This workshop, funded by JISC, is taking place on 30th January 2009, at King’s College London. There is more information on the JISC website and you can book a place there too.
Researchers from all parts of the campus are long-used to collecting, structuring and presenting their data in databases, spreadsheets, webpages etc, using a range of widely available and generic tools. In recent years, however, advances in digitization technologies have led to the creation of much more complex data objects.
For example:
- Motion capture technologies now enable the creation of ‘motion sculptures’ that capture dance movements.
- Optical character recognition (OCR) enables the digitisation of ancient manuscripts, offering researchers the potential to study them collaboratively on-line.
- OCR also enables the digitisation of large corpuses of text with potential for new discoveries through text mining.
- Research using digital objects such as these presents new challenges, but also new opportunities for multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary collaboration.
This half-day workshop, part of the JISC e-Infrastructure Roadshow series, will highlight some of these opportunities and present some of the practical methods researchers can take for using/manipulating complex digital objects.
Coordinated by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, it will provide an interdisciplinary perspective illustrated by examples drawn mainly from the arts and humanities but also the biomedical sciences.
Speakers will include David Fergusson, Deputy Director, Training, Outreach and Education, the National e-Science Centre, who will give an introduction to national infrastructures that support the use of complex digital objects and Jens Jensen from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who will talk about the use of the National Grid Service for the arts and humanities.