Digital Humanities & Arts Praxis

Monday 4th July 2016, 4.00-7.00 pm (an Evening Reception will start at 7.00pm)
Highfield House, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD
Please register through this link on Eventbrite

Between 2014 and 2016, the DHA Praxis project received funding from the University of Nottingham’s Discipline Bridging Award. The project undertook a critical metareflection on the drivers, opportunities and benefits of interdisciplinarity, as well as on the risks and obstacles that researchers face when undertaking collaborative interdisciplinary work. The project considered these issues from the perspectives of the institution and academics, using digital humanities and arts as a case study.

Over the two years, the DHA Praxis project has involved over 200 people in conversations on interdisciplinarity through a set of events: a kick-off meeting, five round-tables, two guest-lectures, a two-day academic writing retreat, and one workshop in collaboration with the British Library. The project also promoted ‘Hidden Tales of the Theatre Royal: Animating the Archive’, an outreach event within the Being Human Festival 2015, which involved over 80 members of the public in an interactive exploration of the Theatre Royal Nottingham’s 150-year history.

The final event of the DHA Praxis project will be hosted as part of the showcase and exhibition organised by the University of Nottingham Research Priority Area (RPA) ‘Heritage and the Digital’. The event will showcase the 2015/16 activities of the RPA, and will provide opportunity to meet RPA members and engage with tools and good-practice documentation they have developed.

The DHA Praxis team will open the RPA event at 4.00pm with a half-a-hour presentation of the activities and outcomes of the project, in particular, the ‘Good Practice Guide’, finalised in June 2016. This document provides a survey of the external and internal stimuli to interdisciplinary research, the main current institutional structures, strategies and policies designed to support it, and the key challenges to its effective implementation. The participants will also have the chance to watch ‘Interrogating Interdisciplinarity’, a specially produced video which provides insights into experiences of academics and researchers and their views on the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinarity.

The detailed agenda of the RPA event is available on Eventbrite.

Wednesday 3rd February 2016, 12.30-4.00 pm (Buffet lunch available from 12.30 pm)
The Lounge, The National Videogame Arcade, 24-32 Carlton Street, Nottingham, NG1 1NN
Please register through this link on Eventbrite.

Hundreds of thousands of digital items and objects are being created and collected for researchers to use such as digitised manuscripts, sheet music, newspapers, maps, archived websites, radio, performances, TV news broadcasts, and artworks, as well as the more expected items like scanned versions of books.

This wonderful cacophony of content is having a significant effect on how institutions like the British Library support the research needs of their users. Will people discover new information when they are no longer restricted to viewing a single page from a single book at a time? How can the BL build systems that provide a coherent route across its content, regardless of whether it is a televised news report or a unique signature drawn in the margins of a map? How can we use crowd-sourced information, computer vision and machine-learning techniques to provide people with better tools to better judge and interpret the context of illustration or work? How can we exploit animations and interactive infographics to better convey the information found in our holdings?

This is the second event promoted by the DHA Praxis project and organised in collaboration with the British Library. The workshop will open with an introduction followed by two presentations of examples of creative use of collection and technology research conducted at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (University of Nottingham). The British Library Labs team will then showcase some of the British Library’s digital content and data, addressing some of the challenges and issues of working with it and how interesting and exciting projects from researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs have been developed via the annual British Library Labs Competition and Awards. Finally, the session will end with an ‘Ideas Lab’ encouraging participants to explore, experiment and think of ideas of what they might do with the British Library’s digital content and data.

The detailed agenda of the event is available here: Activities & Events.

Approximately 30 places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please register at the following link: Experimenting with the BL’s Digital Content and Data

Friday 6th November 2015, 1.15-3.00 pm (Buffet lunch available from 1.00 pm)
Highfield House, Room A11, University Park, University of Nottingham
Please register through this link: https://public-humanities.eventbrite.com

Public engagement is more important than ever to ensure that the impact of research goes beyond academia, and that citizens are actively involved rather than simply informed.

The DHA Praxis project team presents the fifth roundtable in a series of events exploring and interrogating practices of interdisciplinary research. On this occasion, three University-led initiatives of public participation in the arts and humanities will be discussed.

Daniel Mutibwa, University of Leeds, will focus on harnessing digital cultural heritage collection content through community/institutional partnerships. Dominic Price, University of Nottingham, will present ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing project developed in collaboration with Tate and the University of Exeter. Kate Pullinger, University of Bath SpA, will introduce ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, a digital war memorial to which 22,000 people contributed letters.

The detailed agenda of the event is available here: Activities & Events. Please note that places are limited and available on a first-come-first-served basis, so register here to secure your place.

Speakers’ Bios:

Daniel Mutibwa is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds with research interests in the Creative Industries, Research Methods, Digital Culture, Community-based/Co-production Research and Third Sector/Civil Society Studies. Alongside teaching, Daniel works on the research project: Pararchive: Open Access Community Storytelling and the Digital Archive, a project that co-produced a new ‘open access’ digital resource called Yarn that facilitates engagement with and use of public archival material online for storytelling, creative practice and historical research. Daniel is also undertaking report writing for the EPSRC-funded Digital Economy Transformations research project Communities and Culture Network+.

Dominic Price is a research fellow in the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (University of Nottingham) with a background in computer science. His research has focussed on the development of middleware platforms to support crowd-sourcing. In particular crowd-sourcing of ‘experiences’ to support public engagement and the arts. He was the primary developer of the ArtMaps platform and will discuss his experience of the development of the platform from its inception as a simple geographic crowd-sourcing application to a tool for supporting engagement with the Tate gallery’s artworks both on-line and off-line. More information about the project are available on the Tate ArtMaps Blog. The ArtMaps platform is available to the public at http:///artmaps.tate.org.uk.

Kate Pullinger writes novels, short stories, and digital fiction, including transmedia collaborative works. Her sixth novel, The Mistress of Nothing, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, in 2009. Her digital fiction, Inanimate Alice, has won numerous prizes and accolades and has become a leading title in the field of digital literacy and pedagogy. Her new novel, Landing Gear, expands and augments the story of her digital work, Flight Paths. In 2014 she and Neil Bartlett created ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, a digital war memorial to which 22,000 people contributed letters. Kate Pullinger is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University where she leads the Digital Writing PhD group. She lives in London, England. www.katepullinger.com

Wednesday 14th October, 2015, 13.30-15.00 (buffet lunch available from 13.00)
Hemsley Building, Room B7, University Park, University of Nottingham

Guest-lecture events are free to attend, but places are limited so please register in advance to secure your place through the following link:
Digital and Environmental Humanities :: Guest Lecture

As one of the most significant depictions of urban modernity, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is playfully reconceived in the digital age as a “Big-Data” novel (consisting of 18 episodes, 933 pages, 265,000 words, and containing a lexicon of 30,030 terms, titles and expressions). Joyce famously boasted that his aim in writing the novel was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Ironically, it is now Ulysses that is being digitally repurposed by social media, during annual Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin, as well as globally. Dr Charles Travis’ talk will discuss the wider implications of a Digital Environmental Humanities Geographical Information System / Neo-geography model which was originally created to conduct participatory, performative and augmented reality mappings and analyses of the relations between literary and historical discursive practice, social media language activity, and digital eco-system productions of social cultural and urban space.

Dr Charles Travis, PhD Geography, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is currently a senior research fellow with the Trinity Long Room Hub and is conducting research in literary, historical, cultural and human geography, the digital and environmental humanities and the development of digital humanities and geographical information systems methodologies and applications. He is editorial board member of the journal Literary Geography. He published the books “Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS” (Esri Press: 2015) “History and GIS: Epistemologies, Reflections and Considerations” (Springer Press: 2012- with Alexander Von Lunen) and “Literary Landscapes: Geographies of Irish Stories, 1929-1946” (Mellen:2009). His work also appears in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, CITY, and other peer-reviewed publications. He has been a university level teacher in Ireland and the United States for over 12 years, and has published his work in books, edited collection and internationally peer-reviewed journals.

The lecture will start at 13.30, after it there will be space for the Q&A session. The event will end by 15.00. A buffet lunch will be available from 13.00.

Wednesday 13th May, 2015, 14.00-15.30 (coffee available from 13.30)
Highfield House, Room A02, University Park, University of Nottingham

As the digital humanities continue to boom, historians are discovering the potential of big data, computational techniques and corpus-driven methods for opening up new avenues of research. Prof Joachim Scharloth’s lecture – organised in collaboration with the German Historical Institute London – will explore the possibilities and limitations of these new approaches at the intersection of historiography and linguistics.

The automated analysis of huge digital text collections as a method of historical research is becoming more and more popular. But along with its rising popularity, its explanatory power is coming under scrutiny. The talk will focus on how computational methods can be used for a deeper understanding of cultural change from a linguistic angle. Starting with a short introduction to the basic principles of data-driven methods, the lecture will discuss different linguistic categories which can be used as indicators for cultural change and illustrate the corpus-driven approach using empirical evidence from large German newspaper corpora (1946-2014).

Joachim Scharloth is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Dresden University of Technology. His current research focuses on developing linguistic data-driven methods for the analysis of public discourse. Other fields of expertise include social movement research, politics and linguistics, a critique of linguistic methods of digital mass surveillance, and authorship attribution. Joachim has held positions at the Universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg (Germany), the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and Dokkyo University in Tokyo (Japan). His main publications include 1968. Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte (2011); 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-77 (with Martin Klimke, 2008). Joachim’s most recent publication is a special volume on digital text analysis of the “Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik” (ZGL).

The guest lecture will be chaired by Svenja Adolphs, Professor of English Language and Linguistics from the University of Nottingham.

Guest-lecture events are free to attend, but places are limited so please register in advance to secure your place through the following link:
Digital History :: Guest Lecture

Tuesday, 21st April 2015, 12.30-2.00pm (12-12.30pm lunch and registration)
Trent Building, Room C7, University Park, University of Nottingham

The DHA Praxis project team presents the fourth roundtable in a series of events exploring and interrogating practices of interdisciplinary research. On this occasion, several colleagues from arts/humanities and computer science will give 10-15 minute presentations discussing how they and their disciplines conceive space and time, and how these conceptions inform and/or shape their (multi-disciplinary) research practices.

Dr Jo Robinson, Associate Professor in Drama and Performance in the School of English, University of Nottingham, will talk about framing performances. Her broad research interests are in theatre history and historiography, the digital humanities, and nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century theatre and performance with a particular focus on the relationships between place, space, community and region. Her talk at the roundtable is titled “Framing performance: reflections on space and place”.

Dr Dean Blackburn, Lecturer in Modern British History in the Faculty of Arts, will speak about “Time and the Historical Imagination”. Dean’s research engages with the intellectual politics of twentieth-century Britain. He is particularly interested in traditions of progressive political thought and in tracing the way that ideas informed political contestation both within and beyond the parliamentary arena.

Dr Jesse Blum, Horizon Digital Economy Research Fellow, is a computer scientist and will talk about “Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey spacey-wacey… computer science stuff”. Jesse has worked on a number of Computer Science research projects involving data management, analysis and visualisation. His research interests include ubiquitous computing infrastructures, ambient monitoring, and data science; with particular interests in pervasive computing (including Internet of Things), healthcare service delivery systems, and e-social science.

Dr James Pinchin, Research Fellow in Geospatial Science, will give a talk entitled “If you’ve got the time then I’ve got the space”. James’ research concerns the use of multiple sensors to determine the position of dynamic objects. He has worked on projects involving the navigation of people, aircraft, ships and cars in environments from deep mines in the north of England to sea ice in Antarctica. He is currently interested in the use of position for the study of human behaviour at work.

The detailed agenda of the event can be viewed on the project website: http://dhapraxis.wp.horizon.ac.uk/activities-events .

Approximately 30 places are available on a first-come-first-served basis. Please register here: https://dhapraxis-4rt-space-and-time.eventbrite.com .

Lunch will be served during registration from 12-12.30pm.

Wednesday, 18th March 2015, 3-5pm (2.30-3pm coffee and registration in the cloister)
Highfield House, Room A02, University Park, University of Nottingham

This is the third round-table promoted by the DHA Praxis project. The event is organised in collaboration with the British Library, and aims at exploring new ideas and methods to better understand the cultural and historic heritage held in digital form by the Library and how researchers can engage with it.

Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs, and Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs, will talk about the British Library Labs project which is about getting scholars to use the British Library’s digital collections for their research, through various activities such as competitions, hack events and projects. They will present details of the current Labs’ competition which closes on the 30 April 2015 and an interesting experiments with one digital collection, such as the ‘Mechanical Curator’. The team will also be providing access to terabytes of data on the day of the event to get an idea of the kinds of digital content the BL has and some of the challenges researchers face when using it for their work.

Bob Nicholson, Lecturer in History at Edge Hill University, is one of the winners of the 2014 British Library Labs competition, and will give a first-hand account of what it is like to work with the British Library and its digital content and give an overview of the project he worked on, ’The Victorian Meme’ Machine. The project aimed to find Victorian jokes in the Library’s digital archives, create a database of them and then make them re-discoverable through social media, hopefully to bring them back to life and make them funny again.

Maiken Umbach, Head of the University of Nottingham’s History Department, and Professor of Modern History, and Mathew Humphrey, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham (TBC), will talk about the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) they have been working on with the British Library called ‘Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life’ and features maps, political pamphlets, posters, cartoons and many more unique items from the Library’s collections. The content has been co-developed with academics from the University of Nottingham and draws on material showcased in the British Library’s successful 2013 exhibition, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion.
This event will provide an overview of the British Library digital collections, as well as illustrate innovative and creative ways to explore and appropriate the collection for research purposes.

Mike Carey, PhD student in History at The University of Nottingham, will present his PhD project in collaboration with the British Library. Mike’s research is focused on how the Russian revolution was interpreted and used politically in Britain, working from an emotional history perspective. As part of his Collaborative Doctoral Award, Mike is working on an exhibition for the centenary of the Russian revolution at the British Library.

The detailed agenda of the event is available here: Activities & Events.

Approximately 50 places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please register at the following link: https://dhapraxis-3rt-britishlibrary.eventbrite.com.

Tuesday, 17th February 2015, 2.30-4.30pm (2-.2.30 coffee and registration in the cloister)
Highfield House, Room A09, University Park, University of Nottingham

This is the second round-table organised within the DHA Praxis project. In this round-table, the aim is to explore the University of Nottingham framework for collaborations across disciplines.
Dr Chris Satterley, Research Development Manager within RGS, will talk about Interdisciplinarity in the University Research Strategy 2015-2020 and Opportunities for Support. Chris has also responsibility for coordinating the Discipline Bridging Award, and he will introduce the DBA 2015 call for submission (deadline 27th February 2015). Dr Maeve Fitzpatrick, International Development Executive, will talk about the International Research Collaboration Fund. Interdisciplinary projects, funded by the University of Nottingham, will be also presented. An open discussion will follow. The detailed agenda of the event is available here: Activities & Events.

Approximately 25 places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please register at the following link: https://eventbrite.com/event/15567703420/

Thursday, 11th December 2014, 12-2pm (buffet-lunch included)
Study Room, Derby Hall, The University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2QT

This is the first of a series of monthly round-tables organised within the DHA Praxis project. The project – granted a Discipline Bridging Award by the University of Nottingham – is a one-year initiative which aims at experimenting with new ways to promote interdisciplinary research groups.

In this round-table, the aim is to share practices across different disciplines to elicit cross-disciplinary convergences and divergences. In the first part (12-1pm), five speakers – from different Schools of the University of Nottingham – will present their own research practice. In the second part (1-2pm), all the participants will be invited to contribute their own practices and/or reflections. The programme of the event is available here: Activities & Events.

Approximately 22 places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please register at the following link: https://eventbrite.com/event/14571582997

A buffet lunch will be offered during the event.