Intute blog

I am pleased to pass on details of the call for papers of the excellent DRHA conference. Some of our colleagues at Intute are on the committee of DRHA. In the past we have also presented and run panels, (see other Intute blog posts tagged drha), at this international conference for Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES

DRHA 2010 Conference: Sunday 5th September – Wednesday 8th September 2010 at Brunel University, West London. www.drha2010.org.uk

CONFERENCE THEME: Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.

At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include:

• Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge
• Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and technology
• Integration/deployment of digital resources in new contexts
• Connections and tensions that exist between the Arts, Humanities and Science
• Notions of the ’solitary’ and the ‘collaborative’ across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences
• eScience in the Arts and Humanities
• Use of digital resources in collaborative creative work, teaching, learning and scholarship
• Open source and second generation Web infrastructure
• Digital media in time and space
• Music and technology: composition and performance
• Dance and interactive technologies
• Taking inspiration from SET: imaging, GPS and mobile technologies
• Evaluating the experience among providers and users / performers and audiences
• Interface Design and HCI
• Performative Practices in SecondLife or other virtual platforms
• New critical paradigms for the conference’s theme

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Coyne – Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh.
• Christopher Pressler: Director of Research and Learning Resources and Director of the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham.
• Thecla Schiphorst: Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University , Vancouver, Canada.
• STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney.

Professor Stelarc

(Image from a photo on Flickr by tomcorsan, licensed under Creative Commons).

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high standard accommodation.

SUBMISSIONS:
We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances, workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme, with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a SecondLife roundtable/discussion event, led by performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can be screened as part of this panel.

Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations.

Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.

All proposals – whether papers, performance or other – should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.

The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010.

Abstracts should be between 600 – 1000 words.

Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.

Please see http://www.drha2010.org.uk for all relevant information and online submission.

Best wishes,

Franziska Schroeder

DRHA 2010 Programme Chair
School of Music and Sonic Arts
Queen’s University Belfast
www.sarc.qub.ac.uk
www.music.qub.ac.uk

If you had the funding for a community digitisation project what would you do? The Intute Advent Calendar points towards a recent funding call for creating or enhancing digital collections via engagement with the wider community, and RunCoCo – a project which will help to share and establish best practice in the development of community contributed collections.

Web 2.0 Archives?

Many museums and archives are engaging with the public online. For example, a digitisation project which I have been involved with – the First World War Poetry Digital Archive (based at the University of Oxford) has gained momentum from: Facebook; Blogger and Twitter; YouTube; podcasting on iTunes-U; Amazon Associates; photo-sharing on Flickr; online Pathway Creation tool (developed by Oxford University); plotting manuscript and biographical datasets on an interactive First World War timeline; using MyIntute to manage and display links to Internet resources; VUE mind-maps (developed at Tufts University); supporting a Google Group to maintain and foster discussions which have carried on since the project started in the 1990s; and most recently an acclaimed reconstruction of the Western Front in Second Life.

Hype surrounds Second Life, and commentators still demand to know what is the point to these virtual worlds! However in response to a recent BBC News Magazine article along those lines a reader submitted this comment:

Don’t confuse hype with success. I am sure you are as aware of Gartner’s Hype Cycle as I am: Second Life has been through the over-hype, where it suffered particularly from corporates completely missing the point – they could hardly do anything but fail. Today, Second Life seems healthily on what Gartner called the Slope of Enlightenment, on the way to the Plateau of Productivity. Where Second Life really scores today in my view is as a teaching environment, and as a venue for virtual conferences and events which are far more cost-effective and environmentally sound than flying people across the world. As far as teaching environments are concerned, look at the Frideswide region where the University of Oxford’s WWI Poetry Digital Archive has established a stunning presentation of aspects of their collection in a simulated Western Front.
Richard E, Cambridge UK

There are rumours of a Christmas truce on the Western Front in Second Life, although the High Command deny all reports… Watch this space!

A soldier with a Christmas Pudding, France, 17th December 1917. One of hundreds of images, films and audio clips from the Imperial War Museum which are made available on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, to put the poetry into context.

Mass digitisation?

The image below is an example of the rare manuscripts of English poets that the First World War Poetry Digital Archive’s standard digitisation enterprise focussed on capturing. Professional photography was undertaken to very high standards by the respositories themselves, and cataloguing was done by the project’s experts.

Isaac Rosenberg's design for a Christmas card including poem, drawn whilst serving in the trenches in 1917.

Previous significant digitisation initiatives by leading cultural heritage institutions involving the public have included Our Wales (by the National Library of Wales) and WW2 People’s War by the BBC. However, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive’s community contributed collection The Great War Archive broke new ground in terms of digitisation. During the four month initiative not only did the public contribute over 6,500 photographs of items they held originating from the First World War, they even completed the metadata (brief catalogue record) for each item when it was submitted online.

Comforts Tin and Contents (photograph and metadata submitted to The Great War Archive by the contributor). These tins were a present sent to all the troops from the then Princess Mary, who like others, thought the war would be over by Christmas 1914.

The costing and other strategies and processes behind The Great War Archive are explained in detail in an article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly If You Build It, They Will Scan: Oxford University’s Exploration of Community Collections.

Flickr photo sharing

The Great War Archive continues to collect digital artefacts from the public on the Flickr photo-sharing website. Flickr is being used by many archives, museums and art galleries to expose items from their collections and for users to share photos of their visit. These include, for example, the V&A, Kew Gardens, Wessex Archaeology, and the National Museums of Scotland.

German Soldiers Celebrating Christmas 1916, submitted to The Great War Archive Flickr Group. This is representative of the international nature of the Flickr pool, whereas the 6,500 items in the Great War Archive are predominantly British.

Amateur metadata?

The Great War Archive showed that the public will add simple metadata if they are interested enough in the objects, and the Flickr pool shows the high quality of commentary and notes provided by enthusiasts – and their willingness to share this knowledge with others.

Some innovative projects have even started introducing games to their digital resources in order to encourage the public to enhance their metadata, as explained by Alastair Dunning in ‘Making metadata fun’ in the JISC Digitisation blog.

The Galaxy Zoo astronomy site has a game which allows the public to help suggest how galaxy collision and mergers took place.

An “unusual occurrence of metadata and fun in the same sentence!” Ben Showers, a JISC programme manager

RunCoCo – Running a Community Collection Project

The activities and results of The Great War Archive has led its funder, the JISC digitisation programme, to further explore the concept of community collections. These are defined as ‘digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences’. The report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model. The JISC have released funding (in the Developing Community Content call) to projects undertaking the development of community content (up to £75k per project) for:

• Strand A. Rapid Innovation – Rapid enhancement of existing digital resources to provide for greater engagement with previously untapped audiences
• Strand B. Content development – Building new digital collections, or significant extending existing collections, via community engagement

The closing date for proposals will probably be January-February 2010.

“This is a fantastic recognition of the impact of the Great War Archive, and we look forward to seeing the outcomes – there are so many possibilities!” Kate Lindsay, University of Oxford, Project Manager of the First World War Poetry Archive and Principal Investigator for RunCoCo

The team at the University of Oxford will now use the success of The Great War Archive in the follow-on project, RunCoCo: Running a Community Collection. The RunCoCo project will share and establish best practice in the development of community collections, (and will diseminate the open source software they developed), to show that such initiatives can be undertaken by smaller individual units, libraries, museums, and archives; and also with different target audiences. Potential applicants for the community collection funding may also be interested in RunCoCo’s training workshops later in 2010. If you are thinking about running a community collection the RunCoCo team would like to hear from you.

So you think you could curate a collection?
We leave you with a game from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Try the Curator game! Can you put the right objects in the right box without smashing them?

Image credits:

• Christmas on the Front. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Imperial War Museum Photographic Archive
• Pozieres, by Isaac Rosenberg. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © The British Library / The Isaac Rosenberg Literary Estate
• Princess Mary Christmas Fund Gift Tin with Contents. This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © Lewis Trickey
• WWI German Soldiers Celebrate Christmas 1916, from a photo on Flickr reproduced with the kind permission of Sunny Brook, all rights reserved.

Today UNESCO is launching the World Digital library

it is a major digitisation partnership with 32 other institutions worldwide (partners include individual universities such as Yale, National Libraries eg Iraq, China, Russia and other archives) According to the press release it will provide free public access to an online library of cultural materials (books, manuscripts, films, sound recordings and images). The site already contains a wealth of materials. There is a large section of social science materials – including coverage of politics, colonisation, anthropology and social, economic and political history.

You can browse by place, topic, language. Already available are materials relating to slavery (including sketches of the Armistad captives), prints, drawings and manuscripts on the history of Immigration to America.

An excellent supplement to a number of other free online libraries. Notably

Europeana the European Commission funded portal which was launched in 2008 and is currently working to build a virtual European library offering free access to  Europe’s cultural resources. It includes millions of texts (manuscripts, papers, ebooks), images (photographs, maps), films (moving images, videos, film clips, television broadcasts) and sounds from Europe’s main research libraries, archives and galleries. Organisations currently include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris.

Of course there is also the excellent Gallica , part of the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which give access to a vast collection of digitised texts and images covering the periods from the Middle Ages onwards. Subjects covered include philosophy, law, economics and politics as well as history and literature. The website provides chronologies of the periods alongside thematic pages with links to related works. Alternatively, you can use the online catalogue to search for particular works, or by subject. A selection of dictionaries, newspapers and journals have also been digitised and there are a number of themed collections and dossiers The website and most of the texts are in French.

Other useful ebook libraries include:

Búsqueda de libros Google: libros de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid The Universidad Complutense de Madrid is a partner in the Google Book search project. This involves the mass digitisation of out of print books and copyright free pamphlets from the University library. These cover all aspects of the sciences, social sciences and humanities. There is a particular focus on materials relating to the history, literature, culture, politics and social life of Spain and Spanish regions. They include rare examples of Spanish historic books as well as some English language materials

The Digital Library of India- a major portal to online collections of books hosted by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in co-operation with over 21 Indian universities and the Indian government. It provides free access to a growing number of ebooks scanned from Indian library collections. They include many historic monographs and books in Indian languages, covering a full range of topics from the humanities and social sciences. There is particularly strong coverage of topics relating to Indian culture, history, society and politics.

The Aceh books website provides free access to over 600 full text monographs about the history, politics and culture of Aceh. It was established by The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden in association with a number of other Dutch educational establishments to preserve books about the region. It includes materials in Dutch, Indonesian and European languages (published by both Indonesian and European imprints) covering a wide range of topics from the humanities and social sciences. Key fields include ethnographic and anthropology, historic traveller’s accounts, histories of colonialism and settlement in Indonesia.

Many more ebook collections can be located via Intute. Did you know that if you use the advanced search form you can restrict your search to ebooks?

What is more evocative of Christmas than mince pies?

They have a long history, as shown by this early seventeenth century recipe (subject of today’s online Advent Calendar post from Intute: Arts and Humanities).

Some ingredients are familiar, although in generous proportions: two pounds each of sugar, raisins, currants and butter. The recipe also includes meat – a loin of fat mutton and ‘a leg of veal to mince with it’ – reminding us why they were originally called ‘mince’ pies. This substantial recipe was for six pies of an ‘indifferent bigness’: presumably each was cut into slices for individual portions. Clearly, it is not a recipe for vegetarians, or for those concerned with their waistline!

Click on image to go to The National Archives - the State Papers: Mince Pie recipe, dated early 17th century

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The 90th anniversary of the Armistice sees the launch of the final element of a remarkable online archive that provides open access to an unrivalled database of primary source material as part of the JISC Digitisation Programme. The University of Oxford’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive now comprises over 7,000 digital images relating to the poets of the Great War. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bodleian Library, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the AHRC, have published online high resolution images an Islamic manuscript entitled, “The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences, and Marvels for the Eyes“. The manuscript is an illustrated cosmography from the eleventh century depicting maps and diagrams relating to the world, the stars and also more local areas such as the eastern Mediterranean, Byzantium, major rivers and seas. The manuscript images are accompanied by an Arabic edition of the text; an annotated translation; and materials for supporting the schools curriculum (Key Stage 3). Other resources relating to the medieval Islamic world are available via Intute.

You are invited to the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, 22 March, 5.30 pm, in room NG15, Senate House, Malet Street, London. The Seminar leader is Dr Mary Hammond (Open University), whose topic is “The Reading Experience Database 1800-1945: New Directions”. Posted by Dr Willard McCarty to the Humanist Discussion Group list.

As posted to the Humanist discussion list, you are invited to a Roundtable Discussion on Book History at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester. In preparation you may be interested to read Intute’s Limelight on the History of the Book.

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Survey of Handwritten Collections announced on the DigLib discussion list for digital libraries researchers and librarians.

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The latest issue of Early Modern Literary Studies is now available. You may also be interested in browsing Intute’s large collection of other resources about the study of English studies in the sixteenth century and seventeenth century.