Posters 2016

DHOxSS 2016 will feature a short poster session as part of the Welcome Reception at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

 

Event Details

Date and Time: Monday 4 July 2016, 19:00.

Venue: Oxford University Museum of Natural History as part of the Welcome Reception

 

Deadline for submission: The deadline was 17:00 BST (GMT+1), 18 April 2016 and the poster session is now full. The initial proposers were notified on 29 April 2016.

 

Eligibility

Only people attending DHOxSS, speaking at DHOxSS, or who are members of the University of Oxford may present posters at DHOxSS.

Submitting a Poster Proposal

The poster session is now full. The submission form asked for:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Affiliation
  • Type of proposal (whether you are a speaker, have already registered, etc.)
  • Abstract (maximum 250 words) on why it would be useful for DHOxSS participants to see your poster

Producing and printing posters

Delegates whose poster proposals are accepted are responsible for producing and printing their own poster. However, some poster printing may be able to be arranged in Oxford by the events team for an additional fee. Email events@it.ox.ac.uk for more information.

 

The recommended poster size is A1 Portrait (841 x 594 mm  or 33.1 x 23.4 inches)

 

Poster boards and velcro will be provided. There will not be tables nor access to power at the poster boards.

 

Delegates with posters should arrive at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in good time (i.e. from 6.30 pm) to display your poster before the 7pm start.

 

Abstracts

A.Avgousti, R.Georgiou, A. Nikolaidou, E. Zapiti, N. Bakirtzis (The Cyprus Institute)

OpenNumisma: A Software Platform For Managing Digital Heritage Numismatic Collections With a Particular Focus on Reflectance Transformation Imaging.

 

The proposed poster presents digital heritage research related to OpenNumisma; an open source web-based platform focused on digital heritage numismatic collections. The project provides an innovative merge of digital imaging and data management systems that offer great new opportunities for research and the dissemination of knowledge. A key feature of this platform is the application of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a computational photographic method that offers tremendous image analysis possibilities for numismatic research. OpenNumisma data can produce Linked Data; the RDF produces a SPARQL endpoint using PHP,ARC2 libraries and is based on CIDOC-CRM Conceptual Reference Model ontology of exchange heterogeneous cultural heritage information.

RTI is a computational photographic method that digitally captures color and surface texture data to produce a dynamic file that allows the user to virtually illuminate, in high analysis, every detail of the photographed object. Furthermore, the enhancing functions of RTI can reveal hidden surface details that are not disclosed under direct empirical examination. 

The poster will explicate the platforms’ capabilities in the digitally interactive exploration of coins’ collections, discover embossed inscriptions set in the context of a comprehensive digital library that is designed to disseminate knowledge on the history and culture of ancient and medieval. Designed to be used by non-technical or IT experts, OpenNumisma interactive functions and applications are based on a friendly user interface. The first successful implementation of OpenNomisma in the online coinage collection of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation.

 

Arno Bosse (Faculty of History, University of Oxford)

Our poster showcases Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO], the union catalogue at the heart of the Mellon-funded ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ project. It explains the work being conducted with early modern correspondence and the networks and themes involved in these epistolary exchanges, and suggests how in the course of their own research early career scholars can contribute using the digital tools and standards developed by EMLO. 

 

Cultures of Knowledge [CofK] employs hourly paid Digital Fellows to help prepare metadata for upload to EMLO. Predominantly doctoral students with a profound interest the Digital Humanities, people networks, and/or correspondence, in previous years many of these Digital Fellows have attended the DHOxSS. We would like to spread the word to this year’s delegates about the various possibilities of involvement with EMLO and the new European networking project, the COST-funded project ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’. Beyond the (limited) financial remuneration on offer, the benefits of involvement with EMLO include a presence on the CofK website and the opportunity to cite work undertaken for the project — both the scholarly and digital humanities aspects — on a c.v. Thus far, we have found large numbers of UK-based and international doctoral students and early career researchers wish to be involved.

 

Jonas Bozenhard (University of Tübingen)

Low-Tech Digital Humanities

 

Digital Humanities change the face of various academic disciplines. In literary studies, they pave the way for a new approach of surveying literature by supplying apt methods to investigate a large amount of texts. These computational devices make it possible to look beyond the canon and to turn towards “the great unread” (Cohen 1999, 23). In this respect, Humanities Computing possess a firmly egalitarian alignment as they attend to “the other 99.5 percent“ (Moretti 2013, 66) disregarded by traditional literary criticism. In contrast, conducting humanities research digitally is highly exclusive due to deficient accessibility to requisite technical equipment. Related to this circumstance, practically no student of Modern Languages uses digital methods for its studies.

In my project, I pose the following question: Is it possible to do humanities digitally without high-performance computing, inconceivably huge corpora or the latest software, but only with technical equipment available in every western household (for example an ordinary calculator, common word processors and spreadsheet software like Microsoft Word or Excel)? In this context, I developed some digital instruments and representations applicable with simple technical resources and basic mathematics, but nevertheless delivering valuable data for the analysis and interpretation of texts (for example a representation that visualises the temporal story progress of dramatic texts). These practices may be the first steps towards something I called „Low-Tech Digital Humanities“. But why do we need something like that? Because Low-Tech Digital Humanities widen the scope of potential users of digital methods and tools within the humanities, especially amongst students.

 

Jeffrey Cobbold (Berklee College of Music) 

Becoming a Digital Humanist: An Autobiographical Nonlinear Digital Story

This forthcoming six episode digital story demonstrates the power and importance of autobiography. It tells the story of my educational journey from Princeton Theological Seminary to Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. Within the story I explore the themes of race, tradition, individuality and my desired place in the academic area of the digital humanities. Through experimental music, conceptual art and basic documentation viewers are invited to decipher my personal sense of becoming and consider their own sense of self-actualization.

Interpretation and exploration of this digital story are up to viewers, as they are encouraged to watch all six episodes in any order they would like to, doing this numerous times to discover nuances and connections within my journey. Viewers are asked to consider the following questions in conjunction with this digital story:

  • What do you interpret about my life or personality from watching this digital story?
  • What aspects of my story, if any at all, resemble your own story as you strive toward becoming your most authentic self?
  • Would you share some or all of my digital story with others, especially persons in the process of working towards a particular type of self-actualization? Why or why not?

I believe my project poster is a unique symbol of the digital humanities as it explores concerns within the humanities using an innovative digital story format. It is also a reminder to humanists of all kinds that biography and autobiography are necessary tools within humanities research and that their digital versions can positively assist the contemporary general public with the deconstruction of life’s cultural elements.  

At Berklee’s Valencia campus, I will continue this process during the 2016 - 2017 academic year within my Post-Master’s Graduate Fellowship for Diversity & Inclusion. I will be working within the Student Affairs Office, assisting programing on gender equality, interculturality, analysis of relational micro-aggressions amongst other pertinent topics related to diversity and inclusion. I will continue my artistic research on autobiography and digital storytelling, honing them as dynamic tools for navigating issues of diversity and inclusion. This artistic research will be in effort to design and teach a new course for Berklee Valencia students, which will help them analyze their converging artistic timelines and personal stories as they exist within Berklee’s Diversity & Inclusion initiative. This course will assist students in claiming their various forms of self-actualization and approach musical collaborations within the Berklee Valencia community with deeper understanding of each other’s similarities and differences. 

Lia Costiner (Faculty of History, University of Oxford)

This poster introduces a large scale Digital Humanities project, the 'Venice Time Machine,' showcases the platform created for its implementation, as well as displays a sample use of this tool to build visualisations and answer specific historical questions. The 'Venice Time Machine' spearheaded by the Digital Humanities Lab of EPFL, Lausanne aims to build 'a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years.' The first step in this process is to digitise the records of the Venetian State Archive and open access to these via a custom-built platform (the DH Digital Canvas) allowing for annotations, creation of links and performance of complex searches.

 

The poster displays the results of a group project using these new digitisation and data analysis tools. Drawing on vast historical records of political office, property ownership and financial transactions, the project digitally reconstructs and visualises patrician power networks and commercial activity during a single year in Venetian history, 1740 

 

Alice Crawford (University of St Andrews Library)

Developing Photopoetry is a collaborative Digital Humanities project from the Library, the School of English and the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.  

Based on an idea from Professor Robert Crawford in the School of English, and with a detailed commentary by Dr Michael Nott who has recently completed his PhD on this topic, the project’s website brings together digital editions of more than 60 photographically illustrated poetry books published between 1856 and 1921, and documents interactions between poets and photographers from Britain and America over more than half a century.

 

Staff from the Library’s Digital Humanities team were responsible for scanning the (out of copyright) books and loading them to the St Andrews Digital Collections portal where they can be viewed using the portal’s turn-the-page reader.  Callum Kenny from the School of Computer Science created the website, and incorporated the digital books into sympathetically designed webpages. Using linked data he also made it possible for search queries to trigger multiple linkages, for connections to be made, for example, to other works by each photographer and poet, to biographies of the creative artists, to institutions or sites where the photographers’ collections are held, and to information about the photographic media used.

 

The poster would demonstrate the effectiveness of the Arts-Science collaboration, and show how a simple digitisation project can be developed into an attractive web-portal which contributes usefully to the University’s History of Photography teaching and research. http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/photopoetry/static/about.html 

 

Caleb Derven (Maynooth University; University of Limerick)

What role does place, if any, figure in the digital scholarly edition? Can ontologies be used as a way to link other sorts of content to encoded text/ scholarly editions? Are the models generated for encoded texts constitutive beyond a specific research need?

 

This poster examines a model for foregrounding geographical elements, within digital scholarly editions, using a semantic web/ linked data-based approach. Roughly, geographical elements from novels are incorporated with alternative models such as ontologies and RDF XML documents in augmenting TEI XML. The poster also considers whether this approach can be generalised beyond the specific use case of geographic named entities in the text and considers whether the combination of TEI XML, external ontologies and paratextual data stored in RDF triples may be more widely extended to digital scholarly editions. Operationally, the model considered in the poster examines the extraction of named entities from texts, the identification of toponyms and the incorporation of this data as geo-rectified elements in an encoding of the novel. Specifically, the relationship between Thoms’ 1902 Directory and Joyce’s Ulysses is investigated via the model. The approach to modelling taken extends beyond that offered by a strictly TEI-based approach by using a semantic web based approach and links placenames in the text to ontologies (for example, geoNames). The poster weighs marking up place names directly in the encoding itself against linking to external ontologies. 

 

Marc Di Tommasi (University of Edinburgh)

My research concerns the international migration to Edinburgh before the First World War. Rather than focusing on a single migrant community this project approached all the migrants living in Edinburgh at the time in an effort to individuate common themes and individual characteristics. I believe the poster would be interesting to the delegates of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School because my project is methodologically innovative, with a pronounced digital slant. Using census sources I created a relational database detailing the vital statistics of all the migrants who were living in Edinburgh in 1911 and of all the local people who shared lodgings with them. Thereafter I created a GIS where I mapped all the migrant’s addresses on a period map of the town with the intent of studying their patterns of settlement. By linking different factors like national origin, occupation and family structure I created a series of thematic maps, which will be displayed in the poster, that give a new holistic insight into the role played by the migrants in the society of the time. 

 

Iain Emsley (Kellogg College, University of Oxford) 

We present work in progress concerning the exploration of metadata using visualization and sonification using data from the Bodleian Libraries’ First Folio project. We turned a visualization of gender and role metadata from the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) metadata, into sonifications. This provides exploratory analysis to understand the gender balance in the place through different tones and sounds. We also present work on looking at status of the listener using the type of speech that is marked up in Hamlet. We argue that sound is a passive form of analysis that can be used with other techniques to provide a novel exploratory analysis of textual metadata as part of a student project. 

 

Anna Foka; Anna Misharina; Viktor Arvidsson (Humlab, Umeå University; Informatics, University of Oslo)

From Infrapuncture to Infrastructure: Towards a viable socio-spatial model for Digital Humanities.

 

In the last three decades technology has become interwoven in academia. The poster examines the constellation of digital infrastructures for research and education in Sweden, concentrating specifically on the infrastructure in the Arts Campus at Umeå University. Rather than to give yet another definition of digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, we will belabour a spatial-organizational analysis in order to understand how infrastructures affect academia’s social and material existence. To this end, this poster will visualize (Langley 1999) digital infrastructures in the aforementioned case-study as a timeline of events, technologies, projects, and scholarly endeavours. The analysis offers a systematic exploration of relevant knowledge bases and investigates possible syntheses across disciplines to explain how digitalization affects academic infrastructures for knowledge production. 

 

Our poster shows how the increasing complexity from growing interconnections of disciplines and social dimensions of digital technologies deployed for the Arts and Humanities impacted organizing processes. To discuss possibilities and pitfalls, it concentrates specifically on the use of digital infrastructures in relation to knowledge production processes, defined through deliverables in research and education; and the sustainability of organizations as individual and political units. Beyond academic debate, this poster highlights the need for a policy with suggestions for digital infrastructures in academia focused on sustainability and further development.

 

Catherine Kroll (Sonoma State University)

The Anti-MOOC: A Synchronous Small Seminar Format for Distance Mentoring and Digital Public History Projects

 

This poster presents the results of a synchronous interdisciplinary distance mentoring course—Festivals: Culture in the Making—team-taught this year by a professor of history in Texas (Dr. Whitney Snow) and a professor of English in California (Dr. Cathy Kroll). We taught our seven students from Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) around the U.S. via web conferencing hosted by the University of North Carolina, Asheville. In this course, students selected a local festival to research over the course of the semester. With the aid of our combined expertise in archival research, ethnography, and digital humanities, students learned to formulate original research questions, to conduct and digitally record oral interviews and festival videos, to use ethnographic research methods and analysis, to undertake archival research, and to design websites showcasing their research results. In our twice-weekly meetings, I demonstrated DH tools such as mapping and timeline creation, as well as principles of web design. Our students’ finished digital public history projects are now helping to build a permanent record of their communities’ local festival traditions and their communities’ collective memories. 

 

As professors for the course, we made certain shifts in pedagogical design in this digital environment, emphasizing individual and group mentoring. This course was distinguished by its multi-regional, multicultural, multi-tech, and interdisciplinary features. Students may have learned as much about bridging wide differences in regional culture, political philosophies, and local traditions as they did about how to conduct an ethnography of a festival and digitally craft their research results. 

 

Kathryn Holland (The Orlando Project; MacEwan University)

This poster will provide DHOxSS participants with information about numerous aspects of the Orlando Project, an initiative in digital literary studies for which I am Senior Research Associate. Named after Virginia Woolf’s rollicking Orlando: A Biography (1928), Orlando is a collaborative, multidisciplinary DH project based at the Universities of Alberta and Guelph (ualberta.ca/orlando). Its members produce Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (orlando.cambridge.org), a digital textbase currently comprised of more than 8 million words of born-digital scholarship on authors’ lives and bodies of writing in their cultural environments.

 

The poster will be divided into three related sections. The first will explain the DH methodology and tools the project develops and uses to practice feminist literary history online. It will focus on the principles informing our collaboration and Orlando’s tag sets, bespoke encoding schemas the team uses to produce different kinds of textbase entries. The second section will focus on the published textbase, explaining what it offers and noting several ways that users can explore it. The third section will concentrate on our new phase of Orlando activity, called Orlando 2.0. For Orlando 2.0, we are expanding our contributor base to include scholars outside of our two universities and we will be training new contributors to revise and create textbase entries via a new open-source, in-browser text markup editor.

 

This poster will be relevant to DHOxSS participants interested in such issues as collaborative scholarship and training, digital literary studies, feminist literary history, and interpretive markup.

 

Alison Lutton (Somerville College, University of Oxford)

This poster will showcase initial research undertaken for my interdisciplinary postdoctoral project, which considers manifestations of reader and author identity in cross-media settings, as expressed on social media and in other public places online. Still in its formative stages, the project is particularly concerned with issues of authenticity, psychological ownership of texts, and multifaceted, intermedially-constructed  identity. Its first output is focused on YouTubers-turned-authors, and how their transition into print can reconfigure both the ‘authentic’ identities they have practiced online, and the participative roles of fans whose previous relationships with them must be renegotiated. The poster will present the project’s origins, current orientation, and key research focus and questions, which I hope to expand through my attendance at DHOxSS, participating in the Social Humanities workshop.

 

Beatrice Montedoro (Lincoln College, University of Oxford)

DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts https://dex.itercommunity.org (currently live at https://dex.citd.tamu.edu

 

This poster introduces DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts, a digital project that allows us to learn more about audience reception, reading practices, and early modern print and manuscript culture. 

DEx is the first database that aims to collect in one place all known dramatic extracts found in seventeenth-century manuscripts. The content will be searchable either by manuscript, playwright, play or character, and it will be possible to view the extracts in either normalised or original spelling. Moreover, each manuscript page links to the relevant library archives, but also, when applicable, CELM and the Folger First-Line Index. At the moment DEx contains over 2,500 extracts from early modern plays, but this number will continually grow, as new material will be discovered.

Having a poster at DHOxSS 2016 is more than just a project announcement: it offers the DEx team an opportunity to receive feedback from digital humanists who would use or are creating similar projects. This poster will showcase how our project uses XML (TEI) to make a body of evidence available that would otherwise be inaccessible. This poster visually outlines how this project takes information from the (sometimes inscrutable) manuscript page to the searchable, digital interface.  

 

It is an oft-repeated falsehood that we don’t have any evidence about what audiences and readers in Shakespeare’s day thought. This poster shows how DEx seeks to rectify this common misconception by bringing together paleography, archival research, TEI, and Solr."

 

Paige Morgan (University of Miami)

My poster will present details about the process and findings of the CLIR microgrant project IdEMB (Identifying Early Modern Books). IdEMB investigates citation practices for recording books printed throughout the hand-press period (1450-1830). While scholars like Adrian Johns, David McKitterick, and Randall McLeod argue that variations in states of correction, annotation, and binding can deeply influence scholarly understanding of a work, many scholars and modern publishers continue to treat early modern books as interchangeable, employing modern conventions for citing an edition rather than specific copies. Some academic publishers’ house style calls for eliminating shelfmarks and bibliographic reference numbers entirely, while others allow copy-specific citations only in cases where the argument predominantly deals with printing or book history. A tendency to silently elide the use of electronic sources leads some to obscure whether a work was viewed in person or through digital facsimile; and while book history scholars may cite specific copies, they do so in a variety of ways, in the absence of widespread best practices among publishers. IdEMB utilizes distant reading methods to better understand the range of citation techniques in six major journals; and potentially develop a set of recommendations for best practices. My poster will focus on our findings, but also on the start-to-finish process & techniques for cleaning and transforming structured data in order to answer questions that the data's creators did not anticipate. I believe that both this process & the use of distant reading will be useful and of interest to DHOXSS attendees.

 

Marie Revellio (University of Konstanz)

Virtual networks – A computational analysis of references in Latin texts

Referring to an archetype is a universal human practice throughout every culture and society - for instance in film, music, art or literature. In great numbers such crosslinks are able to create a dense network of meaning. The phenomenon of references is a basic research area in the Humanities, therefore it is fundamental to develop and enhance computational analysis methods to investigate this field. The poster at hand deals exemplary with one kind of reference, namely with citations in Latin texts.

"Quid facit … cum evangeliis Maro?" (Jer. ep. 22,29,7) - By modifying the famous question of Tertullian the church father Jerome (around 347-420) refers to Virgil as well as to the Gospels. Thereby, he eloquently draws the in fact mutually exclusive classical-pagan and Christian literature and culture tight. To analyse the intertextual relations in Jerome’s work computationally methods of text analysis are used: To detect verbal citations large text-bases of Jerome’s letters and his sources, classical as well as Christian texts, are computationally compared. Furthermore, the citations are examined in regard of their frequency, (geographical) distribution and morphological configuration.

Though the text analysis method is in particular designed for Latin texts, the general approach and techniques for pattern recognition can be applied on every other language or source. With this poster as a case example, a transdisciplinary audience can get into discussion on digital analysis of references in general and thereby develop the methods in question collectively.

Stephen Rose (Royal Holloway, University of London) 

This poster introduces the project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration between Royal Holloway and the British Library, funded by the AHRC in 2014–15. The project cleaned and made publicly available some of the world’s biggest databases about printed and manuscript music. It also explored how this data could be analysed to create new ways of writing music history, for instance by showing how local events (such as plague in Venice in 1576) had a Europe-wide impact on music dissemination.

 

The poster focuses on two aspects of the project of wider interest to DHOxSS attendees. Firstly, it highlights the opportunities and challenges of analysing library metadata as big data, with examples showing the problems of data cleaning and interpretation. Secondly, it shows ways in which a project in the digital humanities can engage with wider, non-academic audiences of music lovers and citizen scientists.

 

Emma Stanford (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a global collaboration that aims to create rich and interoperable image-based resources for digital humanists and other scholars. Through a set of application programming interfaces and a growing library of image viewing and editing software, IIIF allows researchers to remix image collections, reassemble fragmented manuscripts, and reinterpret resources with layers of annotation and transcription.

 

The Bodleian Library's Digital Manuscripts Toolkit project is producing a set of out-of-the-box tools that will enable manuscript scholars and other researchers to make use of IIIF resources. These tools will allow scholars to build their own IIIF image libraries, transform TEI and other types of metadata into IIIF manifests, and pull images from IIIF-participating institutions across the globe to create brand-new image sequences for teaching and research. As we produce these tools, we are collaborating with University of Oxford scholars on a set of case studies to demonstrate the toolkit's potential and ensure that its functionality stays in step with research needs. These case studies range from the comparison and transcription of a set of Anglo-Norman Apocalypse manuscripts to the development of a digital image library to aid students of Armenian palaeography.

 

This poster illustrates the goals of the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit and tracks the project's progress thus far, using the scholarly case studies to show how IIIF tools can be brought to bear on manuscript research.

 

Danko Zelic (Institute of Art History, Zagreb, Croatia)

The poster would present the work on the ongoing research project “Dubrovnik: Civitas et Acta Consiliorum. Visualizing Development of the Late Medieval Urban Fabric” (http://ducac.ipu.hr/project/mapping), hosted by the Institute of Art History in Zagreb and financed by the Croatian Science Foundation.

The State Archives of Dubrovnik keeps the volumes of the unpublished records of the three Dubrovnik’s governing bodies – the Great Council, the Minor Council and the Senate – that are systematically investigated in order to gather the deliberations concerning the urban spaces and buildings from 1400 to 1450. All the information about the physical changes of the urban tissue, the use of different spaces and buildings and the aspects of governmental control over them, as well as the management of related processes, are regarded as relevant. The deliberations are presented in the form of the fully transcribed texts and they are available on the project web pages. The work is made to facilitate the further project research, but also, as an open source, it is meant to deliver the systematized archival data to other scholars.