Collaboration – THATCamp British Library Labs

VOX: Voices Of eXperience

Laura Carletti — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 12:40:28 +0000

What does it happen when Humanists & Technologists work together? What are the challenges and opportunities of cross-field and interdisciplinary collaborations? What is your personal experience?

This Talk session proposes to listen to the voices of Humanists and Technologists involved in cross-field and interdisciplinary collaborations in order to understand what are the main constraints and the main benefits of those collaborations. What works? What doesn’t? Can we identify common problems and strategies to overcome the obstacles?

This proposal arises from the Digital Humanities & Arts Praxis project at the University of Nottingham. DHA Praxis aims to create a space for conversation around interdisciplinarity and to produce recommendations to facilitate the convergence of different fields and disciplines into shared practices.

So, THATCamp at the British Library seems the perfect event to discuss and exchange (Voices Of) experiences and suggestions.

Beyond the Text: Teaching DH with visual sources

Melodee Beals — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 19:29:40 +0000

With one foot firmly in corpus linguistics, Digital History has often been about finding, collecting, collating, manipulating and linking textual information. However, just as historians have learned to move beyond the text in traditional historical research, so too do we need to move beyond the text in our undergraduate DH instruction. What can we do with digitised images, with our students, beyond merely viewing them. How can we manipulate or otherwise analyse them with basic software (cloud or downloadable) tools in a way that is both ‘play’ and assists in developing in core learning outcomes.

I propose a “make” session in which we collaborate to great a seminar-ready package of

Freely accessible historical images
A basic historical or humanities framework in which to understand the image collection (blurb text!)
An undergraduate-friendly activity that students can undertake with minimal software or hardware requirements but which encourages active use of the digital environment for understanding material, visual or audio-visual sources.

I would advocate putting it up on Github at the conclusion of the session to allow for re-use and further development via forking.

Big Data for Musicology

Tillman Weyde — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 12:47:36 +0000

Digital music libraries and collections are growing quickly and are increasingly made available for research. We feel that the use of large data collections need will enable a better understanding of music performance and music in general, which will benefit areas such as music search and recommendation, music archiving and indexing, music production and education. However, to achieve these goals it is necessary to develop new musicological research methods and in addition to create and adapt the necessary technological infrastructure, to find way of working with legal limitations and to collect large scale data. Most of the necessary basic technologies exist, but they need to be brought together and applied to musicology.

We would like to talk about challenges from a digital humanities perspective and discuss methods and solutions that can enrich music research and make good use of existing and new data collections.

In that context we would like to present for discussion our ongoing work in our AHRC projects with the British Library (Digital Music Lab with data visualisations and ASyMMus) and the Spot the Odd Song Out game.

Gamestorming for DH

Paul Matthews — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 22:34:14 +0000

I would like to propose a gamestorming session to playfully combine technologies and applications, guided by current DH research questions. The session can start with sharing the (technical and subject-matter) skill-sets, interests and data sources of the participants, then move on to brainstorm ideas, following by the rapid refinement and peer rating of these ideas.

We can use some of these

The outcome will be potentially viable research/development project ideas, which participants could either sign up to for further collaboration post-camp – or just use as personal food for thought.

Enriching digitised archival content

George Weyman — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 16:19:30 +0000

Over the past year I have been project managing the content workstream of the British Library’s flagship digitisation programme with the Qatar Foundation, now launched and live on a bilingual free-to-use portal at www.qdl.qa.

This service offers a unique resource on the history of the Gulf region, drawing on primary collections at the British Library including the India Office Records, visual arts, digitised sound collections and the maps collections. You can learn more at www.qdl.qa/en/about.

My interest in this session is to riff with some digital tools proposed by the group for enriching the content without any further development to the portal. For example, that might mean:

Developing learning resources with a tool like Creativist.com
Drawing on the published contextual articles (see www.qdl.qa/en/articles-from-our-experts) to produce a Prezi.com
Creating archives of transcriptions and translations of source material (www.qdl.qa/en/search/site/?f%5B0%5D=document_source%3Aarchive_source)
Creating new collections of key content using a service like Diigo, Pinterest, Evernote or Delicious
Mapping key pages on a digital maps service
Extracting data from tables and charts to produce visualisations of issues like the history of slavery or trade
Constructing bi-lingual dialogues between Arabic and English speakers on key topics on Twitter or elsewhere, using multi-lingual translation services , such as Transfluent.com or www.flitto.com/

Or many other ideas besides. I do hope you’ll join and contribute. Here’s a video to help you decide: