Digitised History: the impact of digitisation on research into 18th and 19th Century Britain
20 July 2010, 10am-4pm
British Library Conference Centre, Euston Road, London
• Explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers
• Consider the effect that this has had on research and researchers
• Question the implied changes to research methodologies
Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. This conference will debate current limitations of this digitisation as well as opportunities for future development.
The conference is being organised jointly by the British Library and JISC. Speakers will include Professor Laurel Brake, Professor Tim Hitchcock, Professor Robert Shoemaker, Professor Miles Taylor and Dr James Mussell.
For more information and to book tickets visit the Institute of Historical Research’s website. Many thanks to the Institute for hosting the online registration form.
£35.00 for full registration
£25.00 student concession
European Digital Libraries Funding Opportunities
The European Community recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme.
30 million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand which aims to improve accessibility, use and preservation of Europe’s rich and diverse cultural and scientific heritage.
The call is broken up into six objectives, three focussing on cultural content and Europeana. The other three focus on ‘scientific’ information and the wider issues surrounding digital libraries.
Three objectives relate to Europeana:
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Coordinating Europeana
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Enhancing/Aggregating content in European
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Digitising content for Europeana
Three more objectives relate to further actions in the wider area of digital libraries:
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Access to European Rights
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Information / Registry of Orphan WorksOpen access to scientific information
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Statistics on cultural heritage digitisation activities
For those wanting further details on the call, I have produced a report outlining the details of the call.
European Conference on Digital Libraries – Call for Papers
14th European Conference on Digital Libraries - Call for Papers
September 6-10, 2010
Glasgow, UK
Overview
The European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) is the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Digital Libraries and Mobility
- Digital Library Architectures
- Digital Library Infrastructure
- Digital Preservation and Curation
- Information Mining in Digital Libraries
- Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries
- Interoperability of Digital Library Systems and Services
- Knowledge Organisation Systems
- Metadata Standards and Protocols in Digital Library Systems
- Multilinguality in Digital Libraries
- Multimedia Digital Libraries
- Personal Information Management and Personal Digital Libraries
- Personalisation in Digital Library Systems and Settings
- Policies for Digital Library systems
- Social Networking, Web 2.0 and Collaborative Interfaces in Digital LibrariesUser Interfaces for Digital Libraries
- User Studies for and Evaluation of Digital Library Systems and Applications
- Visualisation in Digital Libraries
Submissions
All contributions must be written in English. They must follow the formatting guidelines of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and must be submitted via the conference submission system.
Further information
For further information, please visit the conference web site at http://www.ecdl2010.org/ or email info@ecdl2010.org.
Archiving for the Future Conference
Archiving for the Future: using archives to enhance learning and teaching in drama and theatre studies
Event Description:
This event is being organised in conjunction with the Institute for Performing Arts Development at the University of East London and the CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research) project: a unique approach to clustering and enhancing digital theatre archives through a collaboration between UEL, Royal Holloway, Sheffield and Nottingham universities as well as Kings College, London.
The day will consist of a series of presentations of good practice in using digital archives with undergraduate and postgraduate students.
It will include an opportunity for delegates to experiment and reflect on the use of archives for their own practice.
The target audience for the event is: drama/theatre studies lecturers, researchers, theatre historians, digital and web-practitioners, archivists, library and learning support service staff.
Topics covered will include:
- The use of the East London Theatre Archive for undergraduate theatre students;
- The connection between archives and web-based platforms for learning;
- Making archives ‘living’ through the user-interface.
The event aims to provide an opportunity for the sharing of teaching pedagogies and an open forum for the discussion of methodological and other concerns.
More details are available from the event Programme
The Past’s Digital Presence Conference
A Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University February 19th and 20th, 2010
Graduate students from around the globe will address how databases and other digital technologies are making an impact on our research in the humanities during this interdisciplinary symposium.
- How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities?
- If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media?
- What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete?
- What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use?
- What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them?
- Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked?
Keynote Speaker
Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
Colloquium Speaker
Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor, University of Chicago
Closing Roundtable
Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University
Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing, King’s College London
George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
REGISTER NOW: Registration for this conference is now available online.
Advanced registration is required, however, there is no registration fee for university affiliates. The deadline for registration is February 5th, 2010.**
For more information and conference program, please visit our website or email us at: pdp@yale.edu
Also join our Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter.
Digital Futures of Special Collections – Workshop
Building on the work of the Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an e-Repository (CHARTER) project, the university of Exeter Special Collections are holding a free, one day workshop examining the futures of special colections.
Digital Futures of Special Collections
Workshop Day
16th March 2010
A workshop day aimed at curators and collection managers looking at the practical and strategic issues of heritage collections and digitisation.An opportunity to share good practice, problems and solutions and to build partnerships within the research library community.
The focus will be on the strategic and practical but not technical.
Included in the programme:
10:30am Arrival/Registration
11am – 11:50am Welcome; Academic Perspectives: creating digital collections online – a Dspace case b study. (John Plunkett, Department of English; Jessica Gardner, Assistant Director, Library and Research Support)
11:50am – 1pm What are we all doing and Why?
Collaborative group work
1pm – 2pm Lunch
2pm – 2:45pm Ensuring e-Content doesn’t mean Ephemeral Content: Learning the lessons from the JISC digitisation programme (Ben Showers, JISC Programme Manager)
3pm – 3:45pm Panel discussion with Susan Worrall (University of Birmingham), Dorothy Johnston (University of Nottingham), Inderbir Bhullar (Women’s Library)
Christine Faunch (University of Exeter)
3:45pm – 4pm Workshop round-up
4pm – 5pm Reception (all welcome) launching Exeter’s Digital Collections online and Research Commons
There is no charge to attend this workshop day; participants should be ready to discuss relevant issues that are most important to their organisation and the sector.
Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Booking Details:
To book a place please email: libspc@exeter.ac.uk or phone 01392 263879/262097
Challenging our understanding of Digitisation
At the forthcoming Developer Happiness Days one of the sessions planned to take place will be exploring a DIY digitisation workflow:
Taking you from the act of scanning images and objects, learning how to process and edit them with software like ocrupus, blender and OpenCV, storing and manipulating them online and finally, through to printing their digital forms out, mashed together with comments, citations, automatic qr codes and even other digital objects!
While this session is not intended to showcase the same results one would expect to find on large scale institutional and heritage digitisation projects, the session might just force a consideration of digitisation practices and trigger off some interesting questions and dialogue.
So, if this confrontation with digitisation sounds interesting then there is an opportunity for attendance at this session by project members from JISC digitisation and eContent projects.
Spaces will be limited, so please contact me directly if you wish to register your interest: b.showers@jisc.ac.uk.
And to find out a little more about this session you can read Ben O’Steen’s blog and his ideas for the “The Secret Life of the Book” session at the event.
And further information about the Dev8d programme is available on the Developer Happiness website
#dev8d
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.
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
British Cartoon Archive Workshop
The British Cartoon Archive recently ran a workshop which aimed at allowing this important resource to increase both its functionality and embed the resource further within teaching and research.
The final report from the workshop is now available.
Further information about the workshop and the Cartoon archive can be found on the Workshop Website