Programme of Speakers
Professor Chaudhuri
'The Online Variorum Tagore'
Wednesday 12 October 2011, 5pm
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata (Calcutta), where he was formerly Professor of English and Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records. His core specializations are in Renaissance literature, on which he has two books from the Clarendon Press and nine edited volumes, and in textual studies: he published The Metaphysics of Text from Cambridge University Press in 2010. He has also translated widely from Bengali into English, and is General Editor of the Oxford Tagore Translations. His work at the School of Cultural Texts and Records has involved several projects in digital archiving (including two for the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme) and in electronic editing, culminating in the current Bichitra project for an online Tagore variorum.
This is a report on the scope, methods and aims of 'Bichitra' (literally, 'the various'), the ongoing project for a complete online variorum edition of the complete works of Rabindranath Tagore in English and Bengali, under way at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. Tagore wrote voluminously and revised extensively. After a brief outline of the textual and editorial implications of his corpus, the talk will focus on the strategies to meet them electronically: the broad framework of the project, the special challenges of a non-Latin font with a vast range of conjunct letters, and the creation of an adequate collation software. There will be a brief demonstration of the customized software created for the purpose, and the measures being taken to improve it.
Dr Katherine Bode
Novel knowledge: Australian fiction, AustLit and digital humanities
Thursday 10 November 2011, 1pm
Australia is leading the world in the scope and comprehensiveness of its online bibliographical archive, AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. My research draws on this database to explore the critical potential of data-mining, modeling and visualization as methods for investigating and analyzing literary and book history. This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of this data-rich, digital humanities approach, and offers a case study of the findings it enables. By analyzing patterns in the production, circulation and reception of nineteenth-century Australian novels, I present new insights into the operations of publishing and print culture in Australia, the relationship between British and colonial book markets and readerships, as well as shifts in British publishing at the end of the nineteenth century.
Katherine Bode is Senior Lecturer in literary and textual studies in the Digital Humanities Hub at the Australian National University. She has published widely on gender in contemporary fiction and on quantitative and digital approaches to literary history. Her latest monograph, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field, will be published by Anthem Press in March 2012. She was Co-Editor of Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch, and Australian Literary Culture, Sydney University Press, 2006.
Professor Akira Maeda
Integrated Information Access and Analysis of Japanese Humanities Databases
Thursday 15 December 2011, 1pm
In this talk, Professor Akira Maeda will present our ongoing research projects related to Japanese humanities databases. First, he will introduce the project of text analysis and visualisation of Japanese ancient writings in the late Heian period (12th century). The project proposed a method to find relationships between historical persons using co-occurrence of person and place names in the text, and to find persons with similar change patterns in relationships between other persons over years. Next, he will introduce the project of multilingual federated searching system for Ukiyo-e image databases. Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese traditional woodblock prints established in the Edo period (17th century). Many of them are dispersed around the world in the 19th century, and are now stored in museums in Europe and America. In this project, the team is developing a multilingual federated searching system for Ukiyo-e databases around the world, including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Professor Akira Maeda will discuss theoretical and practical issues in developing these systems.
Akira Maeda is a professor at the Department of Media Technology, College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Library and Information Science from University of Library and Information Science (ULIS) in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and received Ph.D. degree in Engineering from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in 2000. He has visited Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) from October 2000 through March 2001 as a postdoctoral visiting scholar. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher of the CREST program, Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) from April 2001 through March 2002. His research interests include digital libraries, digital humanities, information retrieval, and multilingual information
Professor Tim Hitchcock
Academic History Writing and its Disconnects: The Headache of Big Data
Thursday 9 February 2012, 1pm
We are now possessed of an almost infinite archive of historical texts and artefact. In just a decade the very stuff and basis of post-enlightenment scholarship has gone digital. But the discipline of academic history writing has largely failed to keep pace. We persevere in a form of research and writing made ever faster by keyword searches, but which is based in a praxis founded in Rankean methodologies, and embedded within the technology of the printed book and the logistics of the hard copy library. This paper will suggest, first, that we need to re-examine the research methodology that underpins modern academic scholarship, and second, that we need to create new means of dissemination and distribution. In the process it will suggest that 'big data' and the existence of the corpus of the western printed archive in a digital form, challenges us to find new ways of asking historically significant questions; and liberates us to reconstitute the historical project in its most basic form. It will argue that the analysis and exploration of 'big data' provides an opportunity to re-incorporate historical understandings in to a positivist analysis, while challenging historians to engage directly and critically with the tools of computational linguistics.
Tim Hitchcock has been instrumental in creating a series of digital resources that make available the printed and manuscript archives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London. With Robert Shoemaker and others, he is responsible for The Old Bailey Online; London Lives; Connected Histories and Locating London's Past. In collaboration with William Turkell he is currently engaged in using the Old Bailey Proceedings with the tools of text and datamining to better understand the history of the criminal justice system. He is also co-authoring a born-digital e-monograph with Robert Shoemaker on the history of criminal and social policy in eighteenth-century London, to by published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Hitchcock is Professor of Eighteenth-century History at the University of Hertfordshire, and has published ten books on the histories of eighteenth-century poverty, sexuality and masculinity.
Claire Ross (UCL) and Tom Grinsted (Imperial War Museum)
Cultural Collaborative Exchange: Collections, Social Interpretation, Partnerships and Project Management
Thursday 23 February 2012, 1pm
Social Interpretation and ongoing Cultural Exchange (SICE) explores how social media models can be applied to museum collections and interpretation, offering new frameworks for engagement and social interpretation. By applying successful social media intellectual and technical models SICE is developing a platform that provides accessible, extensible, and open technology to aggregate, share and augment cultural data and social interpretation. The SICE Project, Led by theImperial War Museum,Knowledge Integration and UCL, utilises Agile project management principles and a user-centred approach to provide museum objects with profiles, social circles, crowdsourced comments, and community moderation tools: creating truly social, shared objects. This approach guarantees appropriate solutions by embedding users, stakeholders and the entire project team at every point of the development process, leading to advocacy and ownership.
This paper presents the progress of SICE so far, highlights the collaborative project process and user-centred development activities, its opportunities, challenges and provides an outlook on the next steps of the Project. This paper aims to stress the necessity in including users, stakeholders and the project team into a systems design process. Although this paper will concentrate on tools and the development of the SICE project, issues of user-led design, agile project management and collaborative working are applicable to the development of cultural technology projects by any institution.
Claire Ross is undertaking a PhD at UCL Centre Digital Humanities in user experience in digital cultural contexts. She is a HASTAC Scholar, Chair of the committee of the Digital Learning Network for Museums, Libraries and Archives as well as a committee member for Ignite London and, previously, Interface 2011.
Tom Grinsted is the Multmedia Media Manager at the Imperial War Museum and has also undertakes freelance consultancy in interactive design and development for the cultural heritage, education and publishing sectors. Previously he was Interactive Design Manager at the Guardian.
Dr Emma Bayne & Mrs Ruth Roberts
Discovery and the Digital Challenge
Thursday 8 March 2012, 1pm
Emma Bayne and Ruth Roberts will be talking about the changes to the National Archives online services. This includes the development of a new service - the Discovery Service. This is based on a new architecture and allows improved access to the National Archives Catalogue and digitised material. Features include a new taxonomy-based search and an API to allow bulk downloads of data.
They will also be talking about some of the challenges facing the National Archives in delivering large quantities of digital images of records online - moving from a gigabyte scale to a petabyte scale in a short period of time.
Ruth Roberts - Research and Academic Liaison Advisor Ruth has worked at The National Archives for eight years in a number of different roles but has recently returned to the field of research and academic liaison. Before The National Archives, and after graduation, Ruth was a researcher at The Home Office reviewing new policies in the criminal justice system. Now, Ruth leads on all academic communications at The National Archives and works closely with the academic community to ensure that the research carried out at The National Archives benefits the business.
Professor Jeffry Robinson [to be confirmed]
Thursday 19 April 2012, 1pm
Further details to follow
Dr David Bourget
Thursday 10 May 2012, 1pm
Dr David Bourget is the head of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy, part of London's Institute of Philosophy.
Details to follow