Earlier this month, JISC supported a workshop on the University of Nottingham on the development of gazetteers – historic dictionaries of place names (and other geographical information) and their co-ordinates or other appropriate reference. Plenty of work is being done throughout the UK on research on place names, and many projects are keen to exploit […]
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FREE 2 day workshops to be held in (follow links for registration) • Belfast, 14 September 2010 – 15 September 2010 • Glasgow, 7th October 2010 – 8th October 2010 • London, 12th October 2010 – 13th October 2010 • Manchester, 28th October 2010 – 29th October 2010 • London, 16th November 2010 – 17th […]
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Thoughts on CyberScience conference
Last week saw the Citizen Cyberscience event at King’s College London, and it featured plenty of ambitious scientific research projects making extensive use of the enthusiasms and knowledge of an international public. Projects on show included Einstein @home, which used volunteer’s PCs to detect various astronomical phenomenoa, and herberia @home, a distributed project to classify […]
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Falkland Islands Penguin
A Rockhopper penguin, taken on British expedition to the Falkland Islands in 1936 The image is available from the Freeze Frame website, published by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge
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Problems of Marriage and Sex, 1937
“As the Headmaster came into lunch, he slipped into my side-pocket a copy of the ‘New Era’ dealing with problems of Marriage and Sex. Why? A nice gesture of friendliness, anyway.” The above is a transcribed excerpt from a teacher’s diary from Keswick, Cumbria in 1937, the typescript of which is below. It is part […]
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Kennedy arm-wrestling Khrushchev
28 Oct: Khrushchev promised that the Soviet bases on Cuba, that sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis would be removed. The bases had been the subject of a tense standoff between the Soviet Union and the USA. Cartoon from the Daily Mail, 29th October 1962. By Leslie Gilbert Illingworth. Image and caption from the British Cartoon […]
The web interface http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/ which has recently been set up to provide a more user friendly way of navigating the content that JISC funding has helped made available to the HE and FE communities. The site is not aiming to give item level access to each collection, i.e. it is not a federated search in […]
One of the most interesting partnerships in the JISC Islamic Studies strand is that between the Wellcome Trust, King’s College London, and Egypt’s Biblioteca Alexandrina. The Wellcome Trust, as part of its own digitisation programme, is digitising 500 manuscripts from its extensive collection. King’s College London is developing a cataloguing tool which will allow for […]
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Different Forms of Crowdsourcing
The British Museum’s ‘Wikipedian-in-Residence’, Liam Wyatt, recently gave a talk to JISC on some of the work that the British Museum and Wikipedia were doing together. In particular, Liam focussed on the Hoxne Challenge, a one-day event organised at the British Museum at the end of June 2010. Rather than the usual model of building […]
London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical […]
The Wellcome Library has launched a new blog dedicated to JPEG 2000. The blog charts our progress in determining what type of JPEG 2000 we will use, how we use it, and how it impacts on the rest of the Digital Library infrastructure. The blog is also fed to our new Twitter account, Wellcome Digital, […]
Forwarded by John Unsworth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has just launched a new digitization program, AccessTEI. This program allows member institutions to outsource the transcription and basic structural encoding of source material (whether in print or manuscript, in any language, any sized job), at bulk prices with Apex Covantage, a […]
A review of one of the JISC digitisation projects (the John Johnson collection of ephemera from the Bodleian Library at Oxford) made it onto Radio 4 on Saturday 12th June. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sn68v/Saturday_Review_12_06_2010/ (from 21.27 mins to 30.30 – the recording will be available until 19th June) It was interesting to hear the comments from an audience […]
Everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were too afraid to ask event – Monday 7th June, Brettenham House, London Liam Wyatt is Vice President of Wikimedia Australia and a historian. He has recently been appointed as the first “volunteer Wikipedian in residence” at the British Museum – the first residency of its kind […]
The annual Museums and the Web conference throws up some good examples of best and innovative practice in developing cultural heritage websites It’s well worth having a look at the list of winners at http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/congratulations_mw2010_best_web_winners
The JISC 13/09 call for Community Content was aimed at getting digital projects within universities to work with extra mural communities. The five winning projects from Strand I (focussing on rapid innovation for existing resources) have now been announced. Digitizing data for disparate communities : Naval history and climate science, Dr Chris Lintott, University of […]
The inclusion of another 1m pages on the BL Historic Newspapers website takes the total number of pages of 19th Century Newspapers available online to over 3 million 22 new titles cover a range of both regional and metropolitan publications including the Cheshire Observer, the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Isle of Man Times and the […]
Mining a Year of Speech is one of the projects in the Digging into Data Programme. Its aim is to transcribe and then analyse a huge corpus of spoken language, using the massive quantity of the corpus to ask questions about the nature of speech and language A launch event was held last week, involving […]
JISC recently issues a call for studies to analyse the benefit and impact of digital resources. Simon Tanner (King’s Digital Consultancy Services, King’s College London) and Pete Dalton (Evidence Base, University of Central Birmingham) have won the call, and are now starting the four month project, sifting through a mess of extant evidence and also […]
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 […]