Dipping a Toe into the Digital Humanities (video series)

This is brilliant. A series of videos have just been put online from Dipping a Toe into the Digital Humanities, a one-day introductory symposium presented by the Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention at Deakin University on 19 October 2012.

Speakers including Tim Sherratt (@wragge) and Ingrid Mason (@1n9r1d) profiled some of the biggest digital humanities projects happening in Australia right now. I can't wait to watch a couple of these over Easter.


Enjoyed the first vid? Watch them all here.


"Digital Humanities describes research, teaching and knowledge realisation at the intersection of computing and the humanities, social sciences, creative and performing arts. It is broadly interdisciplinary and encompasses a wide variety of emerging practices, ranging from curating digital research collections, developing new tools for exploring archives to visualising information from large data sets."  Dipping a Toe into the Digital Humanities

Watch keynote presentations from Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 (video)

You can now watch the keynote presentations from the 'Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 Conference: Building, Mapping, Connecting'.

• Julia Flanders on 'Rethinking Collections'
• Alan Liu on 'Close, Distant, and Unexpected Reading'
• Peter Robinson, Harold Short and John Unsworth discuss 'Big Digital Humanities' in a keynote Panel session.

Want more detailed information on keynote speakers and their topics? Take a look at the conference website.

Digital Humanities and the case for Critical Commons

"Anyone who has ever consulted Wikpedia, leave the room now…"

Are you interested in using data to tell compelling visual stories?

Source: The Spatial History Project

Don't miss our next reading group session at 2-3pm on Friday 22 March where we will be discussing data visualisation.

Please note we have changed the venue for this session.
We will be meeting at the UWA iVEC facility which is located on the ground floor of the Physics building (entrance opposite the Reid Library or through the main Physics foyer). The iVEC team are supercomputing specialists who provide a range of support services for UWA researchers. We've booked out the conference room and also their impressive visualisation laboratory. We'll combine a discussion of the readings (below) with a tour of iVEC and a demo of vis tools and technologies by Paul Bourke (Director, iVEC@UWA).

The iVEC visualisation laboratory at UWA

Numbers are limited so please RSVP to johawkins@gmail.com. The session is scheduled for 2-3pm but I have booked the facilities until 4pm as I know our discussions tend to run over.

What you need to know:

Not only are researchers in the humanities developing new tools and methodologies to analyse large, complex datasets - they are developing innovative ways to communicate their findings.

The session will be hosted by UWA historian, Ethan Blue, who is developing a concept for a data visualisation project based on his work on American deportation networks in early twentieth century. He's interested in the ways in which historians are using geospacial visualisations to map interconnections, networks, movement, and change. The session will focus on historical research but the topic is relevant to a broad range of disciplines.

Recommended readings:

Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzk, Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
Part 1: Re-Visioning Historical Writing
Part 5: See What I Mean? Visual, Spatial, and Game-based History

You may also like to read Zephyr Frank's 'Layers, Flows And Intersections: Jeronymo José De Mello And Artisan Life In Rio De Janeiro, 1840s-1880' which was published in Journal of Social History (2007). Frank used datasets and maps to write a social history of Rio de Janeiro's artisans.

You can view a series of Frank's connected creative visualisations on the Stanford University's Spatial History Project website.

[Cross Post] Digital Manuscript Studies – Curriculum Development Week One

The Conservation of the Codex Alexandrinus, courtesy of the British Library Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Blog

Hello Digital Antipodeans,

Today I would like to share a post with you from my blog Fluid Imaginings about a unit I am developing, to be run next year, on the topic of Digital Manuscript Studies. The unit is for our Masters in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at our University of Western Australia Centre of the same name. I’ve decided to start blogging about the process, some of the sources that I have discovered, any problems or insights I encounter, and those places that I have found good help and resources. Since the name of the game for our group is the sharing and discussion of Digital Humanities content and ideas, I hope that this is of interest.

I would very much welcome any and all input from anyone reading this blog, so please chime in if you think you have some advice, or that I am making a mistake somewhere. This is my first large scale curriculum development project, and I want to learn in a way that helps others as much as myself.

The name of the game this week is introduction. What readings and activities best prepare students for the world of digital manuscript studies while simultaneously introducing some of the core concepts of digital humanities in general? Perhaps beginning with my four draft outcomes is the best option:

By the end of the unit, students should be able to:

1. Critically engage with the problems, possibilities, and methodologies of manuscript studies in an age of digital content.

2. Analyse different resources for manuscript studies (resources, tools for researchers, tools for students), the manner in which they are presented and the manner in which they can be used and manipulated.

3. Critique the strengths and weaknesses of diverse digital manuscripts and resources.

4. Use resources and tools to conduct original research individually and in a group, and identify the need for new approaches based on this research.

As you can see, these outcomes are wholly manuscript studies based (the goal is to teach students how to use sources confidentlyand critically in a digital environment) and the digital humanities content is inflected rather than self-evident. My question for this week is how to teach both general DH literacy and introduce students to the manuscript as digital entity without being too mired in the ‘yack’ at the expense of the ‘hack’ as scholars are fond of saying.

I will keep you posted as the syllabus emerges. Once again, please feel free to comment on this or any future blog post, or comment on an Academia.edu question i’ve asked.

Take Care,

James Smith