‘Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement’ was a digital humanities workshop held on 13 June 2014, organised by dhAHRC in Oxford. The workshop consisted of a series of presentations related to the field of the digital humanities, touching on issues including digital transformations, specialist IT skills, copyright and IPR, open data, and licensing. Like our own events series, the aim was to introduce key ways of using digital tools in scholarship. Some of the speakers’ work was also related to the field of medieval studies, notably Dr Stewart Brookes, who introduced the DigiPal (database a web-based framework for the study of paleography). Below is a summary of the presentations.
Ethical Issues in Digital Humanities – Anna Crowe
ICCPR – article 17: ‘no one will be subject to disproportionate interference’.The nature of personal data in the 21st century makes the likelihood of it remaining non-identifiable lower (see Unique in the Crowd study).For useful guideline around privacy see:* Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements* Virginia Tech – Twitter guidelines
Reassembling the Republic of Letters – Howard Hotson
See http://www.e-enlightenment.com/
Engagement activities (see Early Modern Letters Online – three strands: emlocollect, emloedit, front end website).
Prosopographical approaches underpin letters information, and these are used to map intellectual networks.
The Zooniverse – Robert Simpson
See https://www.zooniverse.org/
The term ‘Cognitive Surplus’, coined by Clay Shirky is the principle that people are learning how to use free time more constructively for creative acts rather than consumptive ones; this is the idea behind the crowdsourcing projects on Zooniverse.
Human input informs approaches to training machines to do the work, e.g. Snapshot Serengeti and Old Weather.
Zooniverse is now developing crowdsoucing tools as a free online service, for which it received a Google global impact award.
Sharing Data from a Researcher’s Perspective – Ernesto Priego and James Baker
Differences between file formats (e.g. Word, Excel, PDF) suggest different degrees of openness. To encourage re-use, it is important to build re-usability into the process and format from the start.
Although research papers given at conferences may not be at a suitable stage for publishing online, the slides from the presentation could be made available to increase researcher visibility.
Crowdsourcing in the Community – Ylva Berglund Prytz
See: http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/casestudies/
When designing a community crowdsourcing project it is important to have the idea and the specific community in mind from the start.
Different perspectives and sources can enrich understanding of an historical event, for example, a more informed historical resource about WW1 might draw from:
* Official records
* Soldiers’ diaries and associated items
* Personal reminiscences (see e.g. Age Exchange)
The Oxford Community Collection Model, established by RunCoCo for The Great War Archive has now been adopted by Europeana 1914-1918
Getting Medieval, Getting Paleography – Dr Stewart Brookes
DigiPal is a resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100. It is designed to allow users to view samples of handwriting from the period and to compare them with each other quickly and easily.
The project aims to bring digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion in new and innovative ways. It combines digital photographs of medieval handwriting with detailed descriptions and characterisations of the writing, as well as the text in which it is found, and the content and structure of the manuscript or document as a whole.
Scholarly Social Machines – David de Roure
See: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/David%20De%20Roure
The idea of Scholarly Social Machines is developed from Tim Berners Lee’s idea of social machines:
“Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration. The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines”.
The ability to create new forms of social processes is happening at a citizen and population level. There’s a methodological shift in the digital environment (audience driven) – post-digital approaches are required to understand these changes.
medieval studies in the digital age 