Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School

Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow and AHRC Theme Leader Fellow for Digital Transformations, gives the closing keynote for the 2017 DHOXSS. We think of digital humanities as being chiefly concerned with abstract data, tagging and quantitative techniques, but it also has roots in a long tradition of using a variety of technological aids to examine the physical characteristics of objects such as manuscripts, paintings or pots. As new materials and technologies such as conductive ink or ultra-thin transistors develop, they offer humanities scholars different perspectives in exploring and presenting primary materials. This lecture will discuss some projects (mostly by other people) which illustrate some of the emerging possibilities of the Internet of Things for the humanities. These include paper headphones, a guitar that documents its performance history, tattoos that control your smartphone, and a book cover that speaks.

Martin Poulter, Oxford's Wikimedian in Reseidence, gives a masterclass in using Wikimedia for digital research. The Wikimedia family of projects includes some projects that are less well-known than the flagship Wikipedia, but highly relevant to the Humanities. Wikidata has facts and figures about tens of millions of items, Wikimedia Commons has tens of millions of freely reusable images, many from cultural heritage organisations, and Wikisource has hundreds of thousands of historical texts. These platforms are not just for sharing text, images and data, but giving them context in the form of metadata and links. They also allow many kinds of query and visualisation. This session reports on progress with using these platforms with research projects in Oxford University.

Kevin Page, Iain Emsley and David Weigl talk about using The HathiTrust Digital Library to conduct research in this interstice workshop. Within the Andrew W. Mellon funded ‘Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA)’ project, the University of Oxford e-Research Centre have developed new tools and approaches to facilitate study of the HathiTrust Digital Library. This workshop will inform participants of the latest developments from the project, and provide attendees with the opportunity to work with project researchers to explore how they might undertake their own investigations. The HathiTrust Digital Library comprises the digitized representations of 14.7 million volumes, 7.44 million book titles, 405,345 serial titles, and 5.2 billion pages, best described as “a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future”. For many scholars the size of the HT corpus is both attractive and daunting. The first half of this workshop introduces the concept of ‘worksets’, showing how they can be used to effectively investigate large corpora such as the HathiTrust, and demonstrating digital methods to refine and interrogate the data within them. These will be illustrated through existing worksets, including examples focussed on early English printed texts. In the second, interactive, half of the workshop, attendees will work with project researchers to ‘paper prototype’ potential worksets relating to their own fields of study. Participants will be apprised of existing methods by which they can create HathiTrust worksets for their context; discovery of new workset creation motivations and strategies is welcomed and inform the next generation of HathiTrust workset tooling.

Pip Willcox and David De Roure give a presentation on Ada Lovelace, one of the early pioneers in computing. In the 200 years since Ada Lovelace’s birth, she has been celebrated, neglected, and taken up as a symbol for any number of causes and ideas. A symposium to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth narrated many of these, including accounts of her generative relationship with Charles Babbage and his Difference and Analytical Engines. This talk traces some of the paths the idea of Lovelace has taken, what basis they have in her life, and what her reception tells us about our own scholarship and society. It goes on to describe our experimental work responding to Lovelace and Babbage, and to the operatic ‘Ada sketches’ of composer Emily Howard. We created a Web application to produce music from maths through programming a digital simulation of the Analytical Engine, after Lovelace’s idea that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Professor Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute and Laird Barrett, Senior Digital Product Manager for the Taylor and Francis Group, give a talk for DHOXSS 2017. Digital research, computational techniques and big data are often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways forward. Several areas of digital research will be dealt with in depth, such as the large-scale analysis of text in literature, the visualization of intellectual and creative networks, and use of the Web to document historical patterns. The course will also examine transformations in scholarly practices, including crowdsourcing and creating data infrastructures and digital archives. Particular attention will be paid to data sources, and debates about digital research in the humanities. The talk will also cover emerging publishing models, and how they relate to digital research. Finally, it will put digital research into the context of debates about the future of the humanities and about the relations between disciplines.

Dr Nicholas Cole and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman discuss the Quill Project, a software platform developed to aid research and teaching of the history of Parliamentary-style negotiations, and particularuarly the creation of the Constitution of the United States. They will discuss the research problems that the platform was created to address, and the process of building the tools for both data-entry and a diverse readership. We will address the design-choices that we have adopted to encourage a consistent use of the model, and the features that we have built into the platform to facilitate a cooperative relationship with other digital projects. They will discuss the problems of user-interface design for a potential readership that includes high-school students through to subject-domain experts through an analysis of the user requirements and specifications. This talk is aimed at a non-expert audience.

Giles Bergel gives a talk on using new technologies to understand the history of books and printing. The first point of access for image collections has traditionally been the catalogue. Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning have opened up new ways of describing, searching and researching the visual record. This talk will outline the state of the art in the field, demonstrate some recent applications, and provide pathways for participants who wish to apply these techniques to their own materials. Giles Bergel is Digital Humanities Research Fellow for the Seebibyte project in the Department of Engineering Sciences at the University of Oxford.

Cristina Dondi and Matilde Malaspina of the 15C BOOKTRADE project, give a talk for the 2017 DHOXSS. Cristina will present 15cV, a powerful tool for the visualization of the movement of fifteenth-century printed books, from the time and place where they were printed to where they are today, via the many places and people who distributed, purchased, owned, and annotated them during the intervening 500-year period. This tool enables unanswered historical queries on the impact of printing on early modern society to be addressed for the first time. Cristina will illustrate how the project is making its visualization possible, and outlines how the project, one of the largest collaborative enterprises in the humanities, was set up and continues to grow. Matilde will present the 15cBOOKTRADE project, a collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford). This project is testing the application of a series of digital cataloguing and searching methods on fifteenth-century printed images. The work is based on the integrated application of instance-based (i.e. image) and class-based (i.e. text) retrieval. The objective of the collaboration is the creation of a new tool capable of systematically tracking and investigating the production, use, circulation, and copy of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles, etc. within fifteenth-century printed illustrated editions.

Panel chaired by Pip Wilcox, with Barbara McGillivray, Megan Senseney and Nicholas Cole.

Dr Diane Jakacki, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Faculty Teaching Associate in Comparative Humanities, Bucknell University , gives the opening keynote to the 2017 Digital Humanities at Oxford Seminar School. As humanists we are trained to think across methods while we focus on a particular theoretical or praticable approach to our research. As digital humanists we undertake that same type of training to find a digital method that best helps us ask questions of, analyse, and share our subject matter. At the same time, many of us find ourselves engaged in research projects that are expanding across disciplines and growing in scope, scale, and modes of analysis. Certainly, the prospective of linking data across projects requires that we think about how others might be interested in connecting with our corpora. While it is important that we reach beyond our methodological comfort zone to become conversant in others, it is increasingly crucial that we seek out fellow digital humanists expert in other methods with whom we can effectively collaborate. In this talk, Dr. Jakacki will present examples of major research projects that are possible through such coalescence of skills and approaches.

Isabel Galina, (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) gives the closing keynote for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. For over a decade now Open Access (OA) has fundamentally changed the way scholarly publishing works. In the Digital Humanities (DH) the development of new types of scholarly publications in the form of digital projects presents an interesting scenario for the continuation of the OA movement. In this talk I will discuss how DH projects disrupt traditional scholarly communication and publishing systems, focusing on the role of authors, editors, publishers and libraries and how as digital humanists we contribute to shaping these new systems through the various roles we assume in DH project development. Additionally, I will discuss how these new DH publishing models may also serve to increase geographical and linguistic diversity in our field. Currently research and researchers from peripheral countries are sorely underrepresented in international scholarly publishing. Viewing DH as a transformative motor in academia gives us the opportunity to propose new models that adequately incorporate digital scholarly output on a global scale and increase the visibility of countries on the periphery little favoured by the traditional scholarly publishing model.

Pip Wilcox, Curator of Digital Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the 2016 DHOXSS on Shakespeare's First Folio, held by the Bodleian.

Maria Telegina, (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The history of graph (network) theory (GNT) started with an attempt to find a single walking path, which crosses, once and only once, each of the seven bridges of old Königsberg; this is known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem. Since 1736, when Leonhard Euler proved the problem to be unsolvable using a very simple graph, GNT was developed, and it rapidly came to be used in a number of fields. Nowadays, GNT is actively used in a wide variety of disciplines from mathematics and physics to sociology and linguistics, as our world is full of systems, which can be represented and analyzed as networks. The main focus of this talk is a presentation of a network analysis, based on a semantic network constructed on Japanese temporal and spatial lexical items. The network is based on the results of a free word association experiment conducted in Tokyo in 2015. Due to the nature of the material, the network is highly clustered and has a relatively short average path length; in other words, it is a good example of a small world network. As the general framework of GNT, along with some practical information on how to build and analyze a network in R or Gephi will also be presented, the contents of this talk are also relevant to analyses of any system with coupled elements.

Cristina Dondi, (Modern Languages, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The five-year ERC-funded 15cBOOKTRADE Project has developed digital tools to investigate, on solid and extensive evidence, the impact of the introduction of printing on early modern society. The Material Evidence in Incunabula is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc. Locating and dating any of these elements enables the movement of books across Europe and the US to be tracked throughout the centuries, from place of production to the books’ present locations. The TEXT-inc database describes the content of 15th-century editions in great detail and systematically – main and secondary texts, and paratexts. It also identifies the various people involved in the preparation of the editions, to understand the social network surrounding the introduction of printing in Early Modern Europe, and to study the transmission of texts in print. The project is also experimenting with image-matching software applied to 15th-century Venetian illustration, and with the scientific visualisation of data to display the movement of these books over the five-hundred year period of their existence.

Chris Powell, (The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Institutions like Universities and Museums possess considerable volumes of handwritten personal archives, the content of which may be of research interest. However, these archives remain largely untranscribed and their content unknown. We describe our early investigation of word shape analysis, and particularly the decomposition of those shapes in to graphic motifs, as an assistive technology for the researcher wishing to transcribe entire documents, or to locate likely pages of interest within untranscribed documents.

Carolin Rindfleisch, (Faculty of Music, University of Oxford), gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Richard Wagner’s music, and particularly his composition with ‘leitmotifs’ (musical entities with a characteristic identity, that are used to construct musical form and to convey musical meaning) have been interpreted differently in a wide variety of academic as well as audience-aimed introductory literature. A comprehensive analysis of these interpretations can help us find out how Wagner’s music-dramas have been heard, seen and understood in different historical and cultural environments. Using this example, the lecture presents how methods and techniques of Linked Data and Semantic Web can facilitate a large-scale reception study that can deal with a wide range of source material and still compare interpretations in detail. It will discuss different ways of digitally enhancing the study of the reception and interpretation of artworks, and address the question of how we can reconcile these methods with more traditional methodologies in the Humanities. It will focus particularly on presenting the design of an ontology that not only enables the linking and structuring of digitised source material, but also enables the systematic representation and comparison of the interpretations contained in the sources.

Judith Siefring, (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The sight of readers taking their own photographs of books, manuscripts and other objects in special collections reading rooms and museum study spaces is becoming increasingly commonplace. This kind of ‘DIY digitization’ reflects changing technologies but also evolving research practices and institutional policies. Its prevalence warrants proper reflection. Why do users want to take their own photographs of special collections? What are the curatorial concerns around allowing them to do so? How does this relate to institutional digital collections delivery? How is user-led photography changing research? And what challenges does it pose for research libraries like the Bodleian and for individual researchers?

Ralph Schroeder, (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford) and Laird Barrett (Taylor & Francis) give a talk for the DHOXSS 2016. Big data is often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways forward. Particular attention will be paid to data sources, and debates about digital research in the humanities. The talk will also cover emerging publishing models, and how they relate to digital research.

Scott Billings, (Oxford University Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford), Theodore Koterwas, (IT Services, University of Oxford), Jessica Suess, (Oxford University Museums, University of Oxford), give a talk for the DHOXSS 2016. Over the past nine months Oxford University Museums and Oxford University IT Services have been collaborating on a research project to look at best practice in terms of delivering collections content to users within museum and gallery spaces via their mobile device. A notoriously ‘heads down’ experience, the project has explored methods for utilising personal mobile devices to facilitate ‘heads up’ interactions with objects and displays, creating a hybrid physical-digital experience. In this lecture Scott, Ted and Jess will share the key findings from this research project covering key principles around usability, access and content triggering; best practice in using video, looking at when and how to use video to complement rather than distract from displays; and principles for developing interactives that provide a learning experience that enhances engagement with objects, as opposed to online features and games that focus on the technology rather than the displays. This lecture will suggest best practice principles for delivering digital collections content in museum and gallery spaces and should be interesting for anyone considering methods for encouraging public engagement with their research content in gallery spaces, historic sites or other venues.

Alfie Abdul-Rahman, (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. In this lecture, I will present a web-based visual analytics approach for detecting similarity between texts. ViTA: Visualization for Text Alignment is the result of our “Commonplace Cultures: Mining Shared Passages in the 18th Century using Sequence Alignment and Visual Analytics” project under the Digging into Data Challenge Program (III) and it is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, and the Australian National University. The team comprises of computer scientists and domain experts in the fields of literary studies, intellectual history, and digital humanities. ViTA is a web-based visual analytics approach that allows domain experts to construct and modify a text alignment pipeline by visualizing the tools and connections for a specific method in conjunction with testing inputs and outputs. The construction of the text alignment is similar to that of an image processing pipeline. As the approach was embedded directly in the context of 18th century print culture, this approach was developed in an interdisciplinary manner, and was evaluated in intensive meetings with the domain experts at the design stage as well as after prototyping.

Deb Verhoeven, (Deakin University) gives the opening keynote talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.

James Loxley, University of Edinburgh, gives the final keynote in the DHOXSS 2015. The creation of the discipline - if that's what it is - of the digital humanities has gone hand in hand with the ever more pervasive pertinence for humanities academics of a 'digital scholarship' conceived more generally. Scholarship, in Ernest Boyer's influential terms, consists of the different intellectual activities of discovery, integration, application and teaching; each of these activities has been, and is still, undergoing change as a result of the wider intellectual transformations wrought by digital technologies. But scholarly understanding of the nature of such change rests on a variety of differing assumptions - is this, for example, augmentation, development, or metamorphosis? The difference between such assumptions can readily shape the way in which we react to the challenge posed by the attraction, and encroachment, of digital approaches. Some have been moved to ask: can we ignore or resist them? What will become of our disciplines if we can't, or don't? This lecture will explore some possible responses to these concerns through a series of examples drawn, largely, from my own experience as an originally analogue scholar who has been a long time in the process of becoming digital.

Daniel Burt, Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. This presentation will primarily focus on using Filemaker Pro to produce The Online Corpus of Inscriptions from Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA), which contains around 40,000 inscriptions in pre-Arabic languages including Safaitic, Dadanitic, Hismaic, and Thamudic. We will examine the functionality of the database, and look at the technical challenges that were faced when producing the system. In addition to the OCIANA project, this presentation will provide an overview of Filemaker Pro and outline the advantages of working with Filemaker to create databases for research projects.

David Zeitlyn, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. This presentation is based on the practical experience of archiving 46 thousand (plus) images taken by a Cameroonian studio photographer over a 30 years period as part of the British Library 'Endangered Archive Programme' (EAP). I will discuss some of the practical and conceptual issues of working with images collections, looking at how face recognition and pattern matching can help put some order into collections whose scope is too large for an individual to hold in their consciousness. Scaling up means we need technological assistance to explore large collections else we are constrained by human attention spans and memory. Scholarship needs to develop or at least face up to these limitations.

Victoria Van Hyning, Zooniverse, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. Handwritten manuscript materials contain a vast amount of information that is still largely not machine-readable. This poses challenges to librarians, archivists, museum and academic specialists whose work relies on these materials. This paper will present a series of approaches to volunteer-driven crowdsourced transcription, and will outline some of the pitfalls and benefits of crowdsourcing in the humanities. It will begin by briefly considering the genesis of five transcription projects and tools developed at Zooniverse (Zooniverse.org) the world-leading academic crowdsourcing organization headquartered at the University of Oxford, and with branches at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the University of Minnesota. The talk will conclude with a detailed account of the first full text transcription project undertaken at Zooniverse, in partnership with Tate Britain, due to launch in July 2015. It will invite volunteers to transcribe twentieth-century British artists' sketchbooks, letters and diaries. This project has potential for replication at other institutions and by individuals, and the talk will offer suggestions for how to deploy crowdsourcing, and the Zooniverse platform in particular.

Mia Ridge, Digital Humanities, Open University, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. As the number of digital humanities projects grows, good design is an increasingly important factor in attracting and retaining visitors. Usability testing supports innovative design by ensuring digital projects meet the needs of potential audiences and users. Traditional usability tests can seem expensive or dauntingly complex, but lightweight usability methods can be applied to any project. Lightweight usability follows the principle that 'any user testing is better than no user testing' and is based on the idea that all you need to run useful tests with real people is a bit of planning, a laptop or tablet, and a couple of hours. In this session, you will learn how to plan and run a lightweight usability test on paper prototypes or early versions of digital projects, and get tips for recruiting and rewarding participants for 'guerrilla usability testing'. At the end of the workshop we will put it into practice by devising and running a live usability test on a site suggested by the audience.

Howard Hotson, Faculty of History, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. Between 1500 and 1800, the development of increasingly affordable, reliable, and accessible postal systems allowed scholars to scatter correspondence across and beyond Europe. This epistolary exchange knit together the self-styled 'republic of letters', an international, knowledge-based civil society central to that era's intellectual breakthroughs and formative for many of modern Europe's values and institutions. Despite its importance, the republic of letters remains poorly integrated into early modern European intellectual history, and this primarily for one simple reason: its core practice of creating communities by dispersing archives of manuscripts has posed insuperable difficulties to subsequent generations of historians attempting to reconstruct the very documents which established this community. The ongoing revolution in digital communication provides, for the first time, an adequate medium for reassembling the material dispersed by the earlier revolution in postal communication; but before this potential can be realized we need, not merely to adapt the technology to the task, but also to adapt our working methods and scholarly cultures to the technology. More specifically, we need (1) to create an interdisciplinary network of archivists, librarians, IT systems developers, experts in communication and design, educationalists, and scholars from many different fields (2) to design the networking infrastructure and scholarly practices needed (3) to support an international scholarly community devoted (4) to piecing back together the scattered documentation of the international republic of letters. In other words, we need a network to design a network to support a network reconstructing networks: Networking⁴.

Jessica Suess, University of Oxford Museums and Anjanesh Babu, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, give a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. Museums and cultural venues are increasingly focussed on enhancing the experience of their onsite visitors by providing mobile optimised digital resources direct to the visitor's smartphone or tablet. Apps, mobile sites and games are now common place within the museum, providing additional interpretation through text, audio and video content, or an immersive experience using sophisticated augmented and virtual reality platforms. As well as offering an opportunity to push content to and engage with visitors, mobile offers museums a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their audiences: beacons and Wi-Fi triangulation allow visitors pathways through gallery spaces to be tracked in increasing detail, and what visitors choose to access on their device in certain physical spaces can provide significant insight into how they are engaging with the collections around them. In this short lecture we will talk about some of the datasets now available to illuminate how visitors experience museums, and what this may mean for the future.

Chris Powell, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the 2015 DHOXSS. Digital images (photographs) present a significant resource for the Digital Humanities practitioner; individual collections can number in the hundreds of thousands, and can use a variety of encoding methods. These resources can be the result of decades of work and at the very least would be extremely expensive to replace in the event of a disaster. The lecture firstly looks at the methods commonly employed to safeguard an image archive, for example multiple copies across different media types, mirroring. This is followed by an examination of each of these, and identifies issues with each, be they procedural or physical. Next the effects of the issues on image corruption are explored, together with examples of the resultant image corruption on different image encoding methods. Following the observation that most images in an archive are not viewed on a regular basis,methods of detecting corrupted images in an archive are presented, including a visual TIFF image scanner developed at the Ashmolean. Finally, some recommendations are made which will help to ensure the accurate preservation of a digital image archive.

Panel discussion for th DHOXSS 2015. David De Roure, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford (Chair), Lucie Burgess, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Tim Crawford, Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, and Jane Winters, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. We are transforming our individual and collective lives through digital technology, in the ways we communicate and create our knowledge and understanding of the world and the human record of it. How is research in the Humanities leading this potential and responding to its limits? Is current practice in teaching, training, learning, research, storing, curating, and delivering knowledge fit to support, communicate, and encourage citizen participation in these developments? How do they affect our infrastructure requirements, now and into the future?

Jane Winters, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, gives the opening keynote talk for the 2015 DHOXSS. We are all digital researchers now. Our methods of working, the sources that we choose to use, the ways in which we interact with those sources, and the ways in which we communicate our research findings have all been profoundly affected by the digital. Whether we are interested in epigraphic and papyrological texts or in the history of the web, in Anglo-Saxon charters or in eighteenth-century court records, in text or in moving image, digital tools and methods have the capacity to transform our understandings and offer new insights into old and as yet undreamt of questions. The development of the digital has also supported greater collaboration, openness and interdisciplinarity in humanities research, both by making this technologically possible and by altering the types and breadth of knowledge required to run a successful research project. Drawing on a range of projects and initiatives that encompass data both big and small, this presentation will highlight the possibilities afforded by the digital and the skills that we need to develop in order to shape the evolution of digital humanities research in the coming months and years.

Martin Roth, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, delivers the annual TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) open lecture at the DHOxSS 2014. The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded during the tumult of the Industrial Revolution; a period of intense technological and social change. Today brings another such turning point, as we grapple with the consequences of the digital revolution. How are advances in digital design and media changing museum practice? And what curatorial principles remain the same, little changed from 19th century? The V&A holds a rich collection of ‘Ukiyo-e' - popular representations of everyday Japanese life from the 18th-19th centuries. Radical changes and fundamental continuities are both in evidence when, today, curators consider collecting ‘emojis', emoticons with distinctive features reflecting contemporary Japanese culture. Martin Roth, Director of the V&A and, formerly, Director General of Dresden State Museums, will consider these questions and more in a lecture mapping the future of museums in the digital age.

A thought-provoking closing keynote given by Melissa Terras, University College London, at DHOxSS 2014.

A talk given by Howard Hotson, University of Oxford, at DHOxSS 2014. In his Latin treatise, "Via Lucis (The Way of Light)", the great Moravian pedagogue and pansophist, Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), offered an account of the whole of human history conceived as the gradual spread of communication. Organised in terms of the six days of creation, his narrative culminates in the expectation of a dawning seventh day of rest, in which a universal college will use universal communication to gather universal books as the basis for universal education. The most important product of Comenius's brief stay in England during the winter and spring of 1641-2, the plan's prospects were dashed by the outbreak of the civil wars the following summer. Instead of settling down in England to create his universal college, Comenius continued his wanderings, exchanging as he moved across the face of northern Europe an endless series of letters, pansophic schemes and utopian blueprints with a whole generation of intellectual refugees likewise displaced by the wars ranging simultaneously from the Baltic via central Europe to the British Isles. Amidst this constant flux, the "Via Lucis" remained unpublished until 1668, when it appeared with a dedication to the newly founded Royal Society, which Comenius regarded as the fulfilment of the proposal he had penned a quarter century earlier. Comenius illustrates in striking fashion a connection between the terms of our subtitle. Crises both create diasporas and increase the urgency of communication amongst them, while simultaneously rendering that communication far more difficult both for contemporaries to conduct and for historians to reconstruct. In the seventeenth-century case, the problem of reconstructing the movement of letters exchanged between a mid-century generation of intellectuals who were themselves constantly on the move is one which the age of print has proved unable to solve. Reconstruction of the international republic of letters created by the early modern revolution in epistolary communication can, however, be assisted by the consolidation of a new international scholarly community facilitated by the ongoing revolution in digital communications. Having indicated out the nature of the problem with reference to Comenius, this talk will also outline a new COST networking project designed to address this problem: http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/IS1310.

A talk given by Lynne Siemens, University of Victoria at DHOxSS 2014. Advances in digital resources, tools, and methods are allowing researchers to ask and answer different types of research questions which often result in larger and more complex projects. Given these projects' scale and scope, traditional solitary scholarly practices need to be adapted to include collaborative approaches with colleagues locally, nationally and increasingly internationally. This trend raises questions about the ways to develop the necessary team-related and project management skills and required processes to build and sustain teams and their projects while addressing the many challenges that come with working across disciplines, distance, time and culture/language groups. This talk will begin to address these questions and suggest best practices for Digital Humanities teams to consider in their collaborations.

James Brusuelas from the Faculty of Classics, Oxford University, gives a talk at DHOxSS 2014, around the Ancient Lives project. Since August 2011, Ancient Lives has recorded well over 1.5 million transcriptions of ancient Greek papyri (over 7 million characters), the work of over 250,00 online collaborators. The result was not simply the creation of big data, but the inception of an entirely different way of conceiving and interfacing ancient digital texts. Put simply, Ancient Lives has created something that has never existed before: a database of unedited Greek texts. We have strings of Greek characters without word division or any modern editorial convention. However, to access and make full use of that data, as texts actually read in antiquity, new algorithmic methods and digital tools that merge machine and human intelligence are required. The purpose of this lecture is to showcase, first, the Ancient Lives' method for data extraction, curating, and producing digital Greek texts from this unique crowd sourced dataset. Then, and perhaps more importantly, to introduce two new Ancient Lives grant funded projects, in which new tools are being developed for the digital editing, data mining, and researching Greek and Coptic fragments through an advanced online interface.

This panel discussion will bring together those working in the area of data access and preservation to discuss the numerous problems and future possibilities of data curation, preservation, and long-term access.

A talk given by Emma Goodwin, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Oxford, at DHOxSS 2014. Inspired by the successes of Zooniverse's internationally acclaimed digital projects, and the growing appetite among funding bodies to fund collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, today's doctoral students face an exciting challenge. How can a doctoral or early career researcher advance knowledge creation and production through the creative and exciting myriad of opportunities available in Digital Humanities? Even for established academics, it is very difficult to attract funding without a proof-of-concept prototype of the planned project and a workable budget which demonstrates value, innovation and alignment with the stated aims of funding bodies. Addressing these and many more aspects is crucial for demonstrating in a funding proposal that new digital approaches can create world-leading research which will be disseminated widely. Reflecting on the successful funding bids for ‘Crowd-Map-The-Crusades' and the AHRC-funded ‘Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagement in the Digital Humanities', this paper will discuss some ideas about useful strategies which doctoral and early career researchers can use when looking to set up and fund their own small-scale digital projects, including developing concepts into scalable and sustainable models, accessing seed funding, how to access the requisite skills training, and how to engage with international DH networks.

This presentation from DHOxSS 2014 is based on the practical experience of archiving 46 thousand (plus) images taken by a Cameroonian studio photographer over a 30 years period as part of the British Library ‘Endangered Archive Programme' (EAP). This talk will discuss some of the practical and conceptual issues of working with images collections, looking at how face recognition and pattern matching can help put some order into collections whose scope is too large for an individual to hold in their consciousness. Scaling up means we need technological assistance to explore large collections else we are constrained by human attention spans and memory. Scholarship needs to develop or at least face up to these limitations.

This panel discussion will bring together those working in the area of scholarly digital editing to examine how and why such editions should and are being made and what issues and assumptions we bring to the creation of scholarly digital editions.

This talk considers notions of community, community of practice, and the methodological commons as it applies to the digital humanities. A keynote by Ray Siemens, University of Victoria from DHOxSS 2014. The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, DHOxSS, and other institutes, as well as the remarkable range and variety of THATCamps, workshops and other training events and meetings taking place around the world — taken together these elaborate a number of emerging models of networked activities at local, regional and national level of great significance to the growth of the DH community, and the principles on which it is founded.