Tag Archives: tools

The Tyranny of Distance Panel at DHA2014, Perth Australia 2014

Digital Humanities, visualisation, , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Humanities And The Tyranny of Distance for http://dha2014.org/ Wednesday 19 March, 2014, Hosted at University of Western Australia, Perth Australia

Slides

Talk 1 (virtual): No Panacea: How Can Virtual Research Environments Enhance Distance Research-Matt

After a recent report on virtual research environments (VREs) from the Joint Information Systems Council in the UK (JISC) found that, even after 6 years of funding and study by JISC, “the ‘emergent community of practice’ has failed to grow significantly beyond the pool of practitioners in direct receipt of JISC project funds,”[1] perhaps it is time to step back and consider whether VREs truly can be a useful addition to humanities research and, if so, under what circumstances.  This paper will discuss the areas in which scholars should expect VREs to assist them in distance research (access to the same tools, data, and workflows in a single environment) and the price they will need to pay for these advantages (either significant time and energy to develop their own environment or being satisfied with a pre-existing solution).  This paper will conclude that VREs can be an excellent tool for distance research, but one for which a significant price must be paid given the current state of existing VRE platforms.

Talk 2 (virtual): Collaborative writing in a distributed research consortium: requirements and possible solutions-Christof

This contribution reports on experiences made with collaborative writing in the DARIAH consortium (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, www.dariah.eu). DARIAH is a distributed research project involving numerous partners from 12 different European countries and in which tools supporting various collaborative writing and project coordination tasks have been used over a considerable period of time. Despite the fact that collaboration across geographical distance is essential for this and many other projects, the existence of conflicting requirements of scholarly collaborative writing processes make a generic solution very hard to come by. Among these requirements are real-time collaborative writing, flexible word-level commenting, footnote support, version control, access rights management, publishing options and open-source availability of the tool itself. Currently available technical solutions do not meet all of these requirements. Tools discussed in this contribution include Etherpad, Mediawiki/Confluence, GoogleDrive, Dropbox and WordPress. Finally, one promising solution will be discussed which is still in early stages of development, namely Penflip (www.penflip.com), a GitHub front-end for text composition.

Talk 3 (virtual): Recognizing Distance: On Multilingualism in Digital Infrastructures-Toma

Infrastructures are installations and services that function as “mediating interfaces” or “structures ‘in between’ that allow things, people and signs to travel across space by means of more or less standardized paths and protocols for conversion or translation.” [2] By definition, infrastructures are in the business of overcoming distance: they have always been seen as motors of change propelling society into a better and brighter future. Which is why it would be all too tempting — and all too easy — to approach the question of digital research infrastructures uncritically by embracing the master narratives of efficiency and progress without discussing the larger and more complex implications of institutionalizing networked research. A digital infrastructure is not only a tool that needs to be built: it is also a tool that needs to be understood. In this talk, I will address the challenge of multilingualism in research infrastructures evolving against the backdrop of global capitalism in its electronic mode, the so-called “eEmpire” [3] How can we make sure that digital infrastructures — not only the ones we are trying to build now, for ours are baby steps, but the future ones, the ones we hope to see built one day — do not turn from being power grids into grids of (hegemonic, monolingual, monocultural) power?

Talk 4 (in person): The 3D world is your stage-Erik

How can scholars collaborate in virtual environments in a manner similar to video-conferencing? Which conferencing and distributed modeling tools are particularly appropriate to research and collaboration in the spatial and artefactual humanities? This talk will briefly outline needs, issues and promising services and working prototypes.

Authors

Matthew Munson <mmunson@gcdh.de>

Matthew Munson is a researcher at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) in Göttingen, Germany.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Kansas and in Theology from Loyola College (now Loyola University) in Baltimore, Maryland, and a master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.  While a student at the University of Virginia, Matthew began working in the digital humanities center there, the Scholars’ Lab, and immediately became interested in the fascinating insights digital methods could give into ancient religious texts.  He received a Scholars’ Lab Digital Humanities Fellowship in 2009-2010 to explore the use of text-mining strategies to identify relationships between the Greek texts of St. Paul in the New Testament and the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament.  At the GCDH, Matthew works in the European project DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and coordinates the DARIAH work package concerning VREs on the German and European level and is also coordinating the development of the DARIAH international digital humanities summer school, planned for August 2014 in Göttingen.  His current research interests lie in the area of semantic drift and methods of calculating the change in the meanings of words from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

Christof Schöch <christof.schoech@uni-wuerzburg.de>

Christof Schöch is a researcher at the Chair for Digital Philology, University of Würzburg, Germany, working in the DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) project. He obtained his PhD from Kassel University & Paris-Sorbonne in 2008 with a study published as La Description double dans le roman des Lumières 1760-1800. His interests in research and teaching are French Literature (Enlightenment, contemporary novel, classical drama) as well as digital humanities (scholarly digital editions, quantitative text analysis, digital infrastructure).

Toma Tasovac <ttasovac@humanistika.org>

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Centre for Digital Humanities. He has degrees in Slavic Language and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton. He works on complex architectures in electronic lexicography, digital editions, and integration of digital libraries and language resources. He is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Erik Champion <nzerik@gmail.com>

A Professor of Cultural Visualisation at Curtin University, Erik was previously Project Leader of DIGHUMLAB Denmark, and co-Leader of the Research and Public Engagement part of DARIAH. His research is primarily in virtual heritage, serious games, and 3D applications in the Digital Humanities. He has postgraduate degrees in Architecture, Philosophy, and Engineering (Geomatics). He has written Playing With the Past, edited Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism (a free download at ETC Press), and is writing Critical Gaming in the Digital Humanities.

[1] Miller, Paul, “JISC VRE Programme: Impact Study,” March 2010:http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/JISC_UK/J100315M.pdf, p. 21.

[2] Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (2010), ‘Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures’, in Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (eds.), Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 11.

[3] Raley, R. (2004). eEmpires. Cultural Critique 57, 132.

book proposal “Cultural Heritage Creatives Tools and Archives” now being reviewed by publisher

Digital Humanities, virtual heritage, , ,

Summary of proposal:

Our aim is to provide a single point of entry into the world of leading cultural heritage infrastructures and associated tools in Europe. As far as we know there is no easily accessible edited book of this nature that both focuses on key research projects and answers the major questions of the three editors.

The countries represented include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, United Kingdom, and related chapters from Canada and Australia. We are particularly pleased to include two proposed chapters from Professor Julian Richards of York University (Figure 1), and Professor Sean Ross, Dean of the iSchool, University of Toronto. They were the invited speakers, and have decades of experience in this field.

Figure 1: Invited Talk, Julian Richards, York University.

DIGHUMLAB Denmark, and the Digital Curation Unit Athens, ran a two-day workshop at the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, June 26-27, 2013 (Figures 1-4). There were approximately two-dozen presentations from around a dozen research organisations and European infrastructures, two invited international speakers (Professor Seamus Ross and Professor Julian Richards), and a final panel, which explored how research infrastructures dealing in digital cultural heritage could work more closely together. Various groups and future projects were kick-started from this workshop, including the ERCG (Europeana Researchers Coordination Group), which was set up to align the strategies of research infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Figure 2).


Figure 2: Final Panel: Research infrastructures policy panel

Central topics of the workshop were

  • Presentation of digital heritage tools and infrastructures (database, knowledge representation, analysis).
  • GIS, 3D graphic reconstruction, high-end imaging.
  • Ontology related to archives and database storage for material and visual culture, etc. and how best to share data and tools across European countries and partners.
  • Database and infrastructure support for fieldwork (cf. issues of data collecting and representation, excavation and survey data management, recording “information at the trowel’s edge” to coin Ian Hodder, how to best process survey and long series datasets etc.).
  • Discussion on further collaboration and how to influence EU policy in digital heritage-cultural heritage matters.

The mandate of the workshop was as follows:
“The workshop is open to all but we in particular invite participants drawn in the first instance from the DARIAH, ARIADNE, CENDARI and NeDiMAH and other EU cultural heritage networks. We envisage it will foster the growth of a community of practice in the field of digital heritage and digital humanities, leading to closer cooperation between participants and helping attendees develop tools and methods that can be used by the wider community.”

Figure 3: The Venue, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.

We had a very strong turnout of participants, including keynote presentations by Prof. Seamus Ross, the University of Toronto iSchool’s Dean and Prof. Julian Richards, Professor at York University and Director of the Archaeology Data Service, and introducing innovative work from institutions and projects including: the Serious Games Interactive, the National Museum of Copenhagen, the Europeana Cloud project, DARIAH, DASISH, LARM, EHRI, ARIADNE, V-must (Virtual Museum Transnational Network), NEDIMAH, the Digital Curation Unit-Athena R.C., the Digital Repository of Ireland, and the Gunnerus Library in Trondheim (previously library of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters – DKNVS). We received about a dozen pre-workshop papers, and we are impressed with the quality and range of the work presented.

On this basis, we propose turning some of these papers into an edited volume, organized around the following themes:

  • Scholarly information practices in cultural heritage.
  • Requirements for digital tools and services.
  • Corpora and digital collections.
  • Digital infrastructures, architecture and tools.
  • Digital cultural heritage, public communication and user experience, and
  • Policy issues in cultural heritage infrastructure research and development.

Digital Humanities Tools and other resources

Digital Humanities, , ,

Sorry, should also add this syllabus

ALLC small grants award for “Cultural Heritage, Creative Tools and Archives” workshop

Conference, Digital Humanities, virtual heritage, , , , , , ,

Email from today:

Dear Erik,

We are happy to inform you that EADH (formerly ALLC) has decided to grant your proposal for the workshop Cultural Heritage, Creative Tools and Archives.

In a nutshell:

We proposed a 2 day workshop involving speakers from Denmark and Greece and other European countries; participants will be drawn in the first instance from DARIAH, ARIADNE and NeDiMAH, with the addition of leading digital academics from outside these projects. We envisage that the workshop will lead to closer cooperation between members and help attendees develop tools and methods that can be used by the wider community, to address a communication gap in 3Drelated Digital Humanities at a European level. This event will be case-study based, participatory in approach, and workshop-based rather than lecturer-driven. Sessions will be conducted with support from key participants / moderators.

This will be an introductory workshop, suitable for both recently started and experienced digital scholars, and aiming to introduce participants to the main tools, techniques, and resources for digital humanities in the field of digital heritage, tools and archives. Workshop methodology and enabling resources will be standardized so that it can be taught by a number of different scholars, and would last 2 days, with the possibility of a social event the night before (that would be funded by us).

Time of completion: 16-17, 23-24, or 27-28 May 2013.

Venue: Denmark, Copenhagen or Aarhus.

 

What Can We Do With Interactive Movie Making?

Conference, , ,

What are the parameters of interactive film? There has been some interesting discussion on storytelling versus authorial control of the camera at 3rd person cinema. There is now also the ability to create your own trails in video via interactive video object animation. Not to mention the crowd-pleasing opportunity to place your own face over video characters along with your voice.