Keynotes
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Monday 2nd July - Opening keynote:
Dr Victoria Van Hyning - "We're All in This Together" - see video of this talk
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Dr Victoria Van Hyning is Junior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Pembroke College Oxford. She is also the Humanities PI of Zooniverse.org, the world leading academic crowdsourcing organization. Her projects include Science Gossip, Shakespeare's World and AnnoTate.
Abstract:
A large proportion of digital resources such as audio, video, and image files, including those of ornate printed works and handwritten texts, are not yet machine readable and require human attention of some kind to make them discoverable in online catalogs and search engines. This may seem counterintuitive in an age when more and more material is born digital or digitized and placed online, but the automation of descriptive information extraction and transcription lags far behind our ability to create and replicate non-machine-readable digital content. Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) carry much of the burden of making their holdings discoverable to scholars and other patrons, but this activity could be more broadly shared. This talk will explore how and why scholars, cultural heritage/GLAM specialists, and members of the public can work together to carve new pathways through digital collections in order to improve our collective access to the materials that drive scholarly enquiry and lifelong learning. Among the key methodologies that will be discussed are online crowdsourcing and other forms of co-curation and co-creation.
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Friday 6th July - Closing keynote
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Dr Glenn Roe - "After the Flood..."
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Dr Glenn Roe, ARC DECRA Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University. Dr Roe's current research agenda is primarily located at the intersection of new computational approaches with traditional literary and historical research questions.
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Abstract:
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As humanities datasets grow exponentially, scholars are increasingly faced with an over-abundance of research material. While current ‘big data’ techniques – from data mining to distant reading – aim to overcome this sense of textual overload, these same methods also risk disconnecting us from the individual objects of our research. One of the main challenges for the digital humanities is to develop approaches to large-scale text collections that can enable scholarly interpretation at any scale, whether distant or close. This talk will outline attempts at addressing this challenge using data mining and machine learning techniques to explore a variety of datasets drawn primarily from the eighteenth century. The complexity and interpretative capacity of these digital collections serve to demonstrate that our modern notion of ‘information overload’ is in fact much older. From the Renaissance onwards, print culture was shaped by new information technologies developed in order to make sense of the growing textual record. Today, as we grapple with our own data deluge, these techniques can help put our current fascination with big data into perspective, by helping us ensure that the inherent specificity of humanistic enquiry remains viable and vibrant at any scale.
