Oxford Launch Event Workshop – Programme and Speaker biographies

Oxford Workshop – February 18 2014 – ‘Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagement in the Digital Humanities

How can a doctoral or early career researcher advance knowledge creation and production through the creative and exciting myriad of opportunities available in Digital Humanities?

Find out more at www.dhcrowdscribe.com

@dhAHRC and @dhcrowdscribe on twitter

Postdoc lunch (13:00-14:00, TORCH Common Room)

Emma Goodwin: Seed funding strategies: How to set up and access funding for small-scale projects.

Emma is a D Phil Candidate at Merton College, University of Oxford, writing a thesis entitled ‘Imagining the Experience of National Identity in late twelfth-century chanson de geste composed in French’. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Collaborative Skills Project, ‘Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagement in the Digital Humanities’ (dhAHRC). Emma also set up the DHCrowdScribe and CrowdMapCrusade (formally MapFirstCrusade) digital projects, which are affiliated to the dhAHRC project and supported by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH).  Before returning to graduate study, Emma trained as a chartered accountant and worked as a business and information systems auditor in the UK and overseas.

DPhil training session (1400-1600, Seminar Room) 2-4pm RHO Seminar Room

2-2.15 Emma Goodwin and Pat Lockley (Crowdsourcing the Crusades)

Emma and Pat will present CrowdMapTheCrusades (formerly Crowdsourcing the Crusades @MapFirstCrusade), a proof-of-concept transcription and mapping project, which is affiliated with the ‘Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagment in the Digital Humanities’ (dhAHRC) project and hosted at www.dhcrowdscribe.com. The project focuses on a version of ‘the Song of the First Crusade’, an Old French text attributed to Baudri of Bourgueil.  The poem is preserved in a 13th century manuscript, Hatton 77, which is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It has not yet been edited or transcribed in full.

Biography

Pat Lockley is a developer and consultant on the project. Having previously worked for the University of Nottingham and Oxford on a variety of projects including WW1C, Great Writers InspirePolitics In Spires and Xpert. Pat has helped develop OpenJoyce, a large collection of open educational resources about the author James Joyce, and the Huma Bird Project, an open source digital humanities tool.

2.15-2.30 Kathryn Eccles (Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Interdisciplinarity)

What is crowdsourcing? How does it work, and what can crowdsourcing initiatives in the Arts tell us about those who participate?  In this presentation, Dr Kathryn Eccles will talk about her research around the virtual art collection Your Paintings, and talk about what interdisciplinary insights can be gleaned from crowdsourcing platforms such as Your Paintings Tagger.

Biography

Kathryn’s research interests lie primarily in the Digital Humanities. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, cutting across several thematic areas, ranging from the impact of the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world to broader debates surrounding the human and social aspects of innovation and technological change. She recently held an AHRC Early Career Fellowship, which she used to examine the role of crowdsourcing in the arts, in particular, the potential of new information and communication technologies to promote public engagement with and awareness of museum collections, and to elicit new information about users and usage. The research focused on a key case study, Your Paintings, an important collaboration between the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC.

2.30-2.45 Alfie Abdul-Rahman

Poetry Visualisation on the Web

Alfie will present an example of how existing web tools can be used to create a visualization application for poetry. Poem Viewer is the result of the International Digging into Data Challenge – Round 2 programme. The team comprised of computer scientists, a linguist, and poets/scholars from the University of Oxford and the University of Utah.

Biography

Alfie Abdul-Rahman completed her PhD in 2007 at Swansea University, focusing on the physically-based rendering and algebraic manipulation of volume models. She now works as a research associate at the Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford University. Her research interests include visualization, computer graphics and human-computer interaction. Before joining Oxford, she worked as a research engineer in HP Labs Bristol on document engineering, and then as a software developer in London, working on multi-format publishing.

2.45-3.00 James Cummings

Digital Humanities Research Support and Training in
Oxford

James will survey the kinds of support provided for digital
humanities by the University of Oxford for those inside and
outside the university.  He will look at some of the services,
projects, and initiatives of interest to those undertaking
digital humanities research. As part of this he will describe the
intentions behind the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School
(DHOxSS) http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/ and what is
planned for it this year.

Biography

James Cummings is the Senior Digital Research Specialist for the IT Services of the University of Oxford. He helps academics plan research projects with digital aspects, is the department’s liaison for Digital Humanities activities, and is Director of the annual Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School.

Since 2005 he has been an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium‘s Technical Council, which he now chairs. James has a great deal of experience in teaching digital publishing concepts and XML-related technologies. From 2009-2012 he was the elected director of the executive board of the Digital Medievalist project.  James also is the founder of the Digital Humanities Awards
http://dhawards.org/ (anyone can nominate and vote) which has
recently finished its second successful year.

James completed a PhD in medieval drama from the University of Leeds, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds, and a BA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto.

3.15-3.35 Kate Lindsay

Crowdsourcing Community Collections: The Oxford Community Collection Model

In this presentation Kate Lindsay will introduce the Oxford Community Collection Model part of the Community Collections and Crowdsourcing Service based at the University of Oxford. She will show exemplars of how this award-winning model has been implemented (in particular Europeana 1914-1918), how it has been used to engage different audiences and outline the services available to you if you want to get started in crowdsourcing a community collection.

Biography

Kate Lindsay is part of the Academic IT group at the University of Oxford IT Services. She manages a team with a remit to support and progress the use of digital technologies for teaching and learning, public engagement and knowledge exchange in the University. Kate has been the Principle Investigator and Project Manager for a portfolio of digital projects, including: The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit), The Great War Archive (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/gwa), and World War One Centenary Continuations and Beginnings (http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/). She is the founder of the Oxford Community Collection Model.

3.35-3.50 Pip Willcox

The Bodleian First Folio: a story of digital engagement 

The story of the Bodleian First Folio (a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio) is as engaging as the plays the book contains. This talk presents an overview of the 2012 campaign that took up the book’s story, the collaboration that made it possible, its outreach activity, and its future. The chapters until 2011 were researched and related by Emma Smith (Hertford College). Her lecture to the Friends of the Bodleian sparked a 2012 campaign, Sprint for Shakespeare, to raise funds for its conservation, digitization and online publication, and to engage the public with its past and present.

Biography

Pip Willcox is the Curator of Digital Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. She works as part of a team within Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services supporting research, offering consultancy, and enabling online access to images and texts of rare books and manuscripts, often in collaboration with colleagues in other faculties, departments, and institutions. Recent collaborative projects include Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/), the Shakespeare Quartos Archive (http://quartos.org/), the Stationers’ Register Online (http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ProjectProfile/Project_page.aspx?pid=307), the public funding and engagement campaign Sprint for Shakespeare (http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/), and the current project to create a digital edition of the Bodleian First Folio.

3.50-4.00 Round Table Discussion