DHOxSS Archive

This page acts as an archive page and history for previous Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer Schools. It also includes the years 2008 to 2010, when the TEI Summer School served as the precursor to the Digital Humanities Summer School.

History of DHOxSS

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School is a fairly long one.  In July 1997 the Oxford University Computing Services ran a TEI Summer School. This taught the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative.  A photo of this first summer school is below:

The TEI Summer Schools were organised and run primarily by Lou Burnard, who continued to run them, with the assistance of Sebastian Rahtz for many years.  If we have a loose definition of 'Summer' ranging from February to November, then the TEI Summer Schools continued annually from 1997 until they became the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School in 2011.  The teaching was primarily done by Lou Burnard, Sebastian Rahtz, and James Cummings and occasionally they would experiment with the structure of the summer school attempting other pedagogical methods. In 2008 they decided to experiment by appending a 2-day workshop on XSLT to that year's 3-day TEI Summer School.  This was successful but all agreed that there needed to be more time devoted to the teaching of what to do with this XML once you had created it.  In 2009 they experimented with embedding it more through the TEI Workshop, which worked to some degree but didn't do either subject justice.

For 2010 James Cummings suggested that students be offered a choice of two afternoon workshops in parallel (or a surgery consultation on their encoding if they didn't want to attend either workshop). This was fairly successful (though most people didn't attend the encoding surgeries), and based on the success of this James suggested that for 2011 they run two parallel streams throughout the week.  This would not be 2 set workshops, but each slot having two choices that people could choose from (much like a conference). The thought was still that it would be difficult to cater for everyone's desire and that giving them the flexibility to pick and choose between more or less technical options would be a good approach.  2011 was also the first year we started officially referring to it as a "Digital Humanities Summer School" as opposed to a "TEI Summer School" and was jointly organised by Sebastian Rahtz and James Cummings.

For 2012 the summer school renamed itself the Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Summer School.  (That is, the summer school of the Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Network at the University of Oxford.)  In 2012, with James Cummings now as Director, it evolved once more into the format very similar to its current one -- plenary or extra-curricular lectures followed by parallel week-long workshops. This brought it into a similar format to other DH training initiatives internationally and finally gave the opportunity for in-depth teaching for a single workshop across a whole week.  

In 2012 and 2013 James expanded the organisational committee outside of those running the workshops and invited stakeholders from across the university to contribute more directly to its running. Thanks to the vision and contribution of those committee members the DHOxSS went on to greater and greater success. In 2013 the DHOxSS shifted to having the additional (non-workshop) lectures in parallel in the mornings in order to give more opportunities for extra-curricular lectures. This year also saw an increase from 4 to 5 workshops and corresponding growth in participant numbers. In 2014 there were again 5 workshops and no major structural changes. In 2015 the organisational committee decided to accept a total of 8 workshops which swelled the size of DHOxSS significantly.  Also in 2015 Pip Willcox joined James Cummings at co-director of DHOxSS partly because of this expansion in its size but also for a greater separation of roles and additional perspectives. In 2016 the DHOxSS continued on in its current model but increased the number of workshops relying solely on participants bringing their own laptops. In 2018, Pip Willcox was the director of the Summer School, while in 2019 this role was filled by Dave De Roure.

Until 2016 administrative support for the Summer School was provided by the Events Team in IT Services, pro bono, for which we are eternally indebted. From DHOxSS 2017 the administration moved to the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Summer School was organised by a smaller executive committee, taking advice from a larger advisory board.

DHOxSS 2016

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2016 ran from 4-8 July 2016.  

  • Registration Fees: Student: £485; Oxford: £485; Academic/NFP: £595; Corporate: £695;
  • Students: The 166 students were broken down as: Academic/Education/NFP: 51.20% Student: 25.30% Invitation Only: 13.85% Staff or Student of the University of Oxford: 8.43% Commercial: 1.20%
  • Speakers: 76 Speakers: 42 were from University of Oxford

DHOxSS 2015

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2015 ran from 20-24 July 2015. 

  • Registration Fees: Student: £485; Oxford: £485; Academic/NFP: £590; Corporate: £695
  • Students: The 163 students were broken down as: Student: 32.52%; Oxford: 9.82%; Standard: 56.44%; Corporate: 1.23%. 
  • Speakers: 83 Speakers: 54 were from University of Oxford

DHOxSS 2014

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2014 ran from 14 -18 July 2014. 

  • Registration Fees: Student: £475; Oxford: £475; Academic/NFP: £575; Corporate: £675
  • Students: The 109 students were broken down as: Student: 28.44%; Oxford: 10.10%; Standard: 59.63%; Corporate: 1.83%
  • Speakers: 58 Speakers: 41 were from University of Oxford

DHOxSS 2013

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2013 ran from 8-12 July 2013. 

  • Registration Fees: Student: £475; Oxford: £475; Academic/NFP: £575; Corporate: £675
  • Students: 88 students were broken down as: Student: 28.74%; Oxford: 11.49%; Standard: 57.47%; Corporate: 2.30%
  • Speakers: 59 Speakers: 38 were from University of Oxford

DHOxSS 2012

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2012 ran from 2 - 6 July 2012. 

  • Registration Fees: Student: £400; Oxford: £450; Academic/NFP: £500; Corporate: £600
  • Students: 66 students
  • Speakers: 34 Speakers: 28 were from University of Oxford

DHOxSS 2011

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2011 ran from 25-29 July 2011. 

  • Registration Fees: Student: £350; Oxford: £400; Academic/NFP: £500; Corporate: £600 (2 day and 1 day rates were also available)
  • Students: 53 students
  • Speakers: 27 Speakers: 22 were from University of Oxford

TEI Summer School 2010

This TEI Summer School ran from 12-14 July 2010 but included parallel workshops on publishing and interrogating your TEI data. It was from this year that we really started thinking of it as a broader DH summer school rather than one particularly on TEI. 

  • Students: 32 students
  • Speakers: 13 Speakers: 7 were from University of Oxford

TEI Summer School 2009

This TEI Summer School ran from 20-24 July 2009. This included some sessions on publishing and interrogating your TEI data but was still mostly TEI focussed. 

  • Students: 26 students
  • Speakers: 7 Speakers: 5 were from University of Oxford

TEI Summer School 2008 

This TEI Summer School ran from the 21-23 July 2008. This was 3 days of solid TEI teaching, followed by a separate workshop, 24-25 July 2008 on XSLT.  People could register for either or both.  

  • Students: 25 students
  • Speakers: 4 Speakers: 3 were from University of Oxford