Digital Research and Editing Environments Workshop
Event type:
Workshop
Date:
7 July 2011

This workshop will run from 12.30 to 4.30pm, with lunch provided.

Please contact Donna Baillie (see below) if you would like to attend.

Digital Research and Editing Environments offer humanities researchers the opportunity to extend the range of methodologies open to them through the use of advanced online text analysis tools. However, their adoption remains highly localised and unevenly distributed because of, among other things, lack of awareness, the inappropriate configuration of editing tools, lack of institutional support, and the instability and unfamiliarity of interfaces.

This workshop will look at the current state of the field from three viewpoints:
• the researcher, open to learning new skills but wary of the transience, inflexibility and insecurity of some services;
• the editor, looking to broaden the reach of his or her published output, but requiring complex and sometimes bespoke workflows
• the technologist, eager to understand researchers’ needs but unsure how these will develop and change over time

For those attending the workshop, issues arising from the speakers’ presentations will be discussed in an ‘Ideas Café’, which will be followed by an open discussion session. While this workshop will be particularly useful for practitioners currently working on or with Digital Research and Editing Environments, the IHR actively invites contributions from researchers and scholars who may have further observations, experience of, or different insights into the adoption of these new tools and technologies. Parts of the workshop will be live streamed through the IHR’s History SPOT service, with an option to contribute in real time, allowing interested parties who cannot attend to ask questions during the open discussion.

Speaker biographies:

Mark Hedges is Deputy Director of the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London, and prior to this was Technical Manager at the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS#. Mark took the lead in the planning, design and development of the repository-based infrastructure to support the curation, preservation and delivery of the diverse and complex digital resources managed by the AHDS, and since October 2007 he has been extending the scope of the work to providing a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary research infrastructure for King’s.

Rob Iliffe is the Director of the AHRC Newton Papers Project with an overall responsibility for completing the online publication of all four million words of Newton’s Theological Papers. He is also responsible for extending the scope of the original project to include dealing with Newton’s scientific and mathematical work. Rob gained his PhD from Cambridge University and is currently Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of A Very Short Introduction to Isaac Newton #Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007#, and has published extensively on early modern history and the history of science. He is currently completing a major work on Newton’s theology for online release.

Philip Schofield is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, Director of the Bentham Project, Chair of the Bentham Seminar, and General Editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. In 2010 the Bentham Project was awarded a Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact #DEDEFI) Award from the AHRC to launch the Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative, or Transcribe Bentham for short. The Bentham Project, in collaboration with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, the University of London Computer Centre, UCL Library Services and UCL Learning and Media Services, has created a Transcription Desk where volunteer users can log-in and transcribe previously unstudied and unpublished manuscripts from the Bentham Papers collection in UCL Library’s Special Collections.

Jane Winters has been Head of Publications at the Institute of Historical Research since 1999, and of the new IHR Digital since the autumn of 2010. She is responsible for the IHR’s publishing and scholarly communications strategy, including the management of a range of research projects focusing on the provision of digital resources for historians. Currently, she is Co-Director of the JISC-funded Connected Histories project; Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Early English Laws project to digitize Anglo-Saxon legal texts; and Publishing Editor of the Bibliography of British and Irish History. She is also Executive Editor of the IHR’s journal, Historical Research.

URL:
http://www.livestream.com/historyspot

Event Location:
Wolfson Room, Institute of Historical Research
Malet Street Senate House, North Block
London WC1E 7HU
United Kingdom

Contact details:
Donna Baillie
donna.baillie@sas.ac.uk

Posted by: Donna Baillie (donna.baillie@sas.ac.uk).