Digital Humanities Lunchtime Briefings

Week 5 of Trinity Term 2012

These introductory briefings are for scholars in the humanities who want to know more about the opportunities to use advanced digital technologies for research. They will combine broad introductions to different kinds of technology with illustrations from humanities projects that have used them.

The briefings will be held from 1 to 3 pm in the Lecture Hall, Taylor Institution, St Giles. Sandwiches will be available from 1 pm. There will be short presentations from 1.15 to 2, followed by discussion.

Staff and research students are all welcome. Please email dhwebmaster@oerc.ox.ac.uk by the end of Wednesday 16 May to book your place.

Please note: Due to the high level of interest, we have moved the venue to the Lecture Hall. This change of venue will allow us to include everyone who has registered their interest in these briefings by joining the waiting lists, or by emailing the dhwebmaster account.

Monday 21 May: Digital editions

Digital technologies not only make the production of scholarly editions much easier, but also have the potential to transform them through new techniques and resources, notably linking and multimedia.

  • Mark Philp (Politics), ‘Diary as data: The case of William Godwin’
  • Giles Bergel (English), ‘The collaborative digitisation of an early printed ballad: image, text and tradition’
  • James Cummings (OUCS), ‘Tools and technologies for digital editions’

Tuesday 22 May: Large datasets

Research in the humanities can now draw on a vastly increased quantity of digital data resources: these enable new research questions to be asked, as well as new answers to old questions, but require new kinds of technology to take advantage of them.

  • Martin Wynne (OeRC) ‘What does “Big Data” mean in the humanities?’
  • Sebastian Rahtz (OUCS), ‘Integrating disparate resources using a linked data approach’
  • Glenn Roe (OeRC/Modern Languages), ‘Data mining applications for literary research’

Wednesday 23 May: Sound

Non-textual digital media are increasingly important in the humanities. Digital sound studies have become a significant part of research in music and linguistics, and have potential for other areas such as literature and cross-modal arts.

  • John Coleman (Phonetics), ‘Speech: the beating heart of language’
  • Duncan Williams (Music), ‘Searching for meaning in musicological analyses of “in-field” recordings’
  • Dave De Roure (OeRC), ‘Analysis of music on the scale of the Web’

Thursday 24 May: Images

Images have become a major subject for digital work in the humanities, both as an object of study, through capture, analysis, retrieval and linking, and as a tool for study: technologies of visualization are indispensible for the processing of very large amounts of data.

  • Segolene Tarte (OeRC) and Jacob Dahl (Oriental Studies), ‘Images and script decipherment: the interplay of digitization and interpretation’
  • Min Chen (OeRC), ‘What is visualization really for?’