The Introduction to Digital Humanities workshop will be held in the Sloane Robinson O'Reilly lecture theatre.

 

Link to overview of the week's timetable including evening events.

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Monday 2nd July

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08.15-09.15

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Registration (Sloane Robinson building)

Tea and coffee (ARCO building)

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09.30-10.30

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Opening Keynote (Sloane Robinson lecture theatre)

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10.30-11.00

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Refreshment break (ARCO building)

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11:00-12:30

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Workshop introductions and keynote (Sloane Robinson lecture theatre)

 

Keynote speaker: Professor David De Roure. Details tbc.

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12:30-14:00

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LUNCH (Dining Hall)

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14:00-16:00

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Bodleian Student Editions Workshops (Weston Library)

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Bodleian Student Editions workshops bring students from across our University together in the Bodleian's Weston Library with items from Special Collections, curatorial, editorial, digital, and research expertise. Through working hands-on with early modern letters, participants are introduced to special collections handling, palaeography, transcription and editorial practices, metadata, and digital text at scale. The letters' transcriptions and metadata are added to Early Modern Letters Online as citable publications.

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This session presents the development of the collaboration behind the workshops, shows some of early modern letters that have been transcribed, pedagogical practice of teaching with collections, and reflects on participants' and workshop leaders' response to the workshops.

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Speakers: Helen Brown, Chris Fletcher, Miranda Lewis, Olivia Thompson, Mike Webb, Pip Willcox

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16:00-16:30

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Refreshment break

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16:30-17:30

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Material Books, Digital Work (Weston Library)

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This session will use a variety of items from the Bodleian Library to explore the complications, challenges and benefits of digital work on material objects.

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Speaker: Daniel Sawyer

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Tuesday 3rd July

 

09:00-10:30

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An Introduction to the International Image Interoperability Framework

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This session will provide an overview of the community-driven standards and software of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), with demonstrations of several IIIF-based tools for comparing, annotating and remixing digitized images.

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Speaker: Emma Stanford

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Introduction to Visualization for Digital Humanities

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This session will explore how visualization can be used in digital humanities projects. We will cover basic concepts of visualization as well as examine existing visualization techniques and applications.

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Speaker: Alfie Abdul-Rahman

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10.30-11.00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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11:00-12:30

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Challenges in Visualizing the Past

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Cultural heritage represents a large portion of our collective legacy and must be recognized for having contributed to the shaping of society today. Study of these legacies can prove valuable to all sub-fields of the arts and sciences. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of knowledge about the past is lost today. This may subtract from what might be learned about traditions, lifestyles and events in history. The correct documentation, rendition and interpretation of extant monuments are therefore vital in order for us to better our understanding of the past and preserve it for future generations. In this session, we will outline how visualization can be used to investigate the past. We will cover basic concepts of visualization as well as examining techniques, best-practices and applications.

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Speaker: Jassim Happa

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12:30-13:00

 

Text at Scale: readable digital archives for humans and machines

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Monday presents some digital approaches to Special Collections. This session considers the possibilities of remediating these texts as structured, machine-readable data and human-usable collections.

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We take a critical perspective on digital archives, looking at case studies of projects based at the Bodleian Libraries including the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). Introducing the idea and practice of markup and XML, we explore the possibilities of modelling text with the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI). 

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Speaker: Pip Willcox

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13:00-14:30

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LUNCH (Dining Hall)

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14:30-15:30

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Invited speaker: Dr Alessandro Vatri: "From (raw) text to annotated corpus: an Ancient Greek example" (shared talk with other workshop strands) O'Reilly lecture theatre

 

Abstract

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This talk will show how Word files containing Ancient Greek texts can be transformed into annotated XML through scripting and Python coding. Methods and concepts demonstrated in the talk include regular expressions, Python string manipulation, XPath, XML manipulation, Python dictionaries and data structures, error handling and logging, and output generation.

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15:30-16:00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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16:00 - 17:00

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Lectures (various venues)

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Wednesday 4th July

 

09:00-10:30

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Text at Scale: readable digital archives for humans and machines (continued)

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Monday presents some digital approaches to Special Collections. This session considers the possibilities of remediating these texts as structured, machine-readable data and human-usable collections.

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We take a critical perspective on digital archives, looking at case studies of projects based at the Bodleian Libraries including the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). Introducing the idea and practice of markup and XML, we explore the possibilities of modelling text with the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI). 

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Speaker: Pip Willcox

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10.30-11.00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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11:00-13:00

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Match, Compare, Classify and Annotate: Computer Vision Tools for the Digital Humanist

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Computer vision is the science and art of artificial visual understanding. Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group is a leading computer vision research group in the Department of Engineering Science, and a long-term collaborator with humanities researchers in fields including archaeology, classics, art history, and librarianship. Computers can now reliably match the same image, differentiate similar images, and identify the same object or person in multiple images. Recently, computers have also begun to understand the content of images. This session will demonstrate how to install and use several of Visual Geometry’s software tools on either sample data provided by instructors, or participants’ own images (which they are encouraged to bring). Participants will leave the session with software and knowledge allowing them to match, differentiate, classify and annotate many kinds of images.

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Speakers: Giles Bergel, Ernesto Coto, Abhishek Dutta

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13:30-14:30

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LUNCH (Dining Hall)

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14:30-15:30

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Cabinet: Teaching with Digital Objects

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Digital technologies are revolutionizing the ways in which museum collections can be made more accessible for education. With support from the University of Oxford’s IT Innovation Seed Fund (2015), a team across multiple departments and museums worked with IT Services to produce an online platform for teaching with objects, using high-resolution 2D and 3D imaging. The result, known as Cabinet, has been adopted by academics across the Divisions, and last year received a University award for the use of new technologies in teaching and learning.

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This talk will cover how Cabinet was developed, what it can do, and how it has been used in Oxford. We will also discuss some case studies of Cabinet’s use for public engagement, improving access to museum collections for multiple audiences, including schoolchildren and partially sighted visitors.

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Speakers: Kathryn Eccles, Jamie Cameron

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15:30-16:00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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16:00-17:00

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Lectures (various venues)

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Thursday 5th July

 

09:00-10:00

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The Zooniverse

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The Zooniverse is the world's largest platform for online citizen science. Over the last decade it has grown from a single astronomy project looking at galaxies to a platform hosting hundreds of different projects in diverse fields such as ecology, biomedical science, and the humanities. You will hear about this transformation and also about how the Zooniverse is continuing to evolve, incorporating machine learning and even helping in the aftermath of humanitarian crises. You will also find out how easy it is to create your very own citizen science project.

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Speaker: Grant Miller

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10:00-10:30

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Hyperspectral Imaging in the Humanities

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Heritage Science within the Bodleian Libraries is a service which provides analytical and advanced imaging techniques to assist researchers. This can be material identification such as the analysis of pigments using Raman spectroscopy, and revealing hidden texts using techniques such as hyperspectral imaging. This presentation will demonstrate how these digital technologies, especially hyperspectral imaging, have been applied to a number of Bodleian items. It will showcase some of the results obtained, and describe how the digital infrastructure has evolved to enable data storage and interpretation.

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Speaker: David Howell

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10.30-11.00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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11:00-13:00

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Linked Data for Digital Humanities: Introducing the Semantic Web

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The Semantic Web can be thought of as an extension of the World Wide Web in which sufficient meaning is captured and encoded such that computers can assist in matching, retrieving, and linking resources across the internet that are related to each other. In a scholarly context this offers significant opportunities for publishing, referencing, and re-using digital research output. In this session we introduce the principles and technologies behind this ‘Linked Data’, illustrated through examples from Digital Musicology.

 

Speaker: Dr Kevin Page

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13:30-14:30

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LUNCH (Dining Hall)

 

14:30-15:30

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​Digital Musicology

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Digital musicology is a sub-field of digital humanities that applies computational tools to music source studies. The forms that music is expressed in, whether it's symbolic music or audio, means that dedicated techniques must be developed to give scholars the tools to understand and interact with these representations. This talk will provide an overview of the different techniques in use by digital musicologists, demonstrated with an introduction to the tools and projects used by these researchers, including the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), and the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project.

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Speaker: Andrew Hankinson

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15:30-16:00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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16:00-17:00

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Lectures (various venues)

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Friday 6th July

 

09:00-10:30

 

Reproducible Research in the Humanities

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Reproducibility, documenting the process as well as the products of study, is an important part of digital research. Many researchers do not have the confidence or training to use some of the tools available to support reproducible research, or to write their own code for analysis. Writing code to automate a process can be one stage of this, and it then needs to be made available and shareable.

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Using the publicly available Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) corpus, this session teaches participants to code some software that will extract data from the catalogue and create a figure based on that data. Participants will learn how to store this figure with the details of its production in a Github repository and give it a license.

Participants will learn version control commands using Git, licensing practices, and some basic Python coding using a pre-existing script. We will import code libraries, and discover data using the index, and to export the data.

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Speaker: Iain Emsley

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10.30-11.00

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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

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11:00-13:00

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An Introduction to Relational Databases

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This session looks at what a relational database is, and when and why it might be helpful to use one. It introduces some basic database concepts, and works through the process of designing one. We also look at some challenges posed by the sort of data often used in humanities projects, and how these might be addressed. Hands-on exercises give participants a chance to put what they’ve learnt into practice.

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Speakers: Meriel Patrick, Pamela Stanworth

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13:30-14:00

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LUNCH (Dining Hall)

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14:00-15:00

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Digital Preservation

 

Have you ever lost important research data, or found digital files that have been corrupted and unusable? Have you considered what you would do if you did? How would you stop that loss from occurring in the first place? Preventing loss and mitigating risks to your digital materials is a foundational aspect of digital preservation. In order to protect your files for long-term access and use, early intervention with digital preservation practices is necessary. This introduction to digital preservation session will provide background on the risks to digital materials and the techniques that can help prevent them from happening to you. Digital preservation is not just the responsibility of libraries and archives: researchers also have an important role.

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Speakers: Edith Halvarsson, Sarah Mason

Speakers: Edith Halvarsson, Sarah Mason

15:00-16:00

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Closing Keynote

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Speaker Biographies

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Alfie Abdul-Rahman completed her PhD in Computer Science at Swansea University, focusing on the physically-based rendering and algebraic manipulation of volume models. She was then a Research Associate at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and joined King's College London in March 2018 as a Lecturer. Her projects include Quill, ViTA: Visualization for Text Alignment, and Poem Viewer. Before joining Oxford, she worked as a Research Engineer in HP Labs Bristol on document engineering, and then as a software developer in London, working on multi-format publishing. Her research interests include visualization, computer graphics, and human-computer interaction.
 

Giles Bergel is Digital Humanities Research Ambassador in the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford. As well as computer vision, his interests include text encoding, linked data and the study of early printed books.

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Helen Brown is a third year DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, based in the Faculty of English. Her research concerns the application of digital editorial and analytical methods to Alexander Pope’s correspondence. Alongside her studies, Helen is a Digital Editorial Assistant at Oxford University Press, working on projects such as Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and the Very Short Introductions series.

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Jamie Cameron is a Research Assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute and has been working on the Cabinet project since 2015. His responsibilities include 3D imaging of museum objects, providing training in photogrammetry, and supporting staff and students in their use of the Cabinet system to produce online teaching resources. He has a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology (University of Cambridge) and an MSc in Archaeological Science (University of Oxford).

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Ernesto Coto is a Research Software Engineer in the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford. He has several years of experience developing software in academic and industry environments. His current research interests are Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Scientific Visualization.

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Abhishek Dutta is a Research Software Engineer in the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) in the University of Oxford.

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Kathryn Eccles is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her research interests lie in the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship, and the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world, particularly through crowdsourcing and other participatory approaches. She is the PI of the Cabinet project.

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Iain Emsley is a PhD student in Digital Media at the University of Sussex. He worked for the Oxford e-Research Centre on various Digital Humanities projects, such as Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST) and Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA), and the Square Kilometre Array. His research interests include sustainability and sonification.

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Chris Fletcher is Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, a member of Oxford’s English faculty and a Fellow of Exeter College. Before coming to Oxford he was a curator of literary manuscripts at the British Library.

 

Edith Halvarsson is Bodleian Libraries’ Policy and Planning Fellow for the Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge project. Edith is responsible for developing Bodleian Libraries’ policies and strategies around digital preservation. She also consults on digital preservation strategy development for Oxford’s group of GLAM institutions. Edith is an archivist by training and has previously worked on the British Library’s FlashBack project and with encoding of archival descriptions.  

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Andrew Hankinson specialises in large-scale high-resolution digital image delivery systems, computer vision, symbolic music encoding, and non-textual search. He currently sits on the board of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and is technical co-ordinator for the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) project. Andrew earned his Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University in 2007 and his PhD in Music Information Retrieval, also from McGill, in 2014. He is currently senior software engineer in the Digital Research team at the Bodleian Libraries.

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Jassim Happa is a Research Fellow in the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research interests include: Computer Graphics, Cyber Security, Human Factors, Human Visual Perception, Resilience, Rendering, Virtual Archaeology and Visualization. He obtained his BSc (Hons) in Computing Science at the University of East Anglia in 2006. After a year of working as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) analyst, he began his PhD in Engineering at the University of Warwick in October 2007 where he developed a number of novel computer graphics techniques to document and reconstruct real-world heritage sites based on empirical evidence available today. He defended his PhD in January 2012, and has since December 2011 worked at Oxford. In more recent years he has spent his research efforts on cybersecurity analytics through visualization, covering topics such as threat modelling, situational awareness, risk propagation, resilience, decision support, privacy as well as cyber threat intelligence sharing. In his research projects he has been responsible for creating, implementing and assessing novel visualization techniques. Teaching wise, he tutors and lectures the Computer Graphics and Physically-based Rendering courses. He also lectures doctoral students for the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security in topics such as situational awareness, intrusion detection and security architecture. Finally, he supervises undergraduates, MSc and doctoral projects.

 

David Howell has been Head of Heritage Science since 2012 before which he was Head of Conservation and Collection Care at Bodleian Libraries. David has worked in heritage for over 35 years have previously been a Conservation Scientist at Historic Royal Palaces where he set up a Conservation Science laboratory. David graduated in Chemistry but is also a graduate in English Mediaeval Studies and has set up a purpose built laboratory within the Weston Library specific to researching library and museum materials.

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Miranda Lewis is the Editor of Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO] and an Associate Member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. With a background in early modern history, art history, and digital scholarship — including nine years on the research project Cultures of Knowledge [CofK] — her own research focusses at present on early modern collections and collecting.

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Sarah Mason is Bodleian Libraries’ Outreach and Training Fellow for the Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge project. She is responsible for developing and delivering the Library’s digital preservation training programme. Sarah runs the major outreach activities from the project, from the DPOC website to presenting at various events throughout the University of Oxford. Previously, she has worked on digitisation programmes and promoted digitised collections through outreach at the State Library Victoria. She was also part of the first Australia and New Zealand cohort of the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation and Outreach Education trainers.

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Grant Miller is a recovering astrophysicist who now works at the University of Oxford as the project manager and communications lead for the Zooniverse.

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Dr Kevin Page is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, where he applies Linked Data to the Digital Humanities through several research projects. He is PI of the AHRC ‘Unlocking Musicology’ project and a Co-I of ‘Digital Delius’, ‘Mapping Manuscript Migrations’ and ‘Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis’. As Technical Director of Oxford Linked Open Data (OXLOD) he works with collections across the Gardens, Libraries, and Museums of the University, and has participated in W3C activities including the Linked Data Platform (LDP) working group. From 2012-15 he convened the Linked Data workshop at DHOxSS, where he now runs the Digital Musicology course.

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Meriel Patrick is an Academic Research Technology Specialist in the Research Support team at IT Services. Much of her work focuses on helping researchers to work more effectively with data. She is also Lecturer in Theology and Philosophy for Wycliffe Hall's visiting student programme, SCIO.

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Daniel Sawyer received a BA in English from Queen Mary, University of London and worked in medical e-learning before taking his MSt and DPhil in English at Oxford. His work mixes literary and textual criticism with quantitative and qualitative codicology. He is currently helping to edit the Wycliffite Bible (the first complete English Bible, translated in the late fourteenth century), and writing the first history of reading for later Middle English poetry.

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Emma Stanford is the Bodleian Libraries’ Digital Curator. She manages the digitization of new and legacy image content via Digital Bodleian, conducts training and outreach, and writes occasionally about digitization policy and public engagement. She holds a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College and an MSc in Library Science from City, University of London.

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Pamela Stanworth has over a decade’s experience working on databases with researchers and departments across the University. She brings a pragmatic approach to building projects that are effective, reliable and sustainable. Pamela’s roots are in engineering, with blue-chip industrial companies, technical consultancy and small businesses. Her commitment in teaching and consulting is to enable people to use appropriate technology in their work, efficiently and to a high standard.

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Olivia Thompson is a DPhil candidate in Ancient History at Balliol College, Oxford. Her thesis focuses on changing notions of physical and intellectual property during and after the civil wars of the late Roman Republic. She is more broadly interested in the history of classical scholarship and ways in which digital research tools can be used to reconceptualize ancient sources (in particular, the correspondence of Cicero) and their editorial tradition.

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Alessandro Vatri (DPhil Oxon) is Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He is mainly interested in communication in the ancient Greek world and, in particular, in the connection between the linguistic form of texts and the original socio-anthropological circumstances of their production and reception. His recent and forthcoming publications focus on ancient textual practices, ancient rhetoric, Greek oratory, and the reconstruction of native language comprehension. His areas of interest also include ancient Greek synchronic and historical linguistics, ancient literary criticism, corpus linguistics, and the digital humanities. His first monograph Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose. A Linguistic Approach (Oxford University Press) was published in 2017.

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Mike Webb is the Curator of Early Modern Archives & Manuscripts, Bodleian Libraries. He has a degree in history and a diploma in Archive Studies, and has a particular interest in the Library’s 17th-century State Paper collections, and letters and diaries 1600-1900. He has curated three exhibitions ranging in subject from the Tudor and Stuart nobility to the First World War. He teaches early modern palaeography to History postgraduates.

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Pip Willcox is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries, a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Director of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and research member of the common room at Wolfson College, Oxford. With a background in scholarly editing and book history, her current research is in the experimental humanities. 

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