Research Uncovered—Altered senses, excited brains and ageing grey matter: investigating the brain basis of autism, schizophrenia and dementia

StevenChanceWhat: Altered senses, excited brains and ageing grey matter: investigating the brain basis of autism, schizophrenia and dementia

Who: Steven Chance

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 31 May 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

Research into the brain basis of neuropsychiatric conditions can use clues to identify which brain regions are implicated, based on the known relationships between brain structure and function. Using human brain tissue donations as well as live brain scanning, in Oxford University we are conducting research into the brain architecture of basic sensory processing and higher cognitive functions which are disrupted in these neuropsychiatric conditions. This talk describes recent developments that will fuel current and future neurobiological and clinical research, including potential new biomarkers and neuroimaging technology.

Steven Chance: After studying for an undergraduate degree in Human Sciences at UCL in London, Dr Chance undertook his doctoral research in psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He was then awarded a research fellowship and he and his research group have since conducted several research projects on the neurobiology and functional anatomy of autism, schizophrenia and dementia. He is now Associate Professor in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford where he is also co-director of the UK Autism Brain Bank. He has been one of the pioneers in the application of post-mortem brain imaging and in the assessment of columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in neuropsychiatric conditions.

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— Digital Wildfires: the challenge of provocative content on social media

digital wildfireWhat: Digital Wildfires: the challenge of provocative content on social media

Who: Helena Webb

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 24 May 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are hugely popular in modern life and bring many benefits. However they also risk ‘digital wildfires’ in which provocative content in the form of hate speech, misinformation or inflammatory posts etc. spreads rapidly and causes serious harm to individuals, groups and communities.

This talk describes current research on digital wildfires. The research examines how provocative content spreads on social media and the impacts that it has. It also seeks to identify ways to promote the responsible governance of social media – in which the harms caused by digital wildfires are prevented or limited but rights to freedom of speech are also protected.

Helena Webb is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. She works as part of the Human Centred Research group, which examines the inter-relationships between technology and social practices. She has worked on a variety of research projects and is interested in communication, organization and the use of technology in everyday work and interaction. Most recently she has been working on the ‘Digital Wildfire’ project.

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—Crowdsourcing and Humanities Research

victoria-van-hyningWhat: Crowdsourcing and Humanities Research

Who: Victoria Van Hyning

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 17 May 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required 

Is crowdsourcing a viable tool for literary historians and critics to use in their research? How might the fruits of crowdsourced projects be used for both close and ‘distant’ reading in the humanities? This talk will provide an overview of ‘Shakespeare’s World’: a collaboration between the world-leading academic crowdsourcing group called Zooniverse.org (Oxford) the Folger Shakespeare Library which heads up the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project, and the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Shakespeare’s World’ invites members of the public to transcribe manuscript material from the Folger collection. The outcomes will be incorporated into the Folger catalogue, and be made freely available for research. This talk will provide some early findings and visualizations of the resulting data.

Dr Victoria Van Hyning completed her doctoral work at the University of Sheffield, in the department of English Language and Literature, where she held a British Library co-doctoral award. Her work focused on English nuns in exile between 1550 and 1800, and their literary activities. Shortly after completing her doctoral studies she began work at Zooniverse, in Oxford, as the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, and led the development of AnnoTate (with Tate Britain), Science Gossip (with the Biodiversity Heritage Library) and ‘Shakespeare’s World’. She now holds a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the English Faculty at Oxford, is the Humanities PI of Zooniverse, and a JRF at Pembroke College.

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.

Digitized image service update

Access to many of the Bodleian’s digitized images has been compromised due to a recent hardware failure. The images on Digital.Bodleian are still fully accessible, but the images on one of the Bodleian’s older viewing interfaces, viewer.bodleian, are temporarily unavailable, as are some other image archives. Resources that have been partially or totally affected include:

  • Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project
  • Serica digitization project
  • Shelley Godwin Archive

A plan is in place to rebuild the affected resources in the next weeks and months. For more information, please see this post on the Polonsky Project website.

Research Uncovered—CabiNET: Integrating Text and Object in Oxford Teaching

Giovanna VitteliWhat: CabiNET: Integrating Text and Object in Oxford Teaching

Who: Giovanna Vitelli

When: 13.00—14.00, Tuesday 3 May 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: No booking required registration is required and will open shortly

Digital technologies are revolutionising the accessibility of museum collections, increasingly perceived of as intellectual assets in the university environment. The CabiNET project, funded by the University’s IT Innovation Challenges fund, brings specialists from the Oxford Internet Institute, IT Services, and the Faculty of History together with the Oxford University Museums to create an online platform to integrate museum objects used in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching into the traditional text-based curriculum. Cross-subject teaching with the collections is proving to be a powerful enhancement of the student learning experience, and this project addresses the demand for improved digital access to museum materials as an essential part of that experience.

The CabiNET project is using new high-resolution 2D and 3D imagery to assist students in further study and revision of objects they first encounter as part of their course work. The balanced presentation of both texts and objects for courses uploaded onto the interactive platform provides a rich array of teaching tools and materials for research and study.

Dr Giovanna Vitelli is Director of the University Engagement Programme at the Ashmolean Museum, which is tasked with expanding the use of the museum’s collections across the full range of Oxford’s faculties. The UEP, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is an acknowledged leader in the field of cross-disciplinary teaching and a catalyst for new academic approaches to integrating material culture in the curriculum. Giovanna, together with her UEP colleagues, was awarded a 2015 Oxford Teaching Excellence Award.

Giovanna is an archaeologist and anthropologist whose research and teaching interests centre on the early modern period in Europe and the colonial world, with emphasis on 17th and 18th century social history and the relationship between people and things.  She has taught extensively across Oxford’s departments using the collections of the Ashmolean; she is also co-teaching with curatorial colleagues in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Museum of the History of Science, and co-convening courses with faculty in other departments.

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 Talks, Trinity term

ResearhUncoveredVerticalWhite192x273We are delighted to announce the Centre for Digital Scholarship’s Trinity term Research Uncovered talks. These are talks given by experts from across the University and are open to all. Book a place and join us to discover more about current research using digital methods.

 

  • 3 May
    CabiNET: Integrating Text and Object in Oxford Teaching
    Giovanna Vitelli, Ashmolean Museum
  • 10 May
    The Drones Club: Consumer UAVs, their (ab)uses and some possible countermeasures
    Richard Baker, Cyber Security Network
  • 17 May
    Crowdsourcing and Humanities Research
    Victoria van Hyning, Faculty of English
  • 24 May
    Digital Wildfires: the challenge of provocative content on social media
    Helena Webb, Department of Computer
  • 31 May
    Science Altered senses, excited brains and ageing grey matter: investigating the brain basis of autism, schizophrenia and dementia
    Steven Chance, Neuropathology Department
  • 7 June
    TBC
    Richard Harrington, Department of Population Health
  • 14 June
    #Brexit or #StrongerIn? The Rhetoric of EU Referendum Hashtags
    Yin Yin Lu, Oxford Internet Institute

Talks are all 13.00–14.00 on Tuesdays in the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library. Places can be booked through the Bodleian’s What’s On as registration for each one opens.

You can download a flyer for the talks.

Digital Scholarship and ORA Drop-ins and Coffee Afternoons, Trinity Term

Drop-in surgeries and coffee afternoons will be held on Mondays in term-time 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 Trinity term we will be holding drop-in surgeries again in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship where we can discuss or advise you one-to-one. We are delighted to be joined by colleagues from the 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 25 April
  • Monday 9 May
  • Monday 16 May
  • Monday 23 May
  • Monday 6 June
  • Monday 13 June

Please note that these will not be held on the two bank holidays in May.

Introducing the IIIF First Folio

The First Folio in the Universal Viewer

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and to celebrate the opening of the Bodleian Libraries’ “Shakespeare’s Dead” exhibit, we have added our copy of the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and created a IIIF manifest that allows the full structure of the book to be displayed in Digirati’s Universal Viewer.

The Bodleian’s First Folio has an unusual history: it was acquired by the Bodleian when it was printed in 1623, then sold off a few decades later, then rediscovered and repurchased for the Bodleian through a crowdfunding campaign in the early 1900s. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, another public campaign in 2012 raised funds for the Bodleian to stabilize and digitize the First Folio and, later, to create full-text TEI transcriptions of each play. The images and transcriptions can be viewed and downloaded from the First Folio project website. Now, by adding the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and creating images and metadata that are compatible with the standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework, we are opening up this resource for further use by institutions and researchers across the world.

Creating the IIIF First Folio was a multi-step process. Adding the images and metadata to Digital.Bodleian allowed us to generate a bare-bones IIIF manifest, which included page-level metadata but did not reflect the structure of the plays. To allow users to navigate through the book’s contents, we then hand-edited the manifest to add nested ranges of images corresponding to each play and scene. The finished manifest is almost 30,000 lines long.

Digital.Bodleian’s embedded image viewer doesn’t support image ranges, so instead, we’re directing users to the Universal Viewer, a IIIF viewer produced by Digirati, the Wellcome Library, the British Library and the IIIF community. The Universal Viewer—which can be accessed directly from the First Folio in Digital.Bodleian by clicking on the purple “UV” button—features an “Index” panel that displays the multiple levels of structural hierarchy described in the First Folio’s IIIF manifest. The Universal Viewer is also embeddable, so if you like, you can add the First Folio to your own website. You can also link to particular parts of each page, as the URL of each Universal Viewer session is live-updated with the coordinates of the part of the image you are currently viewing. (For example, here is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech.)First Folio in its box

Finally, this re-publication of the First Folio includes several previously-unpublished images of the book’s binding. The Bodleian’s copy is rare in that it has not been rebound since its initial printing almost 400 years ago, so these images are especially valuable, conveying a sense of the weight, size and condition of the original object.

 

– Emma Stanford

 

Catalogue of 15th century printed books now available to search

Further to work carried out at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services, the TEXT-inc database and an associated TEXT-inc Person Index are now available to search.

The TEXT-inc database is an electronic catalogue of 15th century printed books, otherwise known as incunabula, conceived by the 15C BOOKTRADE Project. The database builds on an electronic version of A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century (project Bod-Inc) and now provides a catalogue of incunabula from collections including the British Library, Venice Libraries, and Oxford Colleges. The TEXT-inc database includes corresponding identifiers in other databases such as ISTC and MEI. The TEXT-inc Person Index describes people related to the incunabula described in the TEXT-inc database.

The public search interface has been implemented using Blacklight, an open-source discovery platform framework. Blacklight is a Ruby on Rails Engine plugin and provides a faceted search interface to a Solr index. The Solr index is updated automatically further to a scheduled query of the Text-Inc relational database that the 15C BOOKTRADE project members use to record details of incunabula.

Blacklight includes useful extensions such as an advanced search form and a date range widget that can be used in the faceted search to limit results by year:

Text Inc date tool

A showcase of how Blacklight has been implemented in other libraries is available on the Blacklight web site.

Further information:

Text-inc database http://textinc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Text-inc Person Index http://textinc-person.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

– Tanya Gray Jones

12th-century Arabic manuscript added to Digital.Bodleian

MS. Huntington 212, fol. 40r

MS. Huntington 212, fol. 40r

Since the launch of Digital.Bodleian last July, the number of images on the site has almost tripled. This is mostly thanks to the ongoing Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, but we have also been undertaking smaller digitization projects for colleges and departments within the University of Oxford. These projects include Hertford College’s Ortelius Atlas, digitized in October, and Exeter College’s Prideaux manuscript.

Our most recent addition is the Bodleian’s MS. Huntington 212, a 12th-century copy of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’s Book of Fixed Stars. This important Arabic manuscript, a treatise on the constellations, is now available to view online via Digital.Bodleian, with catalogue information available via Fihrist. More information about the manuscript can be found in a post by Alasdair Watson over at the blog for Archives and Manuscripts.