Bursaries
For 2018 the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School offered a small number of bursaries for summer school attendance to students and early-career researchers. The bursaries are sponsored by the organisers and the University of Oxford e-Research Centre.
The aim of the scheme is to enable students and researchers to go to an event they would not usually have the opportunity to attend, then disseminate what they have learnt to others within the field. This could be in the form of blogs or social media activity during the summer school, a report on their experience, a podcast or a presentation/workshop at their own institution. Further details including the eligibility criteria.
This year's successful bursary holders are:
Shashikala Muthumal Assella
University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka
Introduction to Digital Humanities
I wish to attend DHOxSS 2018 primarily to improve my teaching skills and knowledge on Digital Humanities and secondly to add more value to my research on diasporic literature.
As a member of the teaching staff attached to the Department of English at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, I am keen to introduce Digital Humanities as a core strand for the proposed MA in English, scheduled to commence in 2018. I would like to understand and engage with the concepts of Digital Humanities, especially since it is a completely new subject for me. I would like to follow the Introduction to Digital Humanities strand at DHOxSS 2018, as that will enable me to introduce Digital Humanities to new enthusiasts and researchers whose work in Humanities and literature will benefit
from this knowledge. Further, understanding the intricacies of Digital Humanities will also help me to understand newer forms of research and open source technologies while it will also aid in creating research networks among literary scholars, especially when working from and about South Asia.
DHOxSS 2018 will also assist me with a much needed boost to my own research which focuses on diasporic literature from South Asia. I wish to broaden my knowledge and build on my current research which is mainly textual analysis. I am keen on expanding my research onto audio visual analysis of diasporic representation and creating a larger map of geographic and ethnic representations of South Asian diasporic writers.
Lenka Sediva
Durham University
Introduction to Digital Humanities
In my cultural-historical research I intend to work with digital records of preserved manuscripts and objects from the early nineteenth-century. Combining objects, practices, texts and ideas, my project
focuses on the visual and material culture of domestic science, women and nationalism in early nineteenth-century Bohemia. More precisely, in my doctoral thesis I will use the writings and preserved
objects of the widely-read culinary expert Magdalena Dobromila Rettigova (1785-1845) to argue that the middle-class household was a memory theatre of Bohemian domestic health during the early nineteenth century. I intend to use her manuscripts and published writings as guides to interpret the way she used artefacts. Since all these historical sources are housed in the Museum of Litomysl
(Czech Republic), for most of my research I will work with digital records.
Besides a thorough overview of the theory and practice of Digital Humanities, I expect to gain a better understanding of the complications, challenges and benefits of digital work on material objects which is crucial for my doctoral project. The summer school offers a combination of lectures and presentations with practical
workshops which would provide me with a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge and develop the skills necessary for revealing, visualising and interpreting the past.
Zoltán Szabó
University of Sydney
Digital Musicology
My 2017 PhD thesis argues for a new approach to scholarly music publishing for the digital age. Traditional critical editions in printed form are expensive to produce and unchangeable once they are published. Their critical commentary is often incomplete; editorial emendations may not be clearly differentiated from what is considered to be the original source and so on. A transition to a digital editorial approach, specifically in music editing, is particularly important in the case of works with a problematic source history, such as many compositions by Bach (e.g. the Cello Suites, French Suites, St John Passion etc), Beethoven, Schumann and others.
As part of my post-doctoral research, I am developing a highly customisable digital platform, designed primarily for the production of the Cello Suites (and later, of other repertoire) and aiming to achieve
significantly different goals from already existing experiments with online editions. For example, divergent pitches, rhythms and articulation will be highlighted, sources transparently overlayed and alternative readings easily accessible. The progressive addition of early editions out of copyright will expand the range of possibilities. Suchelectronic editions will fundamentally change the way critical editions are produced and used.
Karen Heath
Rothermere American Institute and Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
Hands-on Humanities Data Curation
Attendance at DHOxSS 2018 will allow me to develop a digital humanities research philosophy and to gain practical skills in a multidisciplinary context. My forthcoming postdoctoral project ‘Transnational Conservative Networks: American Artists and the State, 1890–1945’, seeks to advance scholarly understandings of cultural conservatism as a transnational phenomenon and to demonstrate that art plays a key role in the creation of right-wing identities. Initial research indicates that unpicking the transnational formation of conservative artistic ideas from other discourses may prove problematic, but the Hands-On Humanities Data Curation workshop will provide training in new digital tools, research methods, and theoretical concepts, that will enable me to better gather, explore, search, collate, analyse, and archive my historical primary source
data. I enjoy learning by doing, and I am keen to try out new programmes and techniques to find the most appropriate ones for my project. I am particularly interested in exploring tools for data visualisation, social network analysis, corpus linguistics, and machine learning.
Attendance at the summer school will allow me to learn from others, build international relationships, and develop opportunities for future research collaborations. Given that I have no previous training in this area and that much of what I do is based on my own instincts and experimentation, DHOxSS 2018 will be an excellent academic
investment for the future: it will help me to develop research ideas and methodologies for my new project, and ultimately will enable me to embed the digital humanities in everything that I do.
Emily Di Dodo
University of Oxford
An Introduction to Digital Humanities
I have recently been accepted onto a DPhil course, for which I proposed to create a critical edition of the early modern Castilian translation of the Decameron for which there are six witnesses.
I have several options regarding the presentation of my thesis, one of them being a digital interface which could be published online. The second option would be more widely accessible to any academics who would find it useful for their own research, and it would also facilitate comparisons between the transcriptions which I will produce and allow for more extensive textual commentary which may prove to be more difficult to present in an ordered fashion if I were to limit my
findings to print.
I am interested in this course because it will allow me to learn the most efficient and most accurate way to present my thesis digitally, and once, after my DPhil I decide to expand my research, it will be
much easier to add to in a digital format. Such an expansion may call for participation from other academics who are specialists in other languages into which the Decameron was translated in the early modern period, for example, and again, a digital format would be easier to access and render the collaboration easier to manage.
Louis Henderson
University of Oxford
Quantitative Humanities
I am an MSc Economic and Social History (ESH) student working on poverty in the 18th and 19th century. In particular, I am interested in studying microeconomic strategies for coping with unforeseen loss
of income due to sickness, injury, changes in family structure, etc. As the “economy of makeshifts” literature implies, these solutions could be various and scattershot, with substitutions and adaptations the rule
and not the exception. These practices have understandably uneven archival coverage, but this should not be taken to suggest historical insignificance.
Demographic and macroeconomic evidence suggests that poverty and its “economy of makeshifts” must have been widespread. It is therefore important to stretch what sources there are to their absolute limits. I think that digital humanities methodologies offer a new way
to approach these sources. Although the ESH core courses offer a
background in statistical analysis, this workshop would introduce me to techniques to expand upon my existing quantitative and computational experience. The session on social network analysis could prove useful in considering social capital in the economy of
makeshifts. For instance, shops may have extended informal credit to those they trusted. Additionally, the session on Agent-Based Modeling may prove useful for modelling how the poor chose between
“makeshift” solutions.
Mimi Goodall
University of Oxford
Crowdsourced Research in the Humanities
As a historian, my research involves spending time in a lot of archives, which are often catalogued relatively poorly. There is little information about the actual content of the documents - often just a summary overview. Furthermore, they were often catalogued years ago, by
people whose opinions on the importance of ideas such as gender and race may vastly differ to our contemporary ones.
This means that archives can be very hard to navigate when looking for source material that lies outside the very mainstream and many humanities PhD students, for example, come up against this as a real impediment to their research.
I hope to use the summer school to kickstart an idea that I and two other members of the Oxford History Faculty have begun working on. We would like to create an 'archive wikipedia'. This would be an online database of archival resources. Each time a user was in an archive and they found something in a document that was not described in the catalogue they could enter the record into the database and tag it with key words and perhaps even write a brief description of the document. Users could also search for keywords and come up with
a broader range of archival resources available to them. Attending the DHOxSS will be an invaluable start to this project.
Yelda Nasifoglu
University of Oxford
From Text to Tech
I am particularly interested in developingresearch tools for the history of science,using methodologies from other disciplinessuch as the history of the book. So far, with the limited skills I have acquired on my own in PhP and MySQL, I have been able to create a free searchable
database of the library of the 17th-century scientist Robert Hooke
(www.hookesbooks.com). I've also been using these skills for my current research with the 'Reading Euclid' project based at the History Faculty, Oxford.
There are several other, more complex, projects I would like to implement but need guidance to do so. For these, I'd like to learn the latest techniques in text recognition (especially of early printed
books from 15th to 17th-century), data analysis, and any other techniques that might help automate certain tasks.
Katherine Clough
Newcastle University, Victoria & Albert Museum
Hands on Humanities Data Curation
I am an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership candidate at the beginning of my second year working on the project ‘Curating and Interpreting Historic Collections in the Digital Realm: The Maurice Broomfield Archive' at Newcastle University and the Victoria and Albert Museum. I am particularly interested in attending the Hands-On Humanities Data Curation workshop both for the practical training offered and to learn more about wider conceptual frameworks that address the need to curate data.
I am keen to learn current best practice in data management for using data arising from my own collections-based research. I have started to use (self learnt) digital techniques to explore data visualisation, including OpenRefine and I have started to learn Python. I would greatly value the opportunity of learning more about these digital tools, and meeting other people using them, in a summer school workshop, especially at this point in my doctoral research.
Further, one of my key research aims is to understand how institutional (museum) practices affect the interpretation and use of digital data about collections; i.e. to delineate how museums are sites of particular kinds of data-manufacture and wider knowledge construction and not just stores of object collections. I am interested in expanded notions of curation within museums that extend to include the curation of these layers of data alongside the curation of object collections. I believe this workshop will help form a crucial, stronger foundation for my understanding of Humanities Data Curation in my own research.
Ganit Richter
University of Haifa, Israel
Crowdsourced Research in the Humanities
I am a PhD student in the Department of Information and Knowledge Management. I find this opportunity an excellent and highly relevant experience for practice and a channel for personal development which will certainly be very helpful for my current and future research.
My research interests lie in the fields of serious games for crowds, gamification, motivations for information sharing, computer human interaction, information and communities. In my research, I combine my background in pure mathematics with fields such as psychology and behavior.
Serious games for crowds and gamification are concepts currently gaining momentum in both the industry and academia, especially in light of the phenomenon known as “the “wisdom of crowds”. Arguably, the success of these systems depends upon the motivation for participation and quality of contribution of each individual. While traditional approaches to these challenges have focused on improving software, my research extends in another direction, harnessing the motivational power of games to enhance a desirable behavior. I design feedback mechanisms, based on the motivational role of rewards and incentives, to improve gamification effectiveness and experience. This has important and hitherto little tapped applications in fields such as collaborative environments and culture heritage.
Laura Wright
University of Oxford
Text Encoding Initiative
Laura Wright
University of Oxford
Text Encoding Initiative
In my work on the stage and the senses in the seventeenth century, I have often wished that there were a blog that could catalogue interesting sensory moments (from smell to sound) in obscure or noncanonical texts, which I would encode and upload. I hope to set up a website based around the early modern body, on which information could be added to each limb and bone, 'Wikipedia' style. In addition to being a catalogue of the early modern body, I would make this page a point of discussion, with guest academics offering a
weekly blog outlining a literary text and its relation to the senses. My own work focuses primarily on sound: to be able, for instance, to click on audio links when reading plays, or to be able to digitally
recreate a soundscape, as https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/ has done in
recreating John Donne's sermon, would be invaluable.
My own research focuses particularly on the sense of hearing, in terms of early modern stage sound effects. With sound in mind, I have been hoping to establish a podcast, discussing early modern drama
from the perspective of performance; each episode would approach the staging of a different play. In my work I consider the role of sound technicians (such as those working for the Royal Shakespeare Company) and actors, in preserving and performing sound. Sound is so intangible a subject that using digital resources both to
record and share it is absolutely essential.
I am in the final stages of my D.Phil. in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. I am excited to participate in the Digital Humanities workshop, specifically in Data Curation, in order to gauge new techniques and approaches to systematically collect and process data in regards to objects. I intend to use this workshop to apply new practices to excavations: I collaborate with two ongoing excavation projects in Egypt and my main objective is to classify and process particular finds and place them in a wider, user-friendly scheme for our (and future) research. This workshop will help me define new ways to use documentation methods and to incorporate upcoming practices in Digital Humanities to excavations. I also wish to explore platforms in which I can use this data as a public and accessible forum for other researchers, a concept that is for the most part unfound in archaeological practices.
Hannah Ringheim
University of Oxford
Hands on Humanities Data Curation
Antonio Marson Franchini
University of Oxford
Text Encoding Initiative
As a medievalist, I recognize the importance of employing up-to-date methods and techniques to enquire the sources at the foundation of my research. I majored in Historical Studies with a special interest in XIII Century medieval sermons and a large part of my work revolves around the digital transcription of Latin manuscripts. This is the reason of my interest in the workshop “An Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative”. In the field of study I am currently in, the use of TEI has proven to be useful in building more user-friendly critical apparatuses which enable the reader to better understand medieval texts. Indeed, a medieval sermon is composed of a number of interdependent sections each containing references to other texts (such as the Bible, classical masterpieces, patristic writings) that need to be contextualized. Thus, the usage of mark-up language and hyperlinks is the best way to tackle the transcription and edition of such texts.
Therefore, I am looking forward to attend your summer school so that I will have the chance of deepening my knowledge of TEI. As reported in the summer school program, the attention devoted to subjects such as encoding correspondence, epigraphy and palaeography concurred in sparking my interest. Surely the skills that I will learn during this summer school will bring long term results in my research. As a matter of fact, DHOxSS seems the perfect opportunity to pave my way into the fascinating world of Digital Humanities.
Omer Gunes
University of Oxford
Text To Tech
I have been working in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning for eight years. My doctoral work was to design and develop new NLP techniques to improve the state-of-the-art in information extraction systems. During my PhD, which I was awarded in 2016, I developed an information extraction system named Oxtractor which is an Artificial-Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) focusing on text understanding using natural language processing (NLP) approaches on social data. Oxtractor’s platform has been tested on many different verticals and I am now applying similar techniques to negotiated text as part of the Quill project.
Quill’s core technology extracts named-entities, relations, co-reference resolutions, entities and the aspects of these entities. It actively learns an ontology given negotiated textual data as input and uses this ontology as a model in extracting key information from the content to populate a knowledge base.
The tools that we are creating in Quill are generic and we hope will ultimately have application to the study of a variety of texts. With this in mind, I am very interested in how computational linguistics researchers Dr Barbara McGillivray and Dr Gard B. Jenset have been applying text-processing techniques in the field of humanities. This workshop is a great opportunity to both deepen my knowledge in the field and to expand my professional network.
