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The Digital Humanities Congress is a new conference which will be held in Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method […]

User engagement, both online and offline, is an important process for any project delivering successful web-based resources. Web usability is arguably part of that process, and we were keen to expose projects within the current JISC Content programme to the principles of user centred design early on in the planning of their online resources. Many […]

Last week, we asked for feedback on your experience of OCRing tabular data. Christy Henshaw, working on the JISC funded digitisation of the Medical Officers of Health reports, has summarised the responses received so far: I recently posted a request to digital library mailing lists, asking the community to share their experiences and knowledge about […]

If you have experience in dealing with OCR and tabular data, one of the current JISC-funded mass digitisation projects, the Medical Officer of Health reports, led by the Wellcome Library, would like to hear from you. Christy Henshaw, from the Wellcome Digital Library: For our Medical Officer of Health project, we will be digitising health […]

An excellent short video from Europeana on what linked open data is and why it is a good thing both for users and content providers. For more information on Europeana’s work on open data see their press release of 17 February.

JISC is advertising for a post of Programme Manager – e-Content: Digitisation. The post holder will be responsible for managing a range of different types of e-content projects taking place in universities and other organisations that are either digitising content or developing existing digital collections to make them more accessible, relevant and discoverable on the […]

JISC has issued 5 Invitations to Tender for Digital Infrastructure Reports. Bidders must have knowledge of the topic area and must be experienced in producing high quality reports. These are open Invitations to Tender and anyone may bid. 5 Invitations to Tender for Reports on: • Advantages of APIs • Embedded Licences: What, Why and […]

You can now keep up with the progress of the projects funded as part of the JISC Content programme 2011-2013 on the programme’s new Netvibes pages. Netvibes syndicates content from the projects’ blogs and brings them all in one place, so it makes it easier to have a general overview of activities. My top picks: […]

This week saw the launch of the JISC-funded 3D Sheffield metalwork collection. This rapid digitisation project was a partnership between Sheffield Hallam University, which brought their expertise in innovative 3D digitisation, and Museums Sheffield, which is delivering the 3D objects on their website. Highlights of the web site incude: – 200 beautiful 3D objects, browsable […]

For all the successes of digitisation, it’s still a long, slow route from scanner to published article (or even monograph). Your team can create a rich, engaging website, but it takes plenty of time for scholars to start to work with the new material. It slips slowly into their ideas and interpretations, perhaps helped, perhaps […]

Scots Words and Place Names, run at the University of Glasgow, engaged the Scottish public via a variety of channels (direct contact with schools, a website, Facebook, Twitter) to enrich understanding of the uses and meanings of words and place names in Scots. The final report, just published, has some interesting findings This crowdsourcing project […]

The Internet first strengthened then destroyed the idea of a canon of art history. Early Internet dreamers saw the possibility of the utopian virtual museum, drawing together all the world’s great masterpieces to present a coherent narrative of the history of art. But the very proliferation of images that appeared on the web demonstrated the […]

(Prompted by a tweet from Tim Hitchcock, this is a series of short blog posts on imaginary / future resources in the Digital Humanities) When charting the history of the west, churches, cathedrals and abbeys provide spectacular material evidence. Their art, architecture and archives not only formed notions of aesthetic beauty but are testament to […]

Two projects within the current JISC Content programme 2011-2013 have been recently picked up by BBC News. Observing the 1980s, based at the University of Sussex, will make available as Open Educational Resources (OER) written and oral testimonies from people from a range of backgrounds on what it was like to live in 1980s Britain. […]

JISC is delighted to announce that King’s College London has been awarded funding for a project on “WW1 Discovery: Content Prioritisation” This work will undertake essential primary research that will guide and underpin the wider JISC WW1 Discovery programme which aims to aggregate and deliver WW1 content by building an aggregation, API and discovery layer […]

Stanley Fish recently published a blog post in the NY Times with the grandiose title, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality. The article is engaging; it seems to sharpen the knife for the Digital Humanities but then decides not to stick it in (although that might be to follow) What strikes me about […]

After over four very happy years, I’m moving on from JISC to a new role in the Netherlands. It’s been a privilege to work with colleagues in one of the most innovative educational funding bodies in the world, and also with a broader community of researchers, librarians, teachers, archivists, policy wonks and web geeks. While […]

The OER projects in the JISC Content programme 2011-13 recently attended a workshop on “Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)”, organised by the Open Unviersity’s SCORE team. All projects focus on the digitization of primary material from special collections covering a variety of subjects, from fashion design to architectural drawings and microscopic rock slides. Each […]

One of the largest and strangest archives in the UK is the collection of the British Geological Survey. Its mammoth collection store, just outside Nottingham, holds thousands of fossils but also pallets and pallets of rocks samples, often taken as samples prior to oil drilling. JISC has recently funded the Survey to lead a nationwide […]