Tracking the Exchange of Ideas in the Enlightenment
One of the projects in the Digging into Data Challenge is entitled Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters
It traces the flow of correspondence between intellectuals in eighteenth-century Europe, thus helping giving an indication of the flow of ideas from writers such as Adam Smith, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This YouTube video, featuring Dr Dan Edelstein from the US side of the team at Stanford University, is a useful introduction to the project, and reveals some of the general aims of the broader Digging into Data programme. Also involved in the project are Dr Chris Weaver from the University of Oklahoma and, in the UK, Robert McNamee from the University of Oxford.
Part-time project officer job at Oxford University
Oxford University Computing Services is looking for a Project Officer (part-time, fixed-term) to work on the RunCoCo project. The work involves:
* running a communication campaign and developing engaging Web content to successfully promote the RunCoCo project and support its user community
* managing project events and overseeing the production of training materials
* providing advice to a number of community digitisation projectsDetails and an application form are available from http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jobs/ Completed applications must be received by 12 noon on 26th March 2010, and interviews will be held on 7th April 2010.
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.
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
Why Are Users So Useful?: User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme
In the most recent edition of Ariadne magazine, JISC Programme Manager Paola Marchionni has reviewed how some of the ways that JISC-funded digitisation projects have engaged their audiences, showing how digitisation projects have developed new ideas and learnt from previous mistakes to ensure that their digital resource is seen and used by a wide range of users.
There is a list of ten issues in particular which she feels have been addressed, including
- Knowing What to Do with Users’ Feedback
- Galvanising Users as Project Advocates
- Getting Users to Create Content
- ‘Listen to your users, but don’t be bullied by them’
OCR for the mass digitisation of textual materials
A workshop was held at the University of Bath on 24th September 2009, looking at some of the current issues in using Optical Character Recognition for digitisation, organised in the context of the EU Impact project.
Videos, slideshows, notes and questions from the day are now all available from the workshop webpages
Winners of JISC e-content Programme
Funding letters have now been largely signed and JISC can announce the winners of its e-content Programme. The call was divided into two strands, the first to allow institutions to develop their skills and strategies for digitising and delivering their digitised content, and the second to maximise the use and benefits of existing digitised content.
Projects are starting from autumn 2009 onwards and all will be finished by February 2011.
Strand A - Institutional Skills and Strategies
LIFE-SHARE (Lifecycle Strategies and Architecture for Regional E-content), University of Leeds
- The LIFE-SHARE project will address institutional and consortial strategies and infrastructure for the creation, curation and preservation of digital content. Led by the University of Leeds, it will also work with the University of York, University of Sheffield and JISC Digital Media.
RunCoCo, University of Oxford - (Conditional award)
- Building on the work of the Great War Archive project, this project will encourage the formation of Community Collection projects, whereby projects are built across and by a broader community (education and public sectors) rather than focussed on a sinlge host institution.
Look here! University for the Creative Arts - (Conditional)
- Headed by the Visual Arts Data Service, this project will address how the digital life-cycle for content in the arts can be simplfied and embedded in institutional practice.
Centre of Competence for Heritage digitisation in the North of England, University of Manchester
- This project will investigate the feasibility of establishing a Centre of Competence for Heritage Digitisation, based within the University of Manchester, promoting best practice in object-centred digitisation.
Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East, SOAS
- This project will see the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) establish a Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The Centre will develop a digital collection, curation, preservation and dissemination strategy for SOAS.
OCRPodium, Kings College London
- OCRPodium will trial an open source approach to Optical Character Recognition, using the OCRopus software and embed OCR activities within flexible, semi-automated digitisation workflows for text-based material.
Strand B - Maximising the use of digitised content
Visualising China, University of Bristol - (awaiting funding letter)
- The Visualising China project will build on the digitisation work by the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol and the 15,000 digital images which have been created, and 5,000 images available to search and browse with a further 7,000 having full meta-data, covering a date range of 1870 to 1950.
Mapping Crime beyond the John Johnson Collection, University of Oxford
- The Bodleian Library proposes to map between the crime material available through The John Johnson Collection: an Archive of Printed Ephemera and other online resources containing related material or source information.
Connected Histories, University of Sheffield - (conditional)
- Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.
Grass Portal, University of Sheffield
- Grasses are the fuel that feeds human civilization, and a major focus for international research as food security and natural ecosystems come under threat from rising populations and climate change. The GrassPortal will be a world-class ecological data facility for grasses and science investigating this area.
CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research), University of East London
- Led by the University of East London (UEL) CEDAR will further enhance and embed the East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) into three popular Theatre Studies programmes at Royal Holloway, Nottingham and Sheffield universities.
Winners of Islamic Studies funding for digitisation
JISC is happy to announce the two winners of its call for Islamic Studies Catalogue and Manuscript Digitisation, who are the Wellcome Library and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Wellcome Library will be digitising and cataloguing 500 Arabic-language manuscripts from their collection. They will be doing with assistance with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Egypt.
This project will also be creating software for managing descriptive metadata for non-European manuscripts - a much-needed tool for those working in this field
The second project is a joint venture between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and will be digitising around 10,000 records from their card catalogues of Islamic Studies manuscripts and making them available via a searchable interface.
These projects will be starting in September 2009, and due to finish in February 2011.
The Visual Archive: The Moving Image and Memory
The Visual Archive: The Moving Image and Memory is an international workshop taking place on 28- 29 May in Milton Keynes, and organsied by the Open University in partnership with the British Film Institute.
As the web site explains:
This workshop directs attention to the visual archive, particularly archives of moving images, and the role they play in the (re)production, organisation, and contestation of collective memory. These archives are currently experiencing a significant period of change and reassessment, stemming from the impact of digitisation and the challenges and possibilities this presents for their organisation and accessibility.
The workshop will also see the launch of the British Film Institute’s JISC-funded InView: Moving images in the public sphere digitisation project, which is digitising over 600 hours of material from a variety of broadcasters tracing how the key social, political and economic issues of our time have been represented, illustrated, and debated through moving image media forms.
This project is complementary to a previously JIS-funded digitisation project, Newsfilm Online, which has digitised over 3,000 hours of selected footage from the ITN/Reuters archives covering the 20th century.
Special collections aren’t just curios
There’s an interesting and well-illustrated (in the print version at least) article on the variety and strength on special collections in UK universities in the 7 May version of the Times Higher.
However, in focussing on the special collections as single curios, the article rather downplays the Importance that such collections can have within education.
What is one person’s eccentric oddity may actually form the spine of somebody else’s research. Moreover, put different special collections together and you might get some very interesting relationships building up, and a critical mass of primary source material to inform innovative and engaging teaching and research.
The Discmap project, managed by the University of Strathclyde, is looking precisely at these issues, studying the special collections within the UK’s universities and then developing priorities for digitisation. Its final report is due for publication in early Summer 2009, and should provide interesting food for thought and how future digitisation within the UK is taken forward.
Thanks to University of California Riverside for the image.