Victorians find themselves in Second Life!
Last week saw the launch of the Resurecting the Past Project from the University of Bristol.
The project has built a 3D model of the Pompeii Court from the Crystal Palace exhibition in the virtual world of Second Life.
The project aims to:
- to make accessible to the public knowledge of the Crystal Palace and its collections.
- to increase awareness of and stimulate research into the Crystal Palace and to broaden our understanding of the place and perception of Classics in the nineteenth century beyond the universities and museums by reconstructing the collection and display techniques of a private speculative enterprise that shaped and reflected mid century ideas of taste.
- through dissemination and evaluation of our project to stimulate new approaches to teaching & learning, to encourage dialogue between academic institutions and the wider community and to encourage the increasing use of digital technology within the Arts and Humanities to reach its full, interactive potential.
The project launched with a party in Second Life on Wednesday 16th December, and can be visited by following the link from the project webpages.
More details about the project can be found on the JISC webpages.
New JISC funding call published
The JISC call for developing community content has now been published on the JISC website.
Brief details about the call were mentioned in a previous blog post.
Questions about the nature of the call can be sent to Alastair Dunning; and questions about the application process can be sent to Avalon McAllister.
Scholars and digital resources - an unconference
One of the findings from the measuring impact study was the importance of not relying on quantitative statistics. Seductive as they are, the array of numbers from a Google Analytics report do not tell the whole story.
Considered feedback, review and criticism direct from the intended users are just, as if not more, important.
However getting such qualitative commentary can be difficult. Focus groups and the like take time and effort to set up.
This is why it us encouraging to see an entire conference being organised on the relationship of a digital resource to the schoilarly work it is encouraging.
The London Lives ‘unconference’ is inviting contributions from anyone whose research will benefit from use of the London Lives website- an enhanced resource that will will provide access to primary sources containing 240,000 pages of manuscripts sources, and 3.2 million names, reflecting the history of eighteenth-century London.
The event takes place in July 2010 and further details are available on the conference website. The London Lives resource itself will be available in March 2010
Digging into Data Winners
Over 85 applications were received for the international Digging into Data Challenge, and the eight winners are listed below
Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information
- University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Southampton, McGill University
- SALAMI (Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information) will gather c.23,000 hours of digitised music with a breathtaking range of styles, regions and time periods: A Capella to Zydeco, Appalachia to Zambia, and Medieval to Post-Modern and develop tools to tag and analyse the underlying structures that underpin global music.
Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters
- University of Oklahoma, University of Oxford, Stanford University
- Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping The Republic of Letters will focus on a corpus of 18th-century 53,000 letters, and will extract and interpret details relating to people, places, times, and subjects, and identify new ways of visualising and annotating these relationships.
Data Mining with Criminal Intent
- George Mason University, University of Alberta, University of Hertfordshire
- The Data Mining With Criminal Intent project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline–the history of crime–and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.
Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions
- Mount Allison University, Imperial College, London, Tufts University
- Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions will develop a range of tools that allow for dynamic comparison, generation of lexica, identification if topics and extraction quotations over 10,00 Greek and Roman text, that helping continue develop a fundamental resource for classical studies.
Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions
- Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Sheffield
- This project will take three specific resources (manuscripts, maps and quilts) and develop tools to analyse and identify authorship of visual images
Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web
- McGill University, Cornell University
- This project will harvest audio and transcribed data from podcasts, news broadcasts, public and educational lectures and other sources to create a massive corpus of speech. Tools will then be developed to analyse the different uses of prosody (rhythm, stress and intonation) within spoken communication.
Railroads and the Making of Modern America–Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization
- University of Portsmouth, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Railroads and the Making of Modern America will integrate a vast collection of textual, geographical and numerical data to allow for the visual presentation of the railroads over time, concentrating initially on the Great Plains and NE USA
Mining a Year of Speech
- University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania
- Mining a Year of Speech will create mechanisms to allow for the rapid and flexible access to over 9000 hours of spoken audio files, drawn from some of the leading British and American spoken word corpora
The projects start in 2010 and complete in March 2011
Digitisation and Community Engagement - Future JISC funding
Following the success of projects such as the University of Oxford’s Great War Archive, JISC have continued exploration into the concept of community collections, that is digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences.
1914 Christmas ‘Comforts tin’ and card, from the Great War Archive
This was followed up the report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement, which looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model.
JISC will be continuing this work by publishing a call for projects undertaking the development of community content. It will be a joint call between the JISC Digitisation & eContent, and the Business and Community Programmes. Around £400,000 will be made available, for funding projects up to £75k each.
There will be two strands. Details are also on the JISC roadmap.
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 call will be published in December 2009, with a closing date for proposals likely to be the very end of January 2010.
Potential applicants may also be interested in the follow on project by the Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. Entitled RunCoCo, the project will be helping to share and establish best practice in the development of community collections.