and Answers, which I've just posted the question to to see if I've missed anything else. Again - what a resource! Populated by both experts and newbies - all of them enthusiasts.

Thanks, DH people. I feel like we've not only disproved a criticism, but also highlighted the helpful nature of our community.

My friend thanks everyone for the pointers. And said: "I really must join twitter!".

Spot the Difference

2010-10-01T12:58:00.000+01:00

Something on here has changed. What is it? 10 points if you can see...

I just updated my job title. I'm now proud to be the "Reader in Electronic Communication" in the Department of Information Studies at UCL.

Reader is one of those funny titles that no-one really knows how to place. You dont have to go for it - you can apply to be Professor straight after Senior Lecturer, but I am such a completionist I wanted to collect the set. I'm really proud to have been promoted so soon after Senior Lecturer - and just before a year off on maternity leave, too.

Time to pause and reflect on the next phase... and a nice glass of something in celebration will have to wait for a few months!

Turning Japanese

2010-09-29T11:46:00.000+01:00

My plenary speech for DH2010, Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon, has just been translated into Japanese!

The translator was Satoshi Kodama Ph.D, a Lecturer at the University of Tokyo School of Medicine who teaches medical ethics. His research interests include the moral and legal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham - he can be found on twitter as @bentham.

Thanks to Satoshi, and to the International Institute for Digital Humanities for hosting.

New MA/MSc in Digital Humanities

2010-09-22T11:33:00.000+01:00

We've been putting the final touches to our promotional material for the new MA/MSc in Digital Humanities at UCL. Here is our new poster!

We had to follow quite strict style guidelines from UCL communications. They tend to use a London landmark to publicise courses. I liked the idea of London Bridge - given that the degree will be bridging two disciplines -but didnt want to use the stock photo given. How could we demonstrate cultural heritage, plus digital transformations, using a picture of London Bridge?

How about, I thought, using a historic image. So I bought an out-of-copyright Victorian postcard off eBay that had the right feel. Experiments with pixelation were mocked up, and Rudolf Ammann, who designed the UCLDH logo, suggested this "look through the window" design, with one pixel skewed to add movement and suggest transformation. Comms did a good job in complying with our demands on making it look good as well adhering to the style guide.

We like it. Hope you do too! If anyone out there wants physical copies to stick up at their institution, get in touch...

Transcribing Bentham

2010-09-22T11:27:00.000+01:00

... whilst I was away for a few weeks, Transcribe Bentham launched. Hurrah! We've had a lot of publicity, and now have 156 registered users who have transcribed 150 manuscripts in the last couple of weeks. Progress is steady!

... do of course register and sign up, to see if you can help read Bentham's handwriting!

All quiet from the shed front

2010-09-22T11:03:00.000+01:00

If things have been quiet around here.... its because I'm getting quieter. Those who know me in person will be aware that I'm expecting twins at Xmas. The last few weeks have seen me trying to tidy up various things, meet with various people, and get various projects wrapped up into a state I can comfortably leave them in until I'm back up to speed after The Event.

Early you say! I'm not due til Xmas! ... but I've just been medically signed off from commuting into London. I have a relatively rare condition in pregnancy that makes it increasingly difficult and painful to walk, as the ligaments in my pelvis overstretch. I'm not quite in my wheelchair yet - I still can leave the house under my own steam on crutches. But my world is gradually shrinking to house, shed (home office at the end of the garden) and hospital and physio appointments. That's ok, we knew it would happen this time round. My job is to keep chipper over the next three months before the twins arrive, and the three or four months recovery time after, until I'm able to walk under my own steam again.

Its worth noting how much the Internet contributes to my general wellbeing, though. It is a godsend. I can still get on with work, still communicate with friends and colleagues, and still shop (given that twins are due, there is a lot of shopping to be done). I dont know what I'd do without it. Once again, I breathe a sigh of relief that I live now, and not 20 or 30 years or longer ago. On the Internet, no-one knows you are a disabled. Except for when you tell them. Whoops.

My teaching for the next 16 months will be covered by Julianne Nyhan, who we are glad to welcome on board to UCLDH. I'll be hovering on email and twitter for the duration, no doubt. In the meantime, life goes on as normal, just increasingly physically localised.

EngD Scholarship at UCLDH

2010-08-05T13:03:00.000+01:00

(This is going to be a great project - looking at the use of 3D scanning in a Museum environment. We are working with a major London museum - cant reveal who until we have a memorandum of understanding worked out, but it will be a very interesting and innovative project. Do get in touch if you want to talk more about the project, or the EngD program.)

Engineering Doctorate Studentship

Understanding the Use of 3D Scanning in a Museum Environment

Applications are invited for an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Department of Computer Science in conjunction with a major London museum. This is a 4-year studentship, starting in October 2010, leading to the award of an Engineering Doctorate, which offers the opportunity to conduct research within a cultural heritage context.

The research will seek to understand more about how 3D scans of museum objects can be used in a physical or virtual exhibition space. Within this we wish to ask the following subsidiary questions: how does the use of 3D scans affect the user experience of visiting an exhibition? (For example the user’s level and type of learning, or how much they enjoy the experience.) Can users understand the relationship between the original and virtual object? Can users understand how such exhibitions should be navigated?

This EPSRC (UK Research Council) funded studentship is available to UK citizens and EU nationals if a relevant connection with the UK has been established (usually by being resident for a period of three years immediately before the EngD). Applicants must fulfil EPSRC eligibility criteria and the normal academic requirements for admission to study in the Department. This studentship will pay a tax-free stipend of approximately £18,000 per year, plus tuition fees. EU students without a relevant connection to the UK can receive an award to cover tuition fees only.

Applicants should have at least a high 2.1 in Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, engineering or a related field. Applicants must also demonstrate an interest in cultural heritage, and the use of new media within a museum context.

Informal enquiries on the project can be made to Dr Melissa Terras (m.terras@ucl.ac.uk). For further information on the EngD Programme, see http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/engd/ or contact Dr Jamie O'Brien, j.obrien@cs.ucl.ac.uk.

To be considered, you must fill in the general UCL application form. Please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate-study/application-admission/, where you can download the forms and guidelines. Make sure you specify Supervisor (Melissa Terras), and EngD (“Understanding the use of 3D Scanning in a Museum Environment”) on the “Research Subject Area” part of the form. Please send the completed form to Naomi Jones & Melanie Johnson, Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.

If you need further assistance regarding our application process, please contact the postgraduate administrators - Naomi Jones & Melanie Johnson (postgradadmin@cs.ucl.ac.uk).

The closing date for applications is September 1st 2010. Interviews will be held shortly thereafter.

where's my dinosaur party?

2010-07-27T14:01:00.000+01:00

From a post on lifehacker, about
How to Deal with Distractions in a Web Worker's World,comes this fantastic cartoon (which came my way via @expertsleepers).

I need to give this to all my MA students who are wading through writing their dissertations right now.

And have it printed out big on my office wall.

In the online money

2010-07-27T13:43:00.000+01:00

My 6 monthly royalty statement came in from OUP for Image to Interpretation today. A cheque enclosed! for the princely sum of £10.23!

... but what is interesting about this is that most of the revenue was my (tiny) cut of the proceeds made from selling access to digital versions of the book. Ten times more ebooks sold than hardbacks in the same period. Admittedly, this is not a sample that you can statistically extrapolate findings about the whole of the book industry from - but its just worth saying that I'm glad I ticked the "can we make this book available in digital form?" box when signing all the paperwork a couple of years ago.

Decoding Digital Humanities - Melbourne Chapter

2010-07-26T14:11:00.000+01:00

I said in the post below that I would post more details about the Decoding Digital Humanities reading group who will be meeting in Melbourne, Australia, on thurs 29th July, at the Prince Alfred Hotel, 191 Grattan Street, 5.30- 7.30pm. More information here.

They'll be discussing my plenary at DH2010. Gulp.

Decoding Digital Humanities is an informal gathering for those who are interested in all things digital, providing an opportunity to mingle, share ideas, discuss readings and raise questions surrounding the field of digital humanities. If anyone else feels like setting up a Decoding Digital Humanities group at their own institution (the aim would be to do the same readings each month as the London group, and piling in to the discussions online later) then do get in touch with the organisers of the first group, Claire Ross and Kathryn Piquette, here at UCLDH.

Plenary revisited

2010-07-21T10:56:00.000+01:00

Well. Just coming up for air after the excitement that was DH2010.

The video of my plenary is available at http://www.arts-humanities.net/, which has been viewed and downloaded (by humans, not bots) around 400 times in the past week.

The plenary made the Times Higher, although the reportage gave it a negative spin, rather than focussing on the positive aspects I suggested throughout. Nevermind - all publicity good publicity, etc - and I appreciate that some of you found the time to pile in and correct the reporter on her tone in the comments below the article. (If I have one comment on the slightly sensational reporting - its that they didnt focus on the fact that I said things about the state of the Humanities at King's, when giving a plenary at a Humanities conference at King's. Surely more of a story? But nevermind! It made the Times Higher!).

Next week the plenary will be discussed at the Decoding Digital Humanities reading (and drinking) group in London. And at the Australian chapter of Decoding Digital Humanities (I will provide a link when I find out more about this). And at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland, staff meeting.

I've had lots of email, and twitter, messages from those who agreed - and vehemently disagreed - with points I made in the plenary. Thanks for all your comments. I am, of course, pleased to discuss any points that anyone would like to make to me, whether on email or via twitter.

I admit that I wasn't expecting all of this! But it is nice when you have worked hard on something (and I worked hard on the plenary - it could have gone horribly wrong to be a relatively young scholar standing up in front of the whole discipline for an hour...) to get a reaction. Thanks for your feedback, and (in general) your support.

Type-casting the iPad

2010-07-21T10:26:00.000+01:00

Like most folks interested in new media technologies, we got us an iPad as soon as they came out. And it’s great for some things – such as sitting on the sofa and doing some online shopping, reading blogs, etc. You’ve heard all this before. Great for passive consumption.

I was surprised at DH2010 how many people were toting iPads around as their work machines, though. And I am surprised at the increasing number of people who bring them to meetings at work. Why? Because the iPad is not a machine to do academic work on if you can actually type.

One of the best things I did when I started my PhD and had some time on my hands was spend 30 mins a day for a few months learning to touchtype (thanks, past-semi-bored-self!). Although the quick brown fox jumps over the rusty fence was tedious, it means I can motor through emails and student assessments and drafts of articles now. (I never mastered touch typing numerical, or complex punctuation, but hey, that doesn’t slow me down much). But it also means I could never seriously use the iPad as a work machine: the layout of the keyboard reduces everyone to two-fingered dad-typing. I cant use trusty keyboard shortcuts to make processes that little bit quicker. My productivity – on email, in taking notes, in creating documents – is massively reduced. Back to the normal keyboard and normal laptop it is.

As a result, when more and more colleagues turn up to meetings with their shiny new iPad toy, I’m not sitting there impressed and cooing. I’m thinking – ahaa, thats why it takes you so long to answer emails.

Youth of today: learn to touchtype! (But, as the old advice goes, don’t tell anyone that you can, you don’t want to be treated like a secretary...) And don’t think that shiny and new and touch screen means increased productivity - well, not where emails and documents and reports are concerned, anyway.

TEI By Example Launched!

2010-07-15T10:57:00.000+01:00

After a good few years work on this - we are finally ready to launch!:

The Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) of King's College London, and the Department of Information Studies of University College London, are pleased to announce the launch of TEI By Example: freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). These online tutorials provide examples for users of all levels. Examples are provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts.

Thanks go to my collaborators, Edward Vanhoutte and Ron Van den Branden, for all their hard work on TEIbyexample.org. Do let us know what you think!

Teaching Fellow Post at UCLDH

2010-07-15T10:28:00.001+01:00

After all the excitement of #DH2010, back to business. All being well, I'll be going on maternity leave in the autumn term, and the advert for teaching cover for my post has just gone up. This is a 16 month teaching post in the Dept of Information Studies at UCL, and the candidate will also be involved with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

I'll even share my lecture notes and guest-lecturer contacts with the person who gets the job...

More information on the UCL recruitment pages.

DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon

2010-07-10T17:06:00.000+01:00

This is an approximation of what I plan – or hope – to say in my closing plenary speech at Digital Humanities 2010 at King’s College London, June 2010. I’m not one for reading off prewritten speeches, however, so expect diversions and ad-libs in the recorded speech. I wanted to write a written record for those in the discipline who could not attend, or who were busy keeping their seats in the pub for the World Cup semi final.

(ps. I'll go back in the future and put the links in to the tweets, for verification purposes)

Preamble, the First.
Firstly, let me say how honoured I am to have been asked to be the plenary speaker at DH2010. I understand that this is a deviation from previous conferences – for the first time, instead of getting someone external to the community to talk about semi-related research areas, they’ve asked someone from well within the discipline to present. I’m aware that, in a room that holds 250 people, there are 249 people other than myself who are more than qualified to stand up for an hour and say what they currently think of the Digital Humanities (not to mention the other 200 folks registered for the conference who may be watching from the streaming lecture theatre).
It’s also worth saying that I am incredibly nervous. Many of those in the audience are close colleagues, many are good friends. This is not a conference I can walk away from and forget a disastrous presentation. I’m very aware that the rules of giving plenary speeches have changed as rapidly as the information environment over the last few years. I remember a plenary at ALLC/ACH (as the conference was then known) ten or so years ago where the speaker read out a chapter of their book, never looking up at the audience once, and with no concession given for the change of presentational mode: “As I said on page 39. As I will discuss in chapter five...” Nowadays, given that I’m being recorded and simultaneously broadcast online, that just won’t cut it. You expect more.
As well as being , I’m aware that I’m being #nervous. Many of you will already have tweeted comments about what I’ve said online, even though I’ve not really begun yet. That’s fine, and I’m not looking for any special treatment. I just want you to be aware that I’m aware that these are changed days. I don’t know how I’m being watched and perceived, as much as you don’t know what I’m going to say next. In fact, surveillance is just one of the things I want to talk to you about today.

Preamble the Second
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m from University College London, just a mile north from King’s. UCL and King’s were both founder members of the University of London in 1836, and the two Universities have an interesting, competitive history. UCL was set up as a secular educational establishment, letting in anyone who could pay the fees (such as Gandhi. And Women.) whereas King’s was set up as an Anglican church based institution, in reaction to the “Great Godless of Gower Street” threatening to allow education to all just up the road. The two institutions have remained locked in friendly – but sometimes fierce – competitive mode, ever since. A recent Provost’s newsletter from UCL ran with its most important headline that UCL had beaten King’s in the rugby varsity match 22-0. On the academic front, we are often competing for the same staff, students, grants, even facilities. UCL has recently established its Centre for Digital Humanities, which forms a competitive alternative to the teaching and research that has been established at King’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities (soon to be the Department of Digital Humanities). And so it goes on.
We’re proud at UCL of the different nature of our University. As opposed to King’s, we never will have a theology department, and do not provide a place of worship on campus. Much of the founding principles of UCL were influenced by the Jurist, Philosopher, and legal and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham who believed in equality, animal rights, utilitarianism, and welfarism. UCL special collections host 60,000 folios of Bentham’s letters and manuscripts, many of which have not been transcribed. Upon his death, Bentham’s skeleton was preserved as an “Auto-icon” (a two fingers up to those who believed in religion and the need for a Christian funeral) which now sits, dressed in his favourite outfit, in the cloisters at UCL. There is an oft repeated story that Bentham’s body is wheeled into Senate meetings, although he is noted in the minutes as “Present, not Voting”.
You will notice that in early colour photos, you can still see Bentham’s real preserved head at the base of the Auto-Icon. This has been stored in Special Collections ever since 1975, when (the story goes) students from King’s stole it, merrily kicked it around the quad, and then held it to ransom. Friendly competition, indeed.

Introduction
Time to draw this properly back to Digital Humanities and the plenary in question. One of Bentham’s main interests was penal reform, and he is perhaps most famous for his design of the Panopticon, a prison which allowed jailors to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched. This psychologically, and physically, brutal prison was never built, but the concept has lived on as metaphor, influencing a wide range of artists, writers, and theorists, including George Orwell (who worked in room 101 of Senate House, in-between UCL and King’s, and would have been well aware of Jeremy Bentham’s work) and Foucault. Indeed, the Panopticon can be taken as a metaphor for western society, and increasingly, online communication, particularly social media. Every time you tweet, do you know who is paying attention? What audience are we performing for, and can you be sure you are in control of how our actions are viewed and used?
Now, I cannot pretend to be an omnipresence that has been watching all that has been happening in the Digital Humanities over the past few months. But when you are asked to do a plenary speech such as this, believe me, you start to pay attention to things. You do your homework. I’ve been peering into the twittersphere panopticon and wondering what to say. Which will be the following:

I’m going to talk briefly about the Transcribe Bentham project, as a type of Digital Humanities project that can objectively demonstrate the changes that are occurring in our field at the moment.
I’m going to use this project as a window to peer at current issues in Digital Humanities – or at least things that I’ve learnt from the project – and the wider community – over the past few months.
And finally, I’m going to set you all homework based on the key things that are emerging in our field. Friendly competition is not so friendly just now. There are tough times ahead for academia, given the current financial crisis and promised cutbacks. What can we learn from the areas highlighted by this discussion, and what can we do better as a field, so those who are looking at us (and believe me, managers and administrators and financial experts are looking at us) can visibly see what we are up to?

Transcribe Bentham
Transcribe Bentham is a one year, Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, housed under the auspices of the Bentham Project at UCL (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/). The Bentham Project aims to produce new editions of the scholarship of Jeremy Bentham, and so far twelve volumes of Bentham’s correspondence have been published by the Bentham Project, plus various collections of his work on jurisprudence and legal matters (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/Publications/index.htm). However, there is much more work to be done to make his writings more accessible, and to provide transcripts of the materials therein. Although a previous grant from the AHRC in 2003-6 has allowed for the completion of a catalogue of the manuscripts held within UCL (http://www.benthampapers.ucl.ac.uk/), and transcriptions have been completed of some 10,000 folios (currently stored in MS Word...), there are many hours of work that need to be invested in reading, transcribing, labelling, and making accessible the works of this interdisciplinary historical figure if they are to be analysed, consulted, and utilised by scholars across the various disciplines interested in Bentham’s writings.
Crowdsourcing - the harnessing of online activity to aid in large scale projects that require human cognition - is becoming of interest to those in the library, museum and cultural heritage industry, as institutions seek ways to publically engage their online communities, as well as aid in creating useful and usable digital resources. As one of the first cultural and heritage projects to apply crowdsourcing to a non-trivial task, UCL's Bentham Project has recently set up the "Transcribe Bentham" initiative; an ambitious, open source, participatory online environment which is being developed to aid in transcribing 10,000 folios of Bentham’s handwritten documents. To be launched in August 2010, this experimental project will aim to engage with individuals such as school children, amateur historians, and other interested parties, who can provide time to help us read Bentham’s manuscripts. The integration of user communities will be key to the success of the project, and an additional project remit is to monitor the success of trying to engage the wider community with such documentary material: will we get high quality, trustworthy transcriptions as a result of this work? Will people be interested in volunteering their time and effort to read the (poor) handwriting of a great philosopher? What technical and pragmatic difficulties will we run into? How can we monitor success in a crowdsourced environment?
One of the other things that is interesting about the Bentham Project, and the Transcribe Bentham initiative, it is demonstrates neatly the progression of Digital Humanities in historical manuscript based projects. The Bentham Project has been primarily occupied with print output, gaining a web presence in the mid 1990s, then an online database of the Bentham archive in the early 20th Century, and is now carrying out a moderately large scale digitisation project to scan in Bentham’s writings for Transcribe Bentham. In addition, the Bentham Project has gone from a simple web page, to interactive Web 2.0 environment, from MS Word to TEI encoded XML texts, and from relatively inward looking academic project to an outward facing, community- building exercise. We can peer at Digital Humanities through this one project, and see the transformative aspects that technologies have had on our working practices, and the practices of those working in the historical domain.

Transcribe Bentham, and Emerging Issues in DH
I could talk about crowdsourcing for an entire hour, but I thought it would be more useful to point out to those involved in the Digital Humanities community some of the emergent issues that I have found myself tackling whilst engaging in the Transcribe Bentham project. It’s certainly true that for every project that you work on you learn new things about the field, and over the past year various aspects of DH research and issues that concern the DH community have raised their head.
I’m going now to talk about some of these issues, backing it up with some observations of what has been happening in the DH community, through conversations that others have been having on Twitter. Forgive me if you just think I’m a stalker. A lot of these issues are becoming more visible in the DH community, so I’m going to quote you on those.

1. Our Dependence on Primary Sources, Our Dependence on Modern Technology
I’ve never felt more of a Jack of all trades, master of none working on Transcribe Bentham. And it’s great. Let’s be clear – The Bentham Project belongs to Professor Philip Schofield, who has been working on it for over 25 years. I’ve just been drafted in to help bridge the gap between primary sources, dedicated scholars, and new technology. On the one hand, I’m utterly dependent on scholars who know less than me about IT, and more than me about their subject domain, to make an academic contribution. On the other, I’m utterly dependent on some programmers who have the time to work up the ideas we have for TB into a complex (but seemingly simple!) working environment for transcribing documents, in just a few months. I’d be lost without access to historical knowledge and source material, but I’d be lost without access to new, online cutting edge, technologies.
This is something I see repeated across our discipline. When Ray Siemens tweets “Among many highlights of an excellent week, holding a well-read copy of Thynne’s 1532 Chaucer, as well as an iPad...” we get the joy. When Brian Croxall tweets “Gah, can’t get online at this hotel” we feel his frustration at being cut off from a service and an environment which is becoming as essential to us as running water or Oxygen. When Bethany Nowviskie tweets “Dreamed last night that my #DH2010 poster was a set of flexible, give away, interactive touchscreens. Maybe not too far in the future” we nod in recognition, and go, yeah... that would be cool... let me Google that and see if they exist... We exist in this parallel state where we are looking towards humanities research, and computational technology, and it can be immensely rewarding, and great fun. I’m really enjoying working on Transcribe Bentham. I really enjoy the duality of DH research (as long as I can get online when I want).

2. Legacy Data
But as well as working with historical documents (or artefacts, or whatever), it’s becoming increasingly common with the Digital Humanities that we have to work with historical digital documents – or legacy data, left over from the not-so-distant past, in different formats and structures that need bringing into current thinking on best practice with Digital data. This can take immense amounts of work. Converting 10,000 transcribed Bentham documents from MS Word to TEI compliant XML, with any granularity of markup, is not a trivial task. Linking these transcripts with the records currently held in the online database, and then UCL’s library record system (to deal with usability and sustainability issues) is not a trivial task. Linking existing transcriptions with any digitised images of the writings which exist is not a trivial task. Transcribe Bentham, then, is dealing with sorting its own ducks into a row, as well as undertaking new and novel research.
Most of us understand this, and we understand just how much work (and cost) is involved in continually ensuring we are maintaining and updating our work and our records to make sure that our digital resources can continue to be used. So we understand that a seemingly simple tweet by Tom Elliot saying “more BAtlas legacy data added to Pleiades today, courtesy of @sgillies http://bit.ly/dBuYFg” belies an incredible amount of work to ensure to convert and maintain an existing resource. As well as looking forward to the future, and new technologies, us DH peoples must be our own archivists.

3. Sustainability
Which brings me to the thorny issue of sustainability. We hope with Transcribe Bentham that the project will continue far beyond its one year remit, but there are some decisions to make with that regard. Will the user forums, and user contributions, continue to be monitored and moderated if we can’t afford a staff member to do so? Will the wiki get locked down at the close of funding or will we leave it to its own devices, becoming an online-free-for all? We are at the stage, in a one-year-project, where we already need to be applying for future funding, before we have even got anything to demonstrate that its worth continuing our funding (and there is no guarantee in the current climate that any funding will be forthcoming, see below). But we are lucky in Transcribe Bentham – its father project, the Bentham Project, will continue whatever happens, under the watchful auspices of Philip Schofield. So when Dan Cohen is quoted, by Shane Landrum, in a tweet that reminds us “Being a labour of love is often the best sustainability model” we understand what that means. Sustainability is an area of huge concern for the DH community, and is going to become more so as financial issues get more complex.

4. Digital Identity
Transcribe Bentham is going to live or die by its digital identity and digital presence. It doesn’t have any equivalent in the offline world. It is what it is: an online place to hang out and help Transcribe some documents, should that take your fancy. To be a success, then, our functionality, digital presence, and digital identity need to be absolutely spot on. Ironically, I’ve never worked on a Digital Humanities project before where the digital presence mattered so much, and I’ve come to realise that we all should be taking our digital identity and digital presence a lot more seriously. It’s not enough just to whack up a website and say “that’ll do, now back to writing books”. If we are going to be in the business of producing digital resources, we have to be able to excel at producing digital resources, and be conscious of our digital identity and digital presence.
We are lucky at Transcribe Bentham to have gained the input of one of my PhD students, Rudolf Ammann (@rkammann) who is also a gifted graphic designer. He has taken it upon himself to whip both UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and Transcribe Bentham, into online shape, whilst designing logos for us which are both fitting, useful, and memorable. We’re being careful with TB to roll our presence out over twitter and Facebook to try and encourage interaction. We hope that someone will be watching.
Suddenly, it matters in a way that didn’t matter before, if people are looking at our website and our resource. I believe that digital presence and digital identity is becoming more important to Digital Humanities as a discipline. So when Amanda French jokily tweets “I feel like a got a rejection letter yesterday from @DHNow when too few RTed my “binary hero” post http://bit.ly/aKpBiX” we understand the complexity of interacting in the new digital environment: we want the discourse, and want the attention (and if you don’t know what DHNow is, you should be reading it every day). Likewise when Matt Kirschenbaum tweets “Has Twitter done more as DH infrastructure than any dedicated effort to date?” and this is immediately retweeted by Tim Sherratt with an addendum “[For me it has!]” we understand the possibilities that are afforded with new modes of online communication. How we can harness this properly for Transcribe Bentham remains to be seen – but we are at least aware we need to make the effort.

5. Embracing the Random, Embracing the Open
There are large differences between producing a perfect (or near as perfect as can be) print edition of Bentham’s letters, and learning to deal with the various levels of quality of input we will be getting with Transcribe Bentham. There are large differences between working in a close knit group of scholars, to working with the general public. There are also differences in producing online editions and sources which you are willing to open up to other uses – and one of the things we want to do with Transcribe Bentham is to provide access to the resulting XML files so that others can reuse the information (via web-services, etc). The hosting and transcription environment we are developing will be open source, so that others can use it. And this sea change, from working in small groups, to really reaching out to users is something we have to embrace, and learn to work with. We also have to give up on ideas of absolute perfection, and go for broader projects, embracing input from a wider audience, and the chaos that ensues. So we understand when Dan Cohen tweets “Another leitmotif I’m sensing: as academics, we need to get over our obsession w/ perfect, singular, finished, editorial vols”. Bring it. Let’s see what happens...

6. Impact
I only realised recently that my automatic reaction to getting involved with the Transcribe Bentham project was “how can I get from this some output that counts for me”. We wrote into the grant bid a period of user testing and feedback, and one of the reasons is to get a few pretty much guaranteed publications out of the project, looking at the success – or not! – or crowdsourcing in cultural heritage projects. Get few academic outputs in there, then we can go and play online, and not have to worry too much about how creating an open source tool, or reaching out to a potential audience of thousands, will “count” in the academic world. Because no matter how successful Transcribe Bentham, the “impact” will be felt in the same usual way – through publications. This is a nonsense, but it’s part of the academic game, and is becoming of increasing frustration to those working in the Digital Humanities. It’s not enough to make something that is successful and interesting and well used: you have to write a paper about it that gets published in the Journal of Successful Academic Stuff to make that line on your CV count, and to justify your time spent on the project. So we understand the frustration felt by Stephen Ramsay when he puts a mini-documentary online which goes as viral as things really get in the Digital Humanities, viewed by thousands of people, which will have no real impact on his career: “I’ve published some print articles. Funny thing though: None of them were read by 2000 people in the space of 2 weeks .... had their titles printed on t-shirts, or resulted in dozens of emails from adoring fans. So why am I writing journal articles again? .... Oh wait, nevermind, my department doesn’t count movies.”

7. Routes to Jobs
This is a tricky one. Should those hired in Digital Humanities projects to do technical work have a PhD in Digital Humanities – even if the tasks in the role are service level (such as marking up TEI) and don’t require that academic training? I’m willing to admit that Transcribe Bentham walked right into the storm with this one when our job adverts for our two RAs went up. We advertised for two postdocs: one with a historical background that had experience working in the Bentham studies area, one with TEI chops to help us with the back end of the system. We specified that we wanted PhDs because of the changed rules in employment at Universities in the UK (well, at least those involved in the common pay framework): if we had advertised for posts at non-PhD level, we wouldn’t have been able to employ someone with a PhD, even if they wanted to work for less money, because of the spine point system. So, we advertise for two postdocs, and if someone good comes through without a PhD, we can employ them on a lower rate. But we forgot to mention that applications from those without a PhD may also be considered. Cue much online discussion in various forums.
We get this frustration. Dot Porter said, on Facebook rather than twitter, “I get annoyed when I read job postings for positions that require a PhD, and then read the job description and can’t figure out why. Maybe I’m sensitive, not having a PhD? Is a PhD really required for one to take part in the digital humanities these days, even in supporting (non-research) roles?”
This is becoming a real issue in Digital Humanities. There is no clear route to an academic job, and no clear route to PhD, and there are a lot of people at a high level in the field who do not have PhDs. Yet increasingly, we expect the younger intake to have gone down that route, and then to work in service level roles (partly because there are few academic jobs). It remains to be seen how we can address this. In Transcribe Bentham, we changed the advert to make it clear we accepted applications from non-PhDs. In the end we did appoint two post-docs, but at least we made it clear that people had the option to apply for a job where, ostensibly, you didn’t need a PhD, just the skill set, to undertake the task properly.

8. Young Scholars
This problem of employment and career and progression taps into a general frustration for young scholars in our field. It can be hard to get a foothold, and hard to get a job (not just in Digital Humanities – in the UK over 15% of graduates under the age of 25 are currently unemployed. It’s a tough time to be coming out of university, PhD or no PhD). Perhaps twas always difficult to make the transition from academic student to academic Academic, but twitter amplifies the issues that are facing young scholars in the field trying to make headway. I was very aware when hiring for Transcribe Bentham that there were some very good candidates out there who just weren’t getting a break (the person who came second in the interview, and who we would have employed instantly had we had two historical post-doc positions, later told me that he had had over 20 interviews, but we were the first people to give him any feedback). We shouldn’t forget the pressure young scholars are under (at a time when we are complaining of the financial pressures that us paid academics are under) and how difficult it can be for them on both a professional and personal level. It makes me sad to hear tweets like the one from Ryan Cordell saying “Just wrote a tough email withdrawing from #DH2010. Even if I got a bursary, I just couldn’t swing it in the same summer as our move #sigh”.

9. Economic Downturn
Which brings me to the next doom and gloom point. When Brett Bobbley tweets “Two weeks ago, no one in my kid’s school had Silly Bandz; now they all wear them. How come higher ed never moves that fast?” we all chuckle at the thought of the academy as being a reactive, immediate place to be. It takes a few years for the impact of outside events to trickle down. Its only now that the economic downturn is starting to hit Higher Education. In the UK, cuts over the next few years are predicted to be anything between 25% to 40%, depending on what leak or rumour or Governmental minister you believe. These are uncertain times for research, and for institutions, and for individuals, and for projects. We don’t know if there will be money to even apply for to continue the research and application in the Transcribe Bentham project. We don’t know, even if we submit an application, that the funding council wont suddenly reject all applications due to their funding cuts. We don’t know how to make an economic case for projects in the Arts, Humanities, Heritage, and Culture, so that when panjandrums and apparatchiks are deciding which swinging cut to make next, we can display our relevance, our impact, the point of our existence, and why people should keep writing the cheques. These are uncertain times. How this is affecting Digital Humanities is slowly beginning to be played out.

10. Money, The Humanities, and Job Security
I feel that it would be morally wrong of me to come to a conference at King’s that has the word Humanities in the title and not broach the subject of what had happened over the past year to the Humanities at King’s. Palaeography is a subject close to my heart, and as @DrGnosis tweeted during the opening speech of #DH2010, “I weep for Palaeography”. I also like to think that had any one of the 420 other registered conference attendees from the Digital Humanities community been asked to give this plenary that they would have the guts to raise this issue. But I am guest here and do not want to be rude or impolite. So I’ll repeat what was tweeted by John Theibault: “There’s going to be a bit of a pall over dh2010 because of all that’s gone on with KCL”. And I recommend if you do not understand what I am talking about, then you read about it, and understand how little respect was given to Humanities academics at Kings over the past year from their management. And I suggest you hope that your own management have not been taking notes, and do not proceed in a similar fashion, for what hope is there then for the Humanities?
It’s very difficult for those in the Humanities to make the economic case for their existence, and that is what we are being expected to do in the current climate. We need to be able to explain why projects like Transcribe Bentham are relevant, and important and useful. Those in the humanities are historically bad at doing this, and those in DH are no different. But DH is different from traditional humanities research: on the plus side, we should be able to articulate the transferable skill set that comes with DH research, that can educate and influence a wide range of culture, heritage, creative, and even business processes. On the downside, projects like Transcribe Bentham are more expensive than paying one individual scholar for a year to write their scholarly tome on, say, Byzantine Sigillography – the digital equivalent will require researchers, computer programmers, computer kit, digitisation costs, etc. To ensure that the Digital Humanities are funded at the time when funding is being withdrawn from the Humanities, we need to be prepared, and to articulate and explain why what we do is important, and relevant.

11. Fears for the Future.
Of course, it’s not just the Humanities that are in a perilous financial state: in the UK, it’s the whole of the sector. At King’s, it’s not just Humanities that have taken the hit, but also the Engineering Faculty. Profitable groups from disciplines such as Computer Science have been poached wholesale by other Universities (not so friendly competition now, is it?). And this is a pattern we are seeing across the Universities in the UK. We’re all scared; for the continuation of our projects (such as Transcribe Bentham), for our students, for our young scholars on temporary contracts, for our “research profile” (whatever that may mean) and for our own jobs. We understand the implicit horror in a tweet such as that from Simon Tanner saying “England next? Plan to close smaller #Welsh #Universities broadly welcomed by #education professionals. http://bit.ly/dxWBsj #HE #wales.”

If we think that no-one is watching us and making value judgements about our community, our research, our relevance, and our output, then we are misguided. It’s not just other scholars who are paying attention, but those who hold the purse strings – who often have no choice but to make brutal cuts. The Humanities are one of the easiest targets, given scholar’s reluctance or inability to make the case for themselves. I’m reminded of a phrase from Orwell’s 1984, and what happened to society when under the horrific pressure and surveillance within. Allow me to paraphrase: if we are not prepared, and if we are not careful, these cuts will be “a boot stamping on the face of the humanities, forever”. I remember very strongly that at the end of an upbeat DH2009 Neil Fraistat stood up and said “The Digital Humanities have arrived!”. But in 2010, the place we have arrived to is a changed landscape, and not nearly as optimistic. We are not in Kansas now, Toto.

Digital Humanities in the Panopticon
So let us pretend that we are someone from outside our community, watching the goings on in academia and making value judgements, and financial judgements, about our discipline and field. How does Digital Humanities itself hold up when under scrutiny? How do we fair with the crucial aspects of Digital Identity, Impact, and Sustainability?
The answer is – not very well. From the outside looking in, we look amateur. We should know and understand best, amongst many academic fields, how important it is to maintain and sustain our digital presence and our community. But our web presence, across the associations, sucks. The ACH website says it was last updated in 2003. The ALLC web site is a paean to unnecessary white space. SDH/SEMI is not so bad, but has its own problems with navigation and presentation (I’m including it here so as not to leave out a whole association) – but the ADHO website is a prime example of what happens when Wikis are not wiki-ed. These are our outward faces. These are our representations of the field. We’ve been slow to embrace other social media and new technologies when we are the field that is supposed to show how it is done.
But what you may not know is that the associations have recently taken this on board. There is a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes on all accounts, so I don’t want to lay into folks too badly on this. A wireframe of the new ADHO site, which should be up and running shortly, demonstrates that we are moving into the 21st Century, finally. What’s interesting is the big space for a mission statement, and a definition of the field (which we at DH don’t have, yet!). We need to take our digital presence more seriously, and to embrace the potentials that we all know about, but haven’t pitched in to help represent for the discipline.
What about impact? We’ve been historically bad at articulating our relevance and our successes and our impact beyond our immediate community (and sometimes within our immediate community – it surprised me recently when a leading scholar in the field was told, via twitter, of the role the DH community had in the formulation of XML, and he hadn’t heard of this before). We’re bad at knowing our own history, as a discipline, and having examples listed off the top of our heads of why our research community is required in today’s academe.
As for sustainability, we should know best among many fields of the importance of preservation of our discipline’s heritage. Yet it’s only been recently that scholars in the field have started to note the disappearance of abstracts from previous conferences, websites which have disappeared overnight, the fact we don’t have, and can’t locate, a complete back run of the journals printed by the associations. For example, we don’t have any of the image files included in the ALLC/ACH 2000 abstract book. We need to look after our heritage: no-one else will. What you may not know, again, is that a few people are working behind the scenes to try and build up digital copies of our discipline’s history, and hopefully over the next year or so we’ll see this available online. We need to be leading the way in the humanities for publishing and maintaining and sustaining our discipline, to demonstrate that, yes, we really do know what we are talking about. At the moment, it looks like we don’t.
Why does all this matter? I bring you back to the title of my talk: “Present, not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon”. Our community matters (although heck, a lot of you are not voting – for the ACH and ALLC elections, turnout was around 30%. We need new blood in the associations. We need people who are not just prepared to whine but prepared to roll up their sleeves and do things to improve our associations, our community, and our presence in academia.) But the fact of the matter remains: if we do not treat our research presence seriously, if we are not prepared to stick up for Digital Humanities, if we are not prepared to demonstrate our relevance and our excellence and our achievements, then the status of those working within DH (including the relevance of digital scholarship, and how it is treated by those in the Humanities) will not improve, and we’ll be as impotent as we have ever been. We should be demonstrating excellence and cohesion and strength in numbers. We should be prepared, as best we can, for whatever is coming next in the financial downturn, and in academia. If we self identify as Digital Humanists – and I presume many of those here at the conference would – then we need to articulate what that means, and what’s the point of our community. It’s the only way to prepare for what is coming.
Homework

So far, so doom and gloom. But we are a community who are full of those who like to do things, and make things, and achieve things. And there are plenty of practical things we can do to ensure both the continuation of our individual careers, our individual projects (such as Transcribe Bentham), our centres, and our teaching.
For the individual, we can be prepared by having at the tip of our tongues what we do and why we matter and why we should be supported and why DH makes sense. (Those definitions of DH must be personal, and must vary – but how many of us, when asked to explain DH, go “well, its kinda the intersection of....” – and you lost them at kinda). We need to have thought about the impact of our work, and why it is relevant. When asked, or queried, about this (either in a personal or professional setting) we should know. And it really doesn’t hurt to have learnt a little about the background of our field, and its impact, and its successes, so we can throw in a few “for examples” when the blue-sky nature of research pays off, and for when the application of our research in the wider community works, and for some major problems that need to be solved about digital culture and use and tools and why we are the people to do it.
Individuals can find support in networks of scholars, and become active in communities (both DH and individual subject organisations): there is strength in numbers. Individuals can take their digital identity seriously – let’s show other scholars and other disciplines how best to proceed. We need to learn to play the academic game with regard to publications, though, and ensure all of our wonderful whizz bangy tools are equally as followed up with research papers in important places, which is a bit of a bind, but the only way with which to maintain and improve our academic credentials at present. Individuals can promote and be the advocates for DH, and for DH based research. We can also ensure that we support the younger cohort and students and young scholars who are just entering our field: it’s our role to be ambassadors for DH in every way we can.
For those individuals who do have some management sway and some management clout, there is also plenty that can be done to push forward the Digital Humanities agenda, within departments and institutions. More support and kudos can be given to digital scholarship and digital outputs within the humanities, and this becomes something that can be raised and pushed within institutional committee structures, to ensure they count for hiring and promotion and tenure. (Indeed, established devoted tenure track posts for Digital Humanities scholars may be something those in the states could work towards). Issues of funding and employment for young scholars in the discipline should be watched out for, including the PhD and hiring/ qualification issue, but this is something that can be tackled through careful, watchful leadership. My main advice to those in DH management, though, would be to ensure you fully embed your activities within institutional infrastructures: become indispensible. Get involved with academic departments and service areas. Provide advisory services and engage with as wide a spectrum as people within your institution as you can. Be ready to defend your staff and your projects in the current financial climate, and be forewarned.
There is also strength in numbers in management, in local, regional, national, and international communities. Collaborations should be entered into, rather than competition, to further imbed projects and people into the wider academic field. Strategies and policies should be developed to deal with the coming hardships that face us.
From an institutional point of view, building up a centralised record of all the individuals and projects involved in DH within an institution can facilitate new research, and build on existing strengths to make it clear where new research opportunities may lie. I would suggest that DH centres should integrate closely with library systems (and iSchools). Institutions can also support digital outputs as being research in the internal promotion of individual scholars. The establishment of teaching programs (such as the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities MA in Digital Humanities) provides essential training for young scholars entering our field, and institutions should look to the opportunities which exist in providing this graduate level training – which is sorely needed in our field. Institutions can also encourage collaboration with other institutions, and provide facilities, for example, for visiting scholars, to encourage cross-fertilisation of teaching and research ideas.
The ADHO organisations can also do plenty to maintain and support research, teaching, and the DH community. Our digital presence should be (and is being) sorted out as a matter of urgency. Within those digital resources, ADHO and its constituent organisations should provide the community with the ammunition which is necessary to defend DH at a relevant, useful, successful research field. Information about the successes of DH can be pushed, including projects and initiatives that have been important to both our and other communities. The value and impact of DH can be documented and presented. A register of good projects can also be maintained. Best practice in the running of projects and centres can be pushed, and advice given to those who need it in all matters DH. Collaboration should be encouraged, and the associations should continue the work they are doing in supporting young scholars. If anyone has any further ideas, then please do contact the associations. They are there to help you.
My suggestions for funding agencies are relatively succinct – I am not sure how much leeway they have in providing funds at the moment, although it is worth saying that certain funders (more than others) have been and are being very supportive to DH, and are engaged with and listening to our community. We need financial support, both to carry out blue sky research, and to build DH infrastructures. Funding agencies can also help with the sustainability of projects, and in wrapping up and archiving projects. They can aid, encourage, and facilitate collaboration, and graduate research. Considering the large investment that has been made in DH, particularly over the past ten to fifteen years, it makes sense for them to continue supporting us to ensure our research comes to fruition, although we are all very aware of the changed financial academic world in which we live.

Wrapping up
This has been an honest tour of what DH means to me, and some of the issues which DH is presented with at the moment. It’s been necessarily negative in places. But I hope I have left you with the feeling that there is proactive activity which we, as individuals, departments, institutions, organisations, and agencies can take to further entrench ourselves in the humanities pantheon and to demonstrate that we really are indispensible to the humanities.
I don’t know what is going to happen with Transcribe Bentham, whether the project itself will be a success, or whether we’ll still have a funded project to talk about in a year’s time, but for me it is part of the learning curve to distil and understand how our current research aims fit into the current academic framework.
One thing I do know, is that I think that Jeremy Bentham would have loved the fact that a picture of his manky embalmed head was being broadcast on a giant screen at King’s College London (especially when involved with a speech that raises issues about KCL!). I’ve really enjoyed having the chance to talk to you about my thoughts about Transcribe Bentham, and the Digital Humanities in general. A rough transcript of this talk will be posted to my blog. Thank you for listening in person, and see you on Twitter, in the Panopticon.

Hacking the Career: Digital Humanities as Academic Hackerdom

2010-05-24T16:14:00.000+01:00

Tom Scheinfeldt and Dan Cohen have put forward a proposal for an edited book entitled Hacking the Academy, To be written in a week by folks from the Digital Humanities community and beyond. More details here. I thought I would put down some of my thoughts on what this immediately said to me.

The OED definition of the word “hacker” contains two distinct definitions.

hacker /"hak@/ n. me. [f. hack v.1 + -er1.]
1 A person who or thing which hacks (something).
2 spec. An enthusiastic computer programmer or user; a person who tries to gain unauthorized access to a computer or to data held in one. colloq.
hackerdom n. the realm or world of computer hackers

Unauthorized access. It strikes me that my views on how I ended up here – Senior Lecturer at one of the best Universities in the world, and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, is one giant hack. Lack of self confidence aside, as I look around the discipline of Digital Humanities, I see many people like myself. Enthusiastic computer programmers or users, for sure. But wiley, creative, individuals who have taken every unpredictable opportunity available and turned it into an academic career, and as a result, an academic discipline.

Let me explain. Until recently, you couldn’t go to University and train how to be a Digital Humanities.... what? Scholar? Digital Humanist? How would you start? Most paths into professional academe are a series of increasing specialisations. So, you’d turn up to fresher’s week to study English Literature. Somewhere along the line you’d get interested in Modern Poetry. An undergraduate dissertation here, a masters dissertation there, and before you know it, you’re handing in your PhD thesis on Metaphors of Travel in the Works of Elizabeth Bishop. You’re the expert. Now it’s up to you to battle out the job market to find that English Lit position that will let you burrow further into your specialisation.

I don’t think thats too narrow a description of how it happens (although of course, there is serpendipity, the influence of others, the vaguaries of the funding system and jobs market to surf). But Digital Humanities is not like that.

There is not a traditional path in.

I look around the folks who are part of the team at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and we are a motley crew – and all the better for it. The Eng Lit PhD- turned publisher- turned usability expert. The trained and practicing Librarian – turned academic information seeking specialist. The archaeologist- turned museums and the web expert – turned usability expert. The computer-scientist turned-medical physicist – turned manuscript expert. The computer scientist-archaeologist. Me? I’m the art historian-english literature- turned computer science – turned engineering science –turned information science digital classicist (I think).

I’m at risk here of describing Digital Humanities scholars as the freaks and geeks of the academic world, but this is far from negative. For most of us, getting here has been a series of random connections, introductions, jumps from one career structure to the next. Somewhere along the line, you need to know enough about Humanities to talk the humanities talk. Somewhere along the line, you need to have worked up enough programming chops to use, and utilise, computers as (not “like”) a pro. Until the last 4 or 5 years, academic programs that did that just did not exist (and there are still only a few: Alberta, KCL, soon at UCL, for example). Most of the folks who self identify as Digital Humanists and are active in the DH community have picked up their skills through a mixture of backgrounds and challenges. And used their smarts to get access to – and be active in - the academy along the way. Many of those have a love for Digital Humanities, but will still be teaching Chaucer 101 to undergrads in the Eng Lit dept, whilst being a world expert in TEI and overlapping markup. Or teaching databases in the CS department, whilst working on imaging of ancient coins. Or teaching, like me, how the internet works to librarians and archivists, whilst pottering with whatever advanced computational techniques I can get access to for relevant humanities projects. Or the programmer, working on interesting interfaces for projects. Or the database expert, figuring out how to jam those representations of Byzantine seals into a data structure. (This is not just about teaching, but a way of thinking).

Of course, the same goes for that Eng Lit scholar (the expert in Elizabeth Bishop, who gets lumbered with teaching the Comedies of Shakespeare to the freshers) – but the point I am making is this. Our academic discipline does not have the same structure as traditional, more established ones. We do not have the obvious career progressions. We do not have the obvious tenure track. We do not have the obvious places to publish to guarantee that Nobel Prize. We are the academic magpies, the interdisciplinary scholars with one foot in the sciences and one foot in the humanities, creating our own “portfolio careers”. We are hacking our way through both fields, and creating – making - a space where we can talk about the need for, the use for, and the reason for the use of computational techniques in the humanities (whether to benefit the humanities or the computational sciences).

Unauthorized access to the academe? Digital Humanities has a habit of being labelled by others as “service” rather than academic endeavour: those of us undertaking research in this area know too well the steps we take to maintain and reinforce our scholarly position, and the enthusiasm and conviction necessary to maintain and build a career in this area.

Its still all up for grabs, and there is much to be done. I believe there is room here, for many many more scholars to engage with, utilise, develop, and theorize about digital culture (in its purest sense). Most of them still wont get here by following a traditional degree pathway in. There is a specific mindset that is required to be a success in the Digital Humanities community. I’d argue the enthusiasm, challenge to traditional structures, and querying, querying nature fits us squarely within the “academic hacker” label. Digital Humanities as hackerdom. Lets see how far we can get.

Digital Classicist/ICS 2010 summer seminar programme

2010-05-24T15:22:00.001+01:00

Meetings are on Fridays at 16:30
in room STB9 (Stewart House)
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

*ALL WELCOME*
Seminars will be followed by refreshments

* Jun 4 _Leif Isaksen (Southampton)_ Reading Between the
Lines: unearthing structure in Ptolemy's Geography
* Jun 11 _Hafed Walda (King's College London)_ and Charles Lequesne
(RPS Group) Towards a National Inventory for Libyan Archaeology
* Jun 18 _Timothy Hill (King's College London)_ After
Prosopography? Data modelling, models of history, and new directions
for a scholarly genre.
* Jun 25 _Matteo Romanello (King's College London)_ Towards a
Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Canonical References
* Jul 2 _Mona Hess (University College London)_ 3D Colour Imaging
For Cultural Heritage Artefacts
* Jul 16 _Annemarie La Pensée (National Conservation Centre) and
Françoise Rutland (World Museum Liverpool)_ Non-contact 3D
laser scanning as a tool to aid identification and interpretation of
archaeological artefacts: the case of a Middle Bronze Age Hittite Dice
* Jul 23 _Mike Priddy (King's College London)_ On-demand Virtual
Research Environments: a case study from the Humanities
* Jul 30 _Monica Berti (Torino) and Marco Büchler (Leipzig)_
Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors
* Aug 6 _Kathryn Piquette (University College London)_ Material
Mediates Meaning: Exploring the artefactuality of writing utilising
qualitative data analysis software
* Aug 13 _Linda Spinazzè (Venice)_ Musisque Deoque. Developing new
features: manuscripts tracing on the net

For more information on individual seminars and updates on the
programme, see http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/

The Day After

2010-05-21T11:07:00.000+01:00

We officially launched the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities yesterday! James Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gave a brilliant speech with strong opinions on creativity, culture, and online content (which you can read the full text of). The Guardian have already covered this - and we are eagerly awaiting responses from cultural and heritage institutions, making the case for freely available digital content as opposed to the paid for model championed by James - as well as considering our thoughts on the matter.

The event went swimmingly - UCL was looking handsome in the early summer sunshine, the champagne flowed, and there were many distinguished guests who we were able to explain the role, focus, and impact of Digital Humanities to. At dinner afterwards, I sat beside the newly appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt. It was great to have the opportunity to explain why our field matters, and to showcase the varied research interests we have.

Update: there is quite a lot of media coverage about this.

Why James Murdoch was wrong to attack the British Library, in the Guardian
"British Library newspaper archive plan riles Murdoch" in the Independent
Google knows internet can no longer be free, says News Corp's James Murdoch
in This is London

Gearing up

2010-05-17T11:38:00.001+01:00

We're gearing up to the big launch of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities here, on Thursday. Expect more coverage soon, including the url on which to watch live streaming action of our opening speaker, James Murdoch from News International, who will be talking about cultural heritage and access in the digital age.

And a final taster

2010-04-30T11:32:00.000+01:00

As I said below, I'll share the rotating gallery of all 40 posters when they go online, and start to pepper UCL noticeboards, soon.

And Another UCLDH poster

2010-04-30T11:30:00.001+01:00

.. featuring some DH peeps who I am friends with on facebook.

Another UCLDH Poster

2010-04-30T11:28:00.000+01:00

Have you guessed who it is, yet? (think @TranscriBentham).

Posters

2010-04-30T11:24:00.000+01:00

We are gearing up to the official external launch of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. One of the things we have done is prepare a set of 40 or so posters that rather jokily should raise the profile of UCLDH around campus itself. They should be going up on the website in the next week or so, in a rotating gallery, and I'll share that with you then. I'm really pleased with them - they walk a fine line between provocative and tongue in cheek, and will be ideal for grabbing people's attention who are, say, going places in lifts at UCL and looking at the posters therein.

Changing the Center of Gravity

2010-04-29T09:57:00.001+01:00

Here's the book cover for Changing the Center of Gravity - the book of essays in memoriam to Ross Scaife that was first published as an online journal volume in DHQ. It's in press, and should be out shortly.

The British Museum kindly gave us permission to use the image on the front - psychostasia, the weighing of the souls, as featured on a white ground, black figure Lekythos, around 480BC. We thought this a fitting tribute to Ross and a poignant image- not only was he fond of black figure painting from this period, and the scales reference the title of the book, but the weighing of the souls refers to the gods balancing the scales to determine which heroes will not return from battle.

PhD Studentship at UCL in Digital Humanities

2010-04-07T15:51:00.001+01:00

We have here up for grabs one PhD studentship to come to the good ship UCL Centre for Digital Humanities to undertake a PhD. Details below.

Vacancy Information

The PhD studentship in Digital Humanities will be held at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities which brings together work being done in many different UCL departments and centres, in the humanities, computer science and engineering, as well as Library Services and Museums and Collections. We also collaborate with organisations outside UCL, such as museums, galleries, libraries and archives. We aim to produce research that is meaningful to both computer scientists and humanities scholars, and that will bring about new knowledge in both research areas.

Studentship Description

The award may be held by a student working on any topic relevant to digital humanities. However, it should involve genuinely interdisciplinary research, which is likely to require joint supervision from more than one UCL department or faculty. For further information about examples of current UCLDH research projects, please visit www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/projects. The award provides funding for tuition fees at the UK/EU rate and a student stipend for three years. Informal enquiries may be made to Samantha Hulston (s.hulston@ucl.ac.uk) or Dr Claire Warwick begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting (c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk).

Person Specification

Applicants must have at least a good 2.1 in their first degree, and ideally an MA or MSc in a relevant discipline and should have a background in the humanities, computer science, information or museum studies or ideally a combination of some of these fields.

Eligibility

To apply, please download and complete the application form.

More info on the UCL jobs website.

Back! From Outer Space!

2010-04-07T15:49:00.000+01:00

... or at least, the Easter shutdown plus computer fail. I am now revving on my new little machine, vroom vroom. Backlog, here I come!

Vaio as Chin Scratcher

2010-03-24T16:27:00.001Z

Vaio as chin scratcher
Originally uploaded by monkeysorama

Maybe I shouldnt have let the cat use my old computer as a scratching post.

Take a Stand! ALLC elections

2010-03-24T10:29:00.000Z

The ALLC elections for 2010 are now underway.

Nominations are now invited for three Committee posts, each to serve a 3-year term, and for one Committee post to serve a 2-year term.

And a new Chair needs to be chosen and elected, too.

Any DHers out there who subscribe to LLC (joint membership, or membership of ALLC) are eligible to stand. Being on the committee means that you get to contribute to the running of the association, perhaps also initiatives on the ADHO level, and the running of the various journals. As well as a great thing to have on your CV, its a good way to understand more about the workings of academic associations, conferences, and journals. Its also a great way to get to meet other DH people from across Europe. All this for a couple of meetings a year.

We really need new blood in the committee, and a few individuals who have been very involved for the past decade are now moving on. Do stand for election if you are interested. And do take the time to vote!

More info about the elections here.

Still no new machine

2010-03-24T10:25:00.000Z

But working in the cloud is not as bad as it would have been even a few years ago. I had an interesting exchange with a ticket collector yesterday at Kings Cross station - my train was delayed, so I was hanging out on the platform alongside a train that offers free wifi, picking up email and docs on my iPhone whilst waiting. "Are you travelling with us today, madam?" "only online, sir".

Its not ideal, at the end of term, to be a bit of an internet hobo, but heck, at least all my email records, calendars, etc didnt dissapear into scrambled electron soup. And my new docking station arrived yesterday. Fingers crossed a new machine will arrive to dock into it in the next day or so...

Day of DH

2010-03-18T08:16:00.001Z

Today is the day of DH! over 150 people in digital humanities will be blogging throughout the day, saying what they are up to, and showing the diversity of the discipline.

You can see my own mini blog here, although its not going to be the day I thought, for yesterday my dear little laptop keeled over, forever. I am currently typing this on my TV in my living room (thank goodness we have 5 or 6 computers just kicking about, that come in useful in situations like this). But still - I am oddly bereft.

Bereft, but not tearing my hair out. I keep pretty good backups, so think I may have irrecoverably lost about 30 mins of work, and a to do list, so its not the disaster it could have been. But my little machine! my machine!

I'll remember the good times. sniff.

Crowdsourcing Manuscript Material

2010-03-02T19:50:00.000Z

So, when I announced the Bentham Transcription Initiative (which will soon have its own website, we are working on things behind the scenes) I said it was a “highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work”. I firmly believe that: I don’t know of any other large scale transcription attempt of correspondence that is opening things up to crowdsourcing, and our project has a broad remit, producing an open source tool, whilst undertaking user studies on the use of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage application.

But that is not to say that there are not other crowdsourcing projects out there (and I’m sorry if I implied that!). I have had very interesting exchanges with quite a few people, and so I thought I’d draw a few other projects to your attention, if you are interested in community based online cultural heritage projects (and beyond).

There is huge amateur interest in genealogy, and the Free Births, Marriages and Death (FreeBMD) register have been transcribing the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records.
“Small and Special” has been using volunteer effort to create a database relating to the early years of The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, including patient admission records and articles.
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre have an interest in transcription of cultural material, and they've been doing some very exploratory work in crowd-sourcing transcription.
The National Library of Australia's Australian Newspapers is using crowd sourcing to correct the OCR of digitised Australian newspapers and with some contributors correcting hundreds of thousands of lines of text.
The USGS North American Bird Phenology program encouraged volunteers to submit bird sightings across North America from the 1880s through the 1970s. These cards are now being transcribed into a database for analysis of migratory pattern changes and what they imply about climate change.

Then there is the idea that building an online tool to help transcribing manuscripts is novel. There are a good few things out there, it turns out.

Ben Brumfield was kind enough to point out his blog, Collaborative Manuscript Transcription, which has both links to projects and tools, as well as considering the types of things one has to keep in mind when designing an online tool for transcribing texts. Ben has also developed his own system, http://beta.fromthepage.com/, software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents online. We’ll be looking at it closely.
The MediaWiki ProofreadPage plugin has been developed for many print transcription projects and a few manuscript projects. Current English-language projects using the plugin are listed there (and there are quite a few).
The BYU Historic Journals Project has developed an online transcription tool. The server seems to be down for maintenance (http://journals.byu.edu/) but there is a video online which demonstrates how they have been using their online tool for both searching and creating information.
The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Emergent Transcriptions/Transcription Assistant software system has also been pointed out, you can see more at E-Scripts@ WPI and Uscript.org.
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre have produced a tool called OpenScribe (Online Volunteer Transcription Service) which is based on a slightly-modified Drupal installation, the source-code for which is hosted in svn on Google Code. They have developed another tool, Remote Writer, which provides a web-based word-processor GUI for someone to easily markup text to xhtml which can then be translated to TEI using stylesheets, and is how they have enabled non-technical contributors to create the content found at sites such as Turbine literary journal and Best New Zealand Poems.
The SCRATCH (SCRipt Analysis Tools for the Cultural Heritage) project is exploring methods for automated information retrieval and analysis in large collections of scanned handwritten-document images. That’s a slightly difference focus to the rest of the projects named here, but I include it as it may be of interest.

So that’s the round up so far. Richard Davis, the developer from ULCC who is working on the Bentham project with us, has also posted an overview of who he has been chatting to. Once we get the project name, domain name, and website sorted out, we'll be posting lots of updates about our development of the tool - keeping the project as open as possible, in all kinds of ways.

If you know of any other cultural heritage projects using crowdsourcing, in particular for manuscript material, then please do get in touch. And if you hear about any other online manuscript environments we need to be aware of, drop us a line too! We wont be getting properly stuck into the Bentham Transcription project til RA’s are appointed (closing date for applications March 8th…. ) but it is good to learn what else is out there.

Update: I forgot to mention the "International Amateur Scanning League" which is a crowdsourcing digitisation project to digitise material from the USA's National Archives and Records Administration. Its a different focus - digitisation rather then transcription - but what a great name! They have a badge, and everything!

We're Hiring! x2!

2010-02-18T14:17:00.000Z

The Bentham Transcription Initiative - a UCL based ambitious and ground-breaking project which will increase access to and encourage user participation with the papers of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) - is now hiring for two postdoc research associates. Both posts are available immediately and funded for one year in the first instance.

Research Associate: The post holder will co-ordinate the various aspects of the project. They will write up the documentation for the amateur transcribers, run the publicity campaign which will recruit them, act as moderator of the submitted transcripts, and help to draft the qualitative user study and the final report.

Research Associate (IT): The post holder will be working with another Research Associate and the web developer to create an attractive and intuitive interface. They will take responsibility for the mark-up of the existing transcripts from MS Word into TEI compliant XML, link the digital images to the existing database catalogue and the transcription tool, and help draft user documentation and a qualitative user study. Although a post-doc is preferred, applicants with relevant experience but no PhD will be considered if they can demonstrate they have the desired skill set. Please contact us if you are unsure whether to apply, or whether your experience matches our requirements.

Closing date for both applications is 8th March 2010. Please get in touch (m.terras@ucl.ac.uk) if you have any queries, or want further information.

Book in memoriam to Ross Scaife

2010-02-18T14:11:00.000Z

Over the past six months or so, I've been merrily creating camera ready copy in my downtime for a print volume of the the DHQ issue I edited alongside Greg Crane (Tufts/Perseus): Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure.

Just to let you know, its now in press. And the joy of camera ready copy (after the pain of pasting lovely, well formed, XML into nasty, petulant, MicroSoft Word templates) is that the turnaround should be pretty quick. Heck, its already up on the Gorgias Press website... expect a "real" book in the next four weeks or so!

Announcing the Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative

2010-02-08T11:20:00.000Z

Jeremy Bentham's body, preserved and on display at UCL.

We at UCL are all terribly proud of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)- whose body, or "Auto-icon" is on display in the South Cloisters. It is widely told that he was the founder of UCL - which isnt true, although he did influence those who did found our University. I dont think I'll ever get bored in saying "Good morning!" to him every day as I walk past. You'll be pleased to know his case gets locked up tight every evening to allow him some rest.

He was a prolific writer, scholar, jurist, philosopher, and social scientist. A.J.P. Taylor described him as `the most formidable reasoner who ever applied his gifts to the practical questions of administration and politics’. Since the 1950s, The Bentham Project has been working towards the production of a new scholarly edition of his works and correspondence, although they've only dented the surface of the 60,000 pages of writing he produced which remain in UCL's special collections.

The Bentham Project did receive some AHRC money a few years ago to start digitising the material, although it was time for a rethink. Enter the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s highly competitive Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme.

I've been asked to join the project in an advisory role. It became clear to me very quickly that in a one year project there was never going to be enough time for two (maximum, under the funding) research assistants to digitise and transcribe tens of thousands of pages of manuscript material. So what, I thought, if we change the focus of the transcription initiative?

The Guardian Newspaper had run a very successful investigation into the UK MP's expense scandal in 2009, using an online crowdsourcing application to let their readership help sort though the 450,000 documents that needed closer study. Would it be possible, I thought, to develop a similar tool for cultural heritage documents? Can we persuade the wider historical community to contribute to the transcription effort?

I am pleased to say that UCL Laws, in conjunction with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Department of Information Studies, and UCL Library Services, can announce the launch of the Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative, which has secured £260,000 funding from the AHRC DEDEFI scheme.

The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative is a highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work. A digitisation project will provide high quality scans of the papers, whilst an online transcription tool will be developed which will allow volunteers to contribute to the transcription effort: providing a “crowdsourcing” tool which will be used to manage contributions from the wider audience interested in Bentham’s work, including school students, and amateur historians. It will be the job of the research assistants to manage interaction with the wider historical community, and monitor the quality of the transcriptions which are added to the database.

The use of such a tool for the transcription of cultural and heritage material is novel (although do shout if you know anyone else planning something similar), and UCL’s CIBER group will monitor the use of the online tool, providing an in-depth study of how such a crowdsourcing application was used during the year- long project.

Work on the project begins on March 1st 2010, and the project shall be shortly hiring for two research assistants. The online tool will be launched mid-summer 2010, when you can contribute to transcribing the works of Jeremy Bentham yourself!

Did I mention I was super excited about this? Grin.

Digital Classicist Call for Seminar Papers

2010-02-05T14:32:00.000Z

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers from the DC WiP seminars have been published* in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by
March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers
Gabriel Bodard, King's College London
Stuart Dunn, King's College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006), http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252 (2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9).

Twitterati

2010-02-04T15:37:00.000Z

I'm part of the JISC funded project LinkSphere at Reading University. They are building an online social media tool to do cross institutional repository searching, and facility research relationships. While the guys there are getting up to speed on programming the first demos, we set our research assistant, Claire Ross, a task: why not write up a paper on how people use social media. And why not do one on twitter. And why not study how Digital Humanities folks use it, within conference settings (thereby giving a nice corpus on which to base the study).

The results are here. A nice full, paper which has been submitted to a journal for consideration. Let us know if you have any comments!

Design Iterations

2010-02-03T11:38:00.000Z

You may have noticed our very nice logo for the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Our designer (one of my PhD students, Rudolf Ammann) has just posted an overview of the process of designing a logo for a DH Centre - which makes for interesting reading.

Where's the Party?

2010-02-01T09:46:00.001Z

Today is the official, internal launch of the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. There will be a small internal launch party - if you are around and at UCL, then more details are here - but a bigger external launch in May (email me if you want to go on the guestlist. There will be much wine and song for all in the DH world then).

We've got a really interesting blog, which may be worth subscribing to - lots of things in the pipeline...

Wish us luck. Posters are printed. Invites are out. Sticky-backed plastic is ordered to hang forementioned posters. And I have my party shoes on, rather than converse trainers, so it must be a special day...

Moon Museum Redux

2010-01-29T13:47:00.000Z

A couple of years ago I briefly posted about the "Moon Museum" - a secret project where some people at NASA had incorporated some modern art into the Apollo 12 Moonlanding Unit.

A few weeks ago, whilst doing some blog maintenance, I noticed that there had been a lot of comments on this post. It turned out that some people who had worked on this project had both found my blog - and got in touch with each other through the comment postings. Worth having a read!

I wrote to Burt Unger and, he gave me a little history about the project, and his involvement, which I thought you'd like to see. Imagine being the person who broke that mold!

I've done some research on the Moon Museum, especially before I got involved in the project so I think I can cover most of the details.

The project was a brainchild of Forest Meyers who is a renowned sculptor and artist. He petitioned NASA to allow them to transport an example of modern pop art to the moon onboard one of the space moon landers. NASA did not respond to his request so he went ahead anyway hoping in one way or another to put some art on the moon. Forest contacted five top artists in the field and asked them for a sketch or a doodle that he hoped would be the first art on the moon. The six artists; Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain and Forest Meyers made sketches. Their drawings can be seen on the web by Googling Moon Museum.

Forest dubbed the collective art the Moon Museum. Forest Meyers knew two engineers/ scientists at Bell Labs, Fred Waldhauer and Bill Kluver. They had worked together in a group named Experiments in Art and Technology. The six sketches were given to Fred Waldhauer who worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. He in turn gave them to Bob Merkle , an engineer at Holmdel who worked in a thin film processing laboratory. I was the supervisor of the laboratory.

In 1969 the Thin Film Lab was built in Holmdel to support circuit designers with microcircuits. The Lab was a large clean room with laminar flow hoods that had equipment for metal deposition, photolithography and etching, plating and bonding. The circuits were made on alumina (aluminum oxide) ceramic with thin film resistors and capacitors made from tantalum and conductors from gold. The resistors were adjusted to exacting tolerance by anodization. We bonded silicone chips to complete the circuits.

Bob had the six sketches photo-reduced and arranged in a three by two pattern on a glass mask that we used in our lithography process. The patterns were replicated in photo resist in tantalum that covered the ceramic surface and then etched to provide the sketches. Multiple patterns were made on three ceramics. They were then sawed apart and oxidized in a 500 degree centigrade oven for one hour. The patterns came out a vibrant purple color that is very hard and durable. I then broke the glass mask to prevent the wholesale processing of the Moon Museum.

Fred Waldhauer took most of the Museums and distributed them to the artists and I think he knew someone at the Cape that attached one to the lunar lander. I took some of the museums and gave them to my engineers as mementos. I don't know who the contacts at the Cape were and who attached it to the LEM.There will be a television program on the Moon Museum, called Histories Mysteries sometime next summer. I'm told they are video taping it now.

Googoo Google Goggles

2010-01-22T09:10:00.000Z

You'll have seen all about Google Goggles, right? Take a picture on your phone, and use it to search the web.

I was amused to find this in one of the Wee Man's favourite books: Dr Seuss's ABC. 1963, Read it all by myself beginner's books. Random House, New York, page 19.

Avatar

2010-01-22T08:59:00.000Z

Went to see Avatar in 3D last night. My first 3D film (and I'm showing my age by admitting I expected to get paper goggles, one with a red, one with a green lens).

Aside from the obvious plot borrowings (I wont go into them in case I reveal any spoilers) and the rubbishness of the name of the mineral "Unobtanium", I enjoyed it, although I find the "now throw something at the audience" moments a bit lame. Must read up more about the RealD technology behind it. And I'm looking forward to seeing Star Wars in 3D, eventually...

All this to say - my favourite part of the film was a totally minor aside. The bad guy (evil american selfish commander, not the military one but the one played by Phoebe's brother) was showing people his evil masterplan on a cool holographic display. But of course, he had no idea how to use it and had to get a minion to work the darn thing. Ha.

(The image above is a mashup between Avatar and The Guild's "do you want to date my avatar". The Guild is the most successful online comedy series of all time - about computer gamers. Hilarious.)

Users and Web 2.0 Workshop

2010-01-21T13:44:00.000Z

Earlier this week I chaired a two day workshop at the Oxford eResearch Centre, on use and users of Web 2.0 and eScience. A wide reaching remit, I admit (we were asked to do it so). Perhaps because of its broad focus, it turned out to be really interesting - perhaps because it wasnt the same old same old groups of people reporting on their usual projects. We had folks ranging from commerical journalism (ie the Guardian, @megpickard) to academics thinking about digital identity (@shirleyearley).... a varied and interesting program.

Claire Ross, our wonderful research assistant, took some comprehensive notes, which she has posted on her blog. Well worth a peek.

You're So Special

2010-01-20T19:42:00.000Z

Much of my work, apart from teaching, involves me sitting for long hours in front of the computer. I talk about old things, the digitisation of old things, and the wonder of old things... but actually, its very rare nowadays that I have the time to get involved with the physical media. So I was pleased today to finally make it up to UCL Special Collections to have a behind the scenes tour from the Head of Special Collections. We're planning some interesting research projects (more very soon about this I hope!) and I got to see some treasures, housed in an unassuming ex-warehouse ten minutes walk north of UCL central campus.

What did I see. Well. The Johnston-Lavis collection of early printed material that relates to Volcanoes (one of my students a few years ago made that fantastic website as part of their project based on the collection, and it was great for me to finally see the books). Sir Galton's work on the invention of fingerprinting technology. The first edition of probably the most important medical book ever published - recording Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. These and others ... and last but not least, the slipcases above, which contain the manuscripts and diaries of one Eric Blair, including the notebook for his development of a little book called "1984". Wonderful.

UCL Library Special Collections is one of the foremost university collections of manuscripts, archives and rare books in the UK. I really didnt know much about it until my visit today. If you are in London, try and make a trip north of the Euston Road to see what they have.

2010-01-14T13:06:00.000Z

A belated Happy New Year, everyone. Like most the UK, we've had our fair share of #uksnow, and I've used the time wisely, holed up in my shed finishing up the camera ready copy for the DHQ volume on cyberinfrastructure and classics, in memoriam to Ross Scaife, which is going to be printed up by Gorgias Press. But thats not what I want to talk about here.

I made it into London yesterday in the constant snow: here is one of the Lions in front of the British Museum, looking a bit chilly. I had a meeting there as part of the Linksphere project, we hope to do some collaborative research with them on various things (early days, few details to share at yet, but exciting possibilities and a great meeting). The interesting thing I want to highlight was how this came about. We are only 10 mins walk up the road from the BM, but its often hard to meet likeminded people in other organisations. So how did we get together? Because someone important at the BM saw some of @Clairey_ross's twitter posts, about the research we are doing. And lo, social media does lead to some new research possibilities.

Other things that are happening. I'm writing a book chapter about truth and representation in digital images, and particularly digitised images of text, and the implications that this has for manuscript based scholarship. How did this come about? A silly game on Facebook, which looks for the longest word you can make from letters in your name. Mine is materialisms, apparently. And a friend joked that that was ironic, given that my research primarily exists in the digital, rather than material world. To which I said that I was editing a book on Digitizing Material Culture - and forementioned friend, who is an expert in classical art, particularly theories of representation, said "have you ever thought of applying *that* to *this*? Which of course I hadnt. And now I shall. See, Facebook was useful for my work, after all.

Its these connections, and happenstances, which are perhaps the most useful? amusing? thing for me about social media. Sure, there is all the web 2.0 stuff - such as DHNow, - but I'm enjoying the unexpected.

In the olden days (ie ten years ago), I used to enjoy looking at the books next to the books I needed in the Library. They invariably had the thing I was really looking for, or sent you off on another, random, unexpected trail. I'm glad that social media, for me, is starting to allow the same things to happen.

If you are not doing anything next week, and happen to be around Oxford, I'm helping chair an eScience Institute workshop on users, research, and web 2.0. Plenty of interesting speakers about interesting research in the area. There are still spaces, and its free: do come along.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-17T11:59:00.000Z

Well. I almost survived first term. Am missing the last lecture due to a nasty bout of tonsillitis (although it looks like London will be hit by snow tomorrow anyway!). Hope you have a good break - and here is a picture of my lil' xmas elf to bring some festive cheer. See you in the new year!

The Caucus Race

2009-12-11T14:12:00.000Z

Its been a terrifically busy few weeks. Aside from teaching, I've been jetting off to various places - Hamburg for the ALLC midterm meeting, Reading for the VERA workshop, and this week to Oxford, where I was chairing a workshop on Users and User Centered Design at the IEEE e-Science meeting, as well as dropping in on the eSAD project.

In between the gadding about and the stress as we come towards end of term, moments of wow: arent I lucky. The picture above was taken from where I was sitting in the Senior Common Room at Christ Church, after dinner at High Table. A simple fire screen, you may think. But this fire screen is made up of De Morgan tiles which the maths lecturer, Charles Dodgson, had commissioned, to line his fireplace. Dodgson is better known under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, and there are all kind of things dotted round Ch Ch college which he either incorporated into his story of Alice in Wonderland, or were later produced after its success. To the bottom left of the screen you can see the Dodo, peering out. The Gryphon is top mid left. Did the tiles come before or after Alice was published? I'm not sure (this book would tell me if I had the time to look it up, Google Books will only let me see snippets). In any case, a lovely object to sit in close proximity to, whilst sipping coffee with good friends.

Now back to the grind. 5.5 working days 'til end of term!

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

2009-12-04T13:03:00.000Z

Today was one of my favourite teaching sessions as part of the Digital Resources in the Humanities class. The class assignment is to compare and contrast the digital version of a digitised object with its original: what is lost, what is gained, and how the experiences in accessing the "object" differ. So today's class visit was a behind the scenes tour of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology (one of London's Hidden Gems, apparently). Students were set a few objects on the website, that they have to locate in the museum, and compare and contrast the different experiences they had of viewing the virtual object to visiting the original. What fun - followed by a discussion of aspects that came up over their hour's visit, and looking in detail at the digitisation program the Petrie carried out (80,000 objects over a very short period of time indeed. We calculated in class that gave an image capture time of around 2 minutes per object).

I feel really lucky to be at UCL and to have such a great museum on the doorstep - and thanks go to the conservator, Susi Pancaldo, for giving us a behind the scenes tour. The snapshot above shows a pic of a mummy that is awaiting conservation.

Farewell Vera - we'll meet again?

2009-12-04T12:58:00.000Z

I was over to Reading on Wednesday for the wrap up meeting of the VERA project. Its been a great project - three years of helping Archaeologists mess around in the trench with digital pens, wifi, cameras, GPS, etc etc. Hopefully, we can continue doing some work at the Silchester dig over the next few years: its very rare that you get to study users of technology over such a large time scale, and there are some interesting findings from the dig....

... which we need to write up. Its added to the to do list.

We're Hiring!

2009-11-24T16:38:00.001Z

You may have heard rumours that UCL is getting its own Centre for Digital Humanities. Well, its true! Claire Warwick is the Director, and I'm the Deputy Director. More about this all soon - we are gearing up to the big launch in the spring.

In the meantime, we are hiring for three positions! Centre Co-ordinator, Teaching Fellow, and Research Assistant. All three are part time positions, which means if people wanted to mix and match to become a full time roll, we would consider that.

More info about the jobs can be found here.

Get in touch if you have any queries!

Understanding Image Based Evidence

2009-11-19T14:10:00.000Z

On Tuesday I participated in an excellent workshop, Understanding Image Based Evidence, as part of the eScience and Ancient Documents project at the University of Oxford. We looked at issues of fidelity of digital images, and how image based evidence is used for reasoning, particularly in papyrology and palaeography.

Couldn't be there? Well, my PhD student, Alejandro Giacometti, took some pretty good notes...

Twitterverse

2009-11-19T13:12:00.000Z

If its been quiet around here, its because I've been hanging out elsewhere. In class, lecturing, for one - and as with many other scholars, I've been gradually, and more frequently, becoming immersed in the stream on twitter (@melissaterras).

A couple of things you should know about if you are interested in Digital Humanities. Dan Cohen has put together a fabulous tweet roll of folks in the Digital Humanities, currently numbering 279 active tweeters. James Cummings has another list of 50 digital humanities folks (and although the two lists have some overlap, they dont feature all the same peeps).

Dan Cohen has also gone one stage further - using the new Twitter Times site, he's pulled together a "virtual" journal, that takes all the tweets from his DH list, and produces a changing overview of what people in the DH community are pointing to, and talking about at any one time. Digital Humanities Now is then a "passively edited" DH journal - a fantastic place to dip into daily to see what the community is finding interesting.

Read more about how it works on Dan Cohen's blog.

Finally, the future has arrived. Phew. Twitter is making more and more sense.

(Twitter seems to me like someone leaving some toy money, an old boot, and an iron in a field, and those who found it going on to create Monopoly. Hurrah!)

The Bluebirds Have Returned to Amersham. I Repeat.

2009-11-10T13:18:00.000Z

I love my laptop bag. The kind of thing you pick up quickly in a rush without much thought, that turns out to be a well loved and trusty friend. Its tardis like capabilities never fail to amaze me (laptop and lunch and pair of shoes and 30 student essays and lecture handouts and an umbrella? sure!). I would share with you the brand, but it doesnt discernibly have one. It was cheap, and I've never ever seen anyone else with the same one.

Until last week on the train. I put my laptop rucksack up in the rack next to one which was exactly the same.

How tempted was I to do the ole' spy-who-loves-me switcheroo of the cases?

Then I imagined the work carnage that would ensue, and just went on my merry way, thinking when did I get so unadventurous. Mental note - must put a business card in my laptop bag in case it gets separated from me, in a cold war secret stealing stylie.

btw

2009-10-29T14:54:00.000Z

My local Sainsburys have stopped stocking "Dr" Gillian McKeith products (or even Ms Gillian McKeith products). Over priced, over promoted, non-medicated muesli be gone!

Result.

DRH Domain Name Fail

2009-10-24T09:19:00.000+01:00

I was just wondering where next year's Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference was going to be next year - sadly I missed the Dublin conference this year as I had a friend's wedding in the diary so didnt hear the announcement about 2010 - but it surprised me I couldnt find the DRH website anywhere.

My mug from DRH 99 clearly says the URL is http://www.drh.org.uk/. Jump to the link to see where that takes you now.

Sigh. When the Digital Humanities community cant do something like renew a domain name....

I would ping the secretary to tell them, but I dont know who it is, as the website is down.

And if anyone knows where DRHA 2010 will be, and when, let me know.

Update; Lou Burnard (who is currently secretary) says DRHA 2010 will be at Brunel, London. London-tastic for the digital humanities this year!

Complicated Links Between Things

2009-10-21T14:39:00.000+01:00

One of the things I've been working on, behind the scenes, includes grant writing. I've been involved with four grants in the past two weeks. Which reminded me, today, of the brilliant work of the artist David Shrigley, who aims to articulate complicated links between things in his cartoons. This is a good map of how my brain feels just now.