Monthly Archives: January 2016

Research Uncovered—Julia Craig-McFeely on Exultation and Despondency: the digital reconstruction of the lost partbooks of John Sadler

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Image: DIAMM of Bodleian Library
GB-Ob Mus. e.4, f.28v

Image: DIAMM of Bodleian Library
GB-Ob Mus. e.4, f.28v

What: Exultation and despondency: the digital reconstruction of the lost partbooks of John Sadler

Who: Julia Craig-McFeely

When: 13.00—14.00, Friday 5 February 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

Among the many examples of Tudor music in Oxford’s libraries is a badly damaged set of partbooks written by schoolmaster John Sadler in the mid 1500s. Acid paper and acid ink has caused burn-through damage to most of the pages in the book, rendering much of the content nearly illegible. The Tudor Partbooks project (a collaboration funded by the AHRC between musicologists at Newcastle University and the University of Oxford) is engaged in restoring Sadler’s books to usability for publication in facsimile form as their fragility means they have not been available to readers since the early 1970s. This talk looks at some of the techniques of digital reconstruction and restoration developed by the Tudor Partbooks team, and some of the difficulties we have encountered, both physical and ethical, in developing this complex process.

The Tudor Partbooks project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Image: DIAMM

Image: DIAMM

Image: DIAMM

Image: DIAMM

Julia Craig-McFeely is DIAMM Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music. She is a director of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, for which she has developed digital restoration techniques to restore damaged manuscripts to readability and a database of manuscript metadata that covers every polyphonic music manuscript prior to 1600. She has published and lectured on English Lute Manuscripts, Early modern scribal identification, digital restoration and imaging techniques for fragile manuscripts, and was the imaging advisor on the pilot project to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls. As a specialist manuscript photographer she has worked on documents as diverse as the Winchester Bible and the diaries of Imogen Holst. She is a collaborator on a number of international projects in digital humanities.

Access: If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.AHRC-logo

Research Uncovered—Martin Maiden on digitizing meningitis: thirty years of sequencing the meningococcus

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Photo: Meningitis Research Foundation

Photo: Meningitis Research Foundation

What: Digitizing meningitis: thirty years of sequencing the meningococcus

Who: Martin Maiden

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 16 February 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

For more than two hundred years, meningococcal disease has been one of the most feared childhood infections, with epidemics occurring unpredictably. Many of these epidemics have been associated with periods of social disruption, such as the two world wars, or particular locations, including the African meningitis belt; however, there was a substantial unexpected and largely unexplained increase in disease in the UK from the early 1980s to around 2010. This period coincided with the development of novel genetic analysis approaches for studying bacterial diseases and this talk will chart the rise and fall of this epidemic focussing on the role of digital technologies in unravelling the mysteries of the meningococcus. This included improvements in our understanding the evolution of this elusive pathogen and the design and testing of novel vaccines. While much has been learned, we are yet to decisively beat meningococcal disease, and global sequence databases, such as the recently established Meningitis Research Foundation Meningococcus Genome Library, will continue to play a major role in improving disease control.

Martin Maiden is Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, visiting Professor the Department of Biosciences at the University of Cardiff, and a Fellow of the Society of Biology. 

Interested in infectious disease from an early stage, Martin Maiden trained in microbiology at the University of Reading fooled by graduate studies in the Biochemistry Department in Cambridge where he became interested multi-disciplinary and evolutionary approaches to investigating biological problems. After a two-year MRC Training Fellowship in Cambridge, he moved to the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, to establish a vibrant group working on meningococcal disease. He was a group leader at NIBSC for nine years, including a sabbatical year at the Max-Planck-Institut für molekulare Genetik, Berlin. In 1997 he left NIBSC for a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship in Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of Hertford College and appointed Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology in 2004. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2010.

Access: If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.

Research Uncovered—Neil Jefferies on Framing Digital Objects within Context and Provenance

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NeilJefferiesWhat: Framing Digital Objects within Context and Provenance

Who: Neil Jefferies

When: 13.00—14.00, Friday 29 January 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

A digital object derives much of its meaning from attributes that are not intrinsic to the artefact itself. A description of the circumstances in which an object was created, and the route by which it came to be to where and how it is now, are prerequisites to an understanding of the object, its significance and meaning. This talk will examine this idea and describe how the use of RDF, and in particular the PROV Ontology, can be used as a generic model that is flexible enough to capture the information required to contextualise almost any digital object in a way that is meaningful to researchers. This applies equally to digital surrogates (and the physical artefacts from which they are derived) as well as born digital texts, data and images.

Neil Jefferies is the Head of Research and Development at the Bodleian Libraries. He was involved with the initial setup of the University’s Institutional Repository, and has subsequently been involved with a number of data repository related initiatives: DISC UK Datashare, the JISC-funded BRII (Building a Research Information Infrastructure) and BID (Bridging the Interoperability Divide) projects, and was a co-PI for the DataFlow and Giving Researchers Credit projects. Neil is Technical Director of the Cultures of Knowledge project and subsidiary country chair of the associated EU COST action, a co-author of the International Image Interoperability Framework and sits on the Steering Group for the Fedora Repository platform. Neil has served on the organising committees of international conferences such Open Repositories, The Preservation and Archiving SIG and Digitalna Kniznica, and runs a regular workshop on Data and Metadata Standards at the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School.

Previously, Neil has worked in a broad range of technology-related fields ranging from chip design and parallel algorithm development for Nortel, writing anti-virus software for Dr Solomon’s, and developing corporate data analytics and workflow systems for companies such as Accenture, Mars Inc and Thames Water. He has an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and an MBA from Warwick Business School.

Access: If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.

Research Uncovered—William Allen on visualizing UK immigration for and with non-academics

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William AllenWhat: Visualizing UK Immigration For and With Non-Academics: Visual Literacy, Engagement, Impact

Who: William Allen

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 2 February 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

Researchers in the humanities and social sciences increasingly visualize their data and results for non-academic audiences like policymakers, civil society organizations, or journalists. They may do this to foster public engagement, or to generate wider research ‘impact’. But not much is known about what makes an ‘effective’ visualization in the first place—or even if this is possible. Using findings from the Seeing Data project this talk explores socio-cultural factors that affect how people perceive visualizations in general. Then, it draws upon visualization practice and outputs from The Migration Observatory to highlight the ways that visualizations can develop public understanding as well as future research questions.

William L Allen is a Research Officer with the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) and The Migration Observatory, both at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the interactions among British media and public perceptions about migration. He also has interests in visualisation, the politics of data, and how non-academic groups engage with migration statistics. He tweets from @williamlallen.

If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.

Research Uncovered—Iris Garrelfs on procedural blending: modelling process in sound art practice

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Iris Garrelfs

Image copyright: Joseph Kohlmaier

What: Procedural Blending: a model of process in sound art practice

Who: Iris Garrelfs

When: 13.00—14.00, Friday 4 March 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

Sound art includes a complex set of practices across multiple modes, media or tools. Expanded from a cognitive science model, Procedural Blending was developed to describe the process of creating intricate works of art. It has some similarities with provenance recording models such as W3C PROV, or CIDOC CRM, but also caters for recording decision points and motivations. This talk will introduce the key features of Procedural Blending and suggest some ways in which it can be applied to making and discussing work, facilitating collaborations and capturing process.

Iris Garrelfs is a sound artist and postdoctoral researcher based at the University of the Arts London. Her practice takes place at the cusp of music, art, technology and sociology, spanning fixed media, installation and performance. Works have featured in major exhibitions, festivals and as part of residencies, including Tate Britain, The Barbican, Liverpool Biennial, the Royal Academy of Arts. Her research explores the process of complex creative practices, and she is the editor of open-access journal Reflections on Process in Sound.

Access: If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.

DIY Digitization Mini-Conference

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MS. Laud Misc. 243 fol. 82v

MS. Laud Misc. 243 fol. 82v, https://flic.kr/p/wyYsyJ, image © Daniel Wakelin

On Friday the 8th of January, the Weston Library hosted a mini-conference on DIY digitization organized by Christine Madsen of the Oxford e-Research Centre, Daniel Wakelin of the English Faculty, and Judith Siefring of BDLSS. The aim of this event was to share and discuss the results of the DIY Digitization research project undertaken by Christine, Daniel and Judith in the past six months, and to learn about small-scale, semi-unstructured or otherwise unconventional digitization projects at other institutions across the UK and abroad. Nineteen librarians and academics gave presentations on the potential role of DIY digitization in teaching and research and its impact on library policy, and Judith presented the results of her survey of researchers.

A more formal report on the outcomes of the day will be forthcoming, but in the meantime we would like to thank everyone who contributed to the event, either by giving a presentation or by taking part in the discussion. We would also like to thank Christine, Daniel, Judith, and Alex Franklin of the Centre for the Study of the Book for organizing such an enlightening and enjoyable day, and the John Fell Fund for making it possible.

Digital Scholarship and ORA Drop-ins and Coffee Afternoons

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2015.05.15.11.34.48 (2)

Drop-in surgeries and coffee afternoons will be held every Monday of term in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship and Visiting Scholars’ Centre (map) and are open to any member of the University .You don’t need an appointment—just come along!

Digital Projects Drop-in Surgeries

Are you thinking of developing a digital project using library collections? Do you have questions about getting it funded, what approach to take, or what might be possible?

During term-time we will be holding regular drop-in surgeries again in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship where we can discuss or advise you one-to-one. This term we are delighted to be joined by colleagues from IT Services Research Support team who bring their expertise and perspective to your questions about research and study.

ORA Drop-in Surgeries

Do you want to know more about depositing your work or searching the Oxford University Research and Data Archives (ORA and ORA Data)?

Colleagues from Bodleian Digital Library will be on hand to answer your questions and offer advice.

Digital Scholarship Coffee Afternoons

The Centre for the Study of the Book has kindly lent us the Visiting Scholars’ Centre to host Digital Coffee Afternoons. If you would like to meet and chat informally with other people interested in working in digital scholarship or with the Libraries’ digital or digitized collections, please come along!

Dates

9.30—11.30: digital projects drop-ins
11.30—13.30: ORA and ORA Data drop-ins
14.00—15.00: coffee afternoons in the Visiting Scholars’ Centre

  • Monday 18 January
  • Monday 25 January
  • Monday 1 February
  • Monday 8 February
  • Monday 15 February
  • Monday 22 February
  • Monday 29 February
  • Monday 7 March

The Centre for Digital Scholarship celebrates its first term

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2015.05.15.11.34.48 (2)The Centre for Digital Scholarship, at the heart of the Weston Library, had a successful first term hosting talks, seminars, workshops, and drop-ins.

Speakers came from across the University and from the international academic community, drawing audiences at all student levels and career stages, as well as professional staff from the Museums and Libraries, academic visitors to the University and members of the public.

Working in partnership with colleagues across the Bodleian and the wider University, the Centre provides a hub for sharing ideas and practices in digital scholarship across disciplines.

Michaelmas Term Talks

Michaelmas Term Training Workshops

We are grateful to all our collaborators, speakers, workshop leaders, and audience members for their enthusiastic engagement with the new Fell-funded Centre, and look forward to welcoming more people through Hilary Term.

—Pip Willcox

Act on Acceptance reaches 1,250 deposits

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The Act on Acceptance programme was launched on 1 October 2015. This programme is a mechanism allowing Oxford researchers to comply with the new mandated Open Access requirements set out by HEFCE for the next REF.

These requirements, which ask for a copy of the accepted manuscript to be deposited into an Institutional Repository within three months of acceptance, come into force on 1 April 2016. Launching on 1 October will allow all researchers to become familiar with the process before the requirements come into effect.

The programme includes the Open Access team, Research Services, Symplectic Elements and ORA. To date we have had over 1,250 deposits, and the rate of deposits continues to climb.

ORA currently receives at least 30 deposits a day via Symplectic Elements. Follow how we’re going on Twitter with the “#actonacceptance” hashtag.

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—Sarah Barkla

Research Uncovered—David De Roure on Ada Lovelace, Numbers, and Notes

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David De Roure

Photo: Angela Guyton

What: Ada Lovelace, Numbers, and Notes—a short journey into music, mathematics and computation at the time of Lovelace and Babbage

Who: David De Roure

When: 13.00—14.00, Friday 22 January 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free; registration is essential

Ada Lovelace’s notes on music and computation inspired the musical content of the Ada Lovelace Symposium held at the University of Oxford in December, on the 200th anniversary of her birth. These included a short operatic work, two commissioned pieces, and music generated by a simulator of Babbage’s analytical engine. This talk will explain our musicological, mathematical, and computational journey to this event, and reflect on digital scholarship 200 years ago and today.

David De Roure is Professor of e-Research and Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has strategic responsibility for Digital Humanities at Oxford and directed the national Digital Social Research programme for ESRC, for whom he is now a strategic adviser. His personal research is in Computational Musicology, Web Science, and Internet of Things. He is a frequent speaker and writer on digital scholarship and the future of scholarly communications.

If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.