Lectures
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There will be a choice of additional lectures from Tuesday to Thursday during the Summer School. These will be available on a first come, first served basis.
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"The lectures were my favourite part of the Summer School, owing to their focus, and perhaps also because they brought together participants from multiple strands"
DHOxSS 2017 participant
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Tuesday lectures, 4-5pm
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How to Write a Constitution: Exploring the Records of Multi-party Negotiations - Dr Nicholas Cole
This talk will study examine the Quill Project’s software platform. The Quill Project is an interdisciplinary project that brings together historians and lawyers with visualization and AI specialists. The platform offers tools to model and analyse the records of formal, Parliamentary-style negotiations, supporting both quantitative and qualitative analysis. It is designed to support collaborative research projects. Its flagship project (available online) is a model of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in the United States, and the software developed for this project is being used to support a number of other research projects. This talk will examine the motivations behind and design of the software platform and examine the current technical challenges that we are working on in order to support more effective collaboration and a wider range of material.
Dr Nicholas Cole is the director of the Quill Project and a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He read Ancient and Modern History at University College, Oxford, where he also completed an MPhil in Greek and Roman History and a doctorate examining the contribution of the ancient world to American political thought in the late eighteenth century. He has held research and teaching positions at St Peter’s College Oxford and in the History Faculty, and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. His interest in digital humanities stems from wanting to address two questions: how can digital humanities techniques enable more accurate commentary on complex legal texts, and more generally how can computers support better qualitative judgements on ever-growing corpuses of texts?
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15cBOOKTRADE. The visualization of the circulation of books over time and space and Image-searching tool: How it works - Cristina Dondi and Matilde Malaspina
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Cristina will present 15cV, a powerful tool for the visualization of the movement of 15th-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 500-year period. Unanswered historical queries on the impact of printing on early modern society can now be addressed for the first time. Cristina will illustrate how the project which is making visualization possible, probably one of the largest collaborative enterprises in the humanities, continues to grow and will share its results with the general public in September 2018.
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Cristina Dondi is Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at Lincoln College, and Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL). She is the Principal Investigator of the 5-year project 15cBOOKTRADE, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which started in April 2014.
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Matilde will present the database 15cILLUSTRATION, developed by 15cBOOKTRADE in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford). This searching tool is based on the creation of specific metadata for images through a digital annotation software and on the integrated application to 15th-century printed images of instance-based (i.e. image) and class-based (i.e. text) retrieval technologies. For the first time, 15cI allows scholars to systematically track and investigate the production, use, circulation, and copy of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles, etc. within 15th-century printed illustrated editions.
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Matilde is a DPhil (PhD) student at the University of Oxford and a member of the 15cBOOKTRADE Project. She got her BA and MA from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), where she specialised in Medieval and Humanistic Philology. Her doctoral research concerns 15th-century printed book illustrations, with a focus on Italian editions of Aesopian texts, the Classical author of fables extensively used for primary education over the centuries.
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Learning social dimensions of the lexicon - Professor Janet Pierrehumbert
People learn words from experiences with language. Social groupings and variation in linguistic experience naturally lead to variation in how people pronounce words and what words they know. Some, but not all, of this variation becomes conventionally associated with different social characteristics, thereby acquiring social meanings. Many studies of pronunciation patterns have show these how can convey gender, ethnicity, age and social class. Some words, such as slang words and jargon, also function as social markers. What kind of cognitive processing is involved in learning these patterns? How well do they generalize to interlocutors and new words? In this talk, I will present some experiments that tackle these questions. They indicate that social factors influence learning from a young age, are active in fast unconscious processing, and even generalize them to made-up words like “thrafium” or “pelpcase” that have recognizable subparts.
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Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling at the Oxford e-Research Centre (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford). She received a B.A in Linguistics from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D from MIT in 1980. Much of her Ph.D research on English prosody and intonation was carried out in the Linguistics and AI Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she served as a Member of Technical Staff through 1989. She then joined the Linguistics faculty at Northwestern University. She moved to Oxford in May 2015. One of the founding members of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, an interdisciplinary research organisation that promotes the scientific study of all aspects of language sound structure, she is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Cognitive Science Society.
Wednesday lectures, 4-5pm
The imagination of Ada Lovelace and an Experimental Humanities - Pip Willcox and Professor David De Roure
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In this talk we trace some paths the ideas of Ada Lovelace and her imagination of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine might have taken, focussing on music and creativity. We follow Lovelace's idea that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent".
Our work began at a symposium in 2015 to mark the 200th anniversary of Lovelace's birth, which initiated a series of experiments and demonstrations including simulations of the Analytical Engine, use of a web-based music application, construction of interactive hardware, reproduction of earlier mathematical results using contemporary computational methods, and a musical performance based on crowdsourced algorithmic fragments. Recently we have extended our experiments to include the work of Charles Wheatstone, who deployed an electric telegraph in the same period – a nineteenth-century network.
Our digital experiments bring insight and engagement with historical ideas, and raise questions about the roles of algorithm and human. Our designed digital artefacts can be viewed as design fictions, or as critical works explicating our interpretation of Lovelace’s words: digital prototyping as a means of close-reading (after Galey and Ruecker, 2010). We frame this as Experimental Humanities, in which we also apply the lens of Social Machines.
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David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford. Focused on advancing digital scholarship, David works closely with multiple disciplines including social sciences (studying social machines), humanities (computational musicology and experimental humanities), engineering (Internet of Things), and computer science (large scale distributed systems and social computing). He has extensive experience in hypertext, Web Science, Linked Data, and Internet of Things. Drawing on this broad interdisciplinary background he is a frequent speaker and writer on the future of digital scholarship and scholarly communications.
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Pip Willcox is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. With a background in scholarly editing and book history, she is an advocate for engaging new audiences for multidisciplinary scholarship and library collections using digital methods and technologies. A Senior Researcher at the Oxford e-Research Centre, she acts as a point of liaison between the two departments, and works on projects including Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption and SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines.
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Integration and Linked Data for museums and library collections - Dr Athanasios Velios
This presentation will introduce basic principles and concepts around the integration of cultural heritage records. It will discuss current technologies for the publication of Linked Data including standards for producing thesauri. It will offer an introduction to the CIDOC-CRM ontology and its extensions. It will use examples from Linked Data workflows in relevant projects within and outside Oxford. This is a beginner's introduction and no previous knowledge is required by participants.
Dr Athanasios Velios studied archaeological conservation in Athens and completed a PhD on Computers in Conservation at the Royal College of Arts. He is the OXLOD Data Architect at the Oxford e-Science Research Centre, University of Oxford. His work in OXLOD involves integrating museum records as Linked Data using the CIDOC-CRM ontology.
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Digital Humanities research with The Oxford English Dictionary - James McCracken
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has had a fitful relationship with Digital Humanities: although in principle OED contains information useful for the analysis of historical texts, in practice this information has been difficult to access as computationally tractable data. This talk considers some of these limitations, and then looks at approaches to making OED data more directly useful as part of the computational toolkit for Digital Humanities. We present some sample applications which exploit OED data to support tasks like information retrieval, text annotation, and the reading and interpretation of historical documents.
As well as contributing to Digital Humanities research, OED also stands to benefit enormously from that research. Digital Humanities is transforming historical lexicography, especially through the creation of large and diverse text collections. How should a project like OED position itself to make the most of these opportunities?
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James McCracken is lead developer for the Oxford English Dictionary, developing resources to support OED's lexicographic research, and exploring new applications of OED data. His work includes computational approaches to linguistics, literary studies, and history, with a particular interest in how advances in natural language processing and machine learning can be applied to the analysis of historical texts.
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Thursday lectures, 4-5pm
Wikidata: knowledge representation the easy way - Dr Martin Poulter
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Wikidata is a knowledge base combining biographical, geographical, bibliographic and other kinds of data in a single, open platform. It describes around 50 million things and links to thousands of other databases and authority files. This session will demonstrate some tips and short-cuts in querying Wikidata or linking it to your own research. No knowledge of RDF or SPARQL is assumed.
Martin Poulter has held Wikimedian In Residence roles at the Bodleian Libraries, at the University of Oxford and at Jisc. He has made nearly a million edits to Wikidata and more than 13,000 to Wikipedia. With a PhD in Philosophy, he has helped researchers across several subject areas make use of open platforms and crowdsourcing.
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Art and Neuroscience: change blindness, can you spot the difference? – Dr Chrystalina Antoniades
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Many of us have changed the way we exchange visual information, with the growing accessibility of high-speed internet and the capability of smart portable devices. This talk describes an experiment at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that compares the perception of real-world and on-screen artefacts.
A recent report found that adults in the United States spend an average of more than 8 hours a day accessing media through a device with a screen. Such a significant shift in behaviour warrants further investigation into the differences between on-screen and real-world perception. There is already evidence to suggest that binocular stereoscopic vision (as in real-world viewing) confers an advantage over monocular vision (on-screen) in certain perception performance tasks, including the analysis of complex visual scenes.
Change blindness is a phenomenon where the viewer doesn't notice a change in an image, or "stimulus". To date, the effect has been produced by changing images displayed on screen, as well as changing people and objects in the viewer's environment.
This talk explores possible implications of the results of these experiments for understanding change blindness as well as future directions for research into real-world and on-screen comparisons, and the perception of artefacts in museums.
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Art making, digital curation and real-world value - Laura Molloy, Oxford Internet Institute
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Artists in the UK produce work that benefits society and adds value to the economy, but most are underpaid or unpaid. How can we support the sustainability of art making careers in the real world? This talk provides an overview of a current qualitative interdisciplinary research project that identifies the seeking, creation, management and use of digital objects as a critic element of contemporary art practice, and explores the relationship between digital curation - the active management of digital files over time - and the sustainability of contemporary visual art careers.
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