Workshop—Digital Delius: Editing, Interpretation, and Cataloguing

We regret that this workshop has been cancelled. Please contact the organizers (see below) to find out more about their work on Digital Delius.

This workshop is open to anyone conducting or interested in pursuing research in music and musicology, who would like to learn more about using digital techniques. Undergraduates and postgraduates are most welcome.

Book a place by emailing Joanna Bullivant: please see below for details.

 

What: Digital Delius: Editing, Interpretation, and Cataloguing—workshop

When: 10:00–17:00, Thursday 11 October 2018

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

Open to all

Free

Registration is required: please email Joanna Bullivant (joanna.bullivant@music.ox.ac.uk) by 1 October 2018 with your name, email address, and access and dietary requirements.

How might digital technologies enrich your musicological research in editing, interpretation, and cataloguing, and help you to present your work to others?

We hear increasingly about the importance and possibilities of digital methodologies, but it is not always easy to know how to go about using digital techniques in tandem with more traditional research, or what the benefits of these techniques might be. This workshop uses the ongoing project ‘Digital Delius’ as a case study, showing how a variety of digital techniques and software are being used to cast light on such critical areas of Delius research as sources and variants, editing, interpretation, and cataloguing. The aim is to introduce work in progress and provide a series of guided practical exercises to help participants to gain awareness of skills and methods that can be applied in their own research.

Convenors

Joanna Bullivant is a musicologist, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. She has created the forthcoming digital catalogue of Delius’s works, and is part of the team creating an interactive digital exhibition on Delius for the British Library as part of their new Discovering Music web space.

David Lewis is a researcher based at the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He has recently worked on projects at Goldsmiths, University of London, Universität des Saarlandes and Universiteit Utrecht. He has worked on online resources for instrumental music (Electronic Corpus of Lute Music), music theory (Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works and Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum) and work catalogues (Delius Catalogue of Works). His current research explores uses of Linked Data to support and extend the exploration and sharing of musical information and research.

REGISTRATION

To register, please email Joanna Bullivant (joanna.bullivant@music.ox.ac.uk) by 1 October 2018 with:

  • Your name
  • Current status/research interests (undergraduate, postgraduate etc)
  • Your email address
  • Access or dietary requirements

Research Uncovered—Romantic poetry and technical breakthrough: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive

Book a place!

Paul Eggert
What: Romantic poetry and technical breakthrough: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive

Who: Paul Eggert

When: 13:00—14:00, Wednesday 7 March 2018

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: open to all

Admission: free

Registration: required

This talk will show a new technical solution to an abiding problem – presenting a large body of literary works in multiple versions. It has been trialled in The Charles Harpur Critical Archive, due to be published in June.

Harpur’s work in New South Wales in the mid-19th century makes a perfect case study of the technology. His verses made 900 appearances in the press, but publishing opportunities for him other than in newspapers were almost non-existent. A digital solution addresses the textual problems that defeated the attempts to capture the full range of his poetic achievement in book form.

Paul Eggert is the Martin J Svaglic Endowed Professor of Textual Studies at Loyola University Chicago, and former president of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

This public lecture is co-hosted by the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book and Centre for Digital Scholarship.

Digital Approaches to the History of Science—workshop 2

You are warmly invited to join us at the second day-long workshop on Digital Approaches to the History of Science. These workshops are supported and co-organized by the Reading Euclid project, the Newton Project, the Royal Society, and the Centre for Digital Scholarship.

Book a place!

Digital Approaches to the History of Science

—Life out of a coffin—

When: 9:30—17:00,  Friday 23 March 2018

Where: Faculty of History, University of Oxford, 41–47 George Street OX1 2BE (map)

Access: all are welcome—see below for information on travel bursaries

Admission: free, refreshments and lunch included

Registration is required

Our second one-day workshop will showcase and explore some current work at the intersection of digital scholarship and the history of science. Visualizing networks of correspondence, mapping intellectual geographies, mining textual corpora: many modes of digital scholarship have special relevance to the problems and methods of the history of science, and the last few years have seen the launch of a number of new platforms and projects in this area.

With contributions from projects around the UK and from elsewhere in Europe, these two workshops will be an opportunity to share ideas, to reflect on what is being achieved and to consider what might be done next.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Richard Dunn: the Board of Longitude Project
  • Christy Henshaw: the Wellcome Collection
  • Miranda Lewis, Howard Hotson, Arno Bosse: Cultures of Knowledge
  • Robert McNamee: Electronic Enlightenment Project
  • Grant Miller: Zooniverse Project Builder
  • Yelda Nasifoglu: Hooke’s Books
  • Tobias Schweizer, Sepideh Alassi: Bernoulli-Euler Online (BEOL)
  • Sally Shuttleworth: Diseases of Modern Life or Constructing Scientific Communities

We have taken inspiration from William Stukely’s isolation and seek to converse, as it were, out of a coffin:

in my situation at Stamford there was not one person, clergy or lay, that had any taste or love of learning or ingenuity, so that I was as much dead in converse as in a coffin

Travel bursaries

We are delighted to be able to offer travel bursaries to enable students and early career researchers (up to 3 years beyond the award of most recent degree) to attend. If you would like to apply for a bursary, please contact co-organizer Yelda Nasifoglu on yelda.nasifoglu@history.ox.ac.uk, providing:

  • Your name
  • Your institution
  • Your level of study/year of award of most recent degree
  • Travelling from
  • Estimate of travel cost

These workshops are organized by:

 

 

Quotation:

Lukis, ed. ‘Family Memoirs’, vol. I (1882), p.109, cited in Michael Reed, ‘The cultural role of small towns in England, 1600–1800’, in Peter Clark, Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1882), p.147, via Google Books.

Images:

Tycho Brahe, Tabulae Rudolphinae (Ulm, 1627), frontispiece. Bodleian Library Savile Q 14. Edited in Photoshop by Yelda Nasifoglu.

René Descartes, Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam, 1644), ‘Cartesian network of vortices of celestial motion’, p. 110. Bodleian Library Savile T 22. Edited in Photoshop by Yelda Nasifoglu.

Free workshop—Working with digital text: a hands-on introduction to basic computational techniques

Register by email: see below for details


 

 

What: Working with digital text: a hands-on introduction to basic computational techniques

When: 10:00—16:30, Thursday 22 and Friday 23 February 2018

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

Open to members of the University

Free

Registration is required: please email Emma Stanford with your name, ox.ac.uk email address, department and study/career level

This introductory two-day workshop will help students and researchers get to grips with basic computational analysis methods. It is aimed at an introductory level and will be useful to anyone seeking to work with large amounts of textual data. The workshop builds sequentially on its sessions and attendance at both days is required.

Over two days of demonstrations and hands-on training sessions, the workshop will cover:

  • Online text corpora: What’s out there and how to use it
  • The surprising amount of text-mining you can do with Microsoft Word, Excel and Notepad
  • XML, XPath and XQuery: Textual encoding and getting answers back
  • Using statistics to avoid your own gaffes and spot other people’s
  • Beginning Python programming for the working with text at scale

Please note that catering is not provided.

The workshop is part of the Travelling Roadshow led by Gabriel Egan, Director of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is hosted by the Wolfson College Digital Research Cluster and the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship.

NOTE: attendees are requested to bring a laptop with the latest version of Python and oXygen XML Editor. As a member of the University, using your Single Sign-On you can download oXygen and the required licence free of charge, via IT Services’ Software Registration and Download. If you cannot bring a laptop with you, please let us know before the day.

Registration

Registration is required as places are limited. The event is open to members of the University of Oxford only.

To register, please email Emma Stanford (emma.stanford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) with:

  • Your name
  • Your ox.ac.uk email address
  • Your department and study/career level

Free event–Making the most of digitized images: a IIIF workshop

IIIF workshopWhat: Making the most of digitized images: a IIIF workshop

Who: Emma Stanford and Tim Dungate

When: 13.00-16.00, 26 January 2018

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library

Access: open to all

Admission: free

Registration: required

Learn how to use free tools to make the most of digitized library and museum images with the International Image Interoperability Framework. Want to compare Blake etchings or make your own IIIFrankenstein? In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn:

  • how to compare and manipulate digitized images using Mirador;
  • how to save and share your comparison;
  • what to do if the images you need aren’t available via IIIF; and
  • how to remix images from different manuscripts or collections into a new sequence for research or teaching.

All welcome; no technical or research experience necessary. Please bring your own laptop if you have one. Some of the more advanced tasks will require a text editor such as Sublime Text or Notepad++, both of which can be downloaded for free.

Bodleian Student Editions 2017–2018

Please note that these workshops are now fully subscribed for this academic year, 2017–2018. To express an interest in future workshops, please email Pip Willcox.

Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

Elizabeth Wagstaff letter, 2 May 1621

A collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History

We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

Join the waiting list: see below for details

After a hugely successful pilot run—from which published transcriptions can be seen here—these workshops are in their second year, and are scheduled to take place on the following dates:

Michaelmas Term 2017

  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 23 November

Hilary Term 2018

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 31 January
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 1 March

Trinity Term 2018

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 9 May
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 7 June

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in last year’s workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant last year successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

To hear about future textual editing workshops and other events as they are advertised, please join the digital scholarship mailing list.

Participation is open to students registered for any course at the University of Oxford. If you would like to participate or to join the waiting list, please contact Carmen Bohne, Special Collections Administrator, carmen.bohne@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that registration is only open for Michaelmas term’s workshop. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops: please state the dates on which you are available. Places are limited and will be confirmed for each term’s workshops at the start of that term.

The Bodleian Libraries welcome thoughts and queries from students of all levels on ways in which the use of archival material can facilitate your research. For an idea of the range of collections in the Weston, visit the exhibition Bodleian Treasures: 24 Pairs in the Treasury gallery in Blackwell Hall (http://treasures.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), where some famous items are illuminated through juxtaposition to less known items that prompt reflection on the concept of a treasure. Our next themed exhibition, Designing English, showcasing the graphic design of mediaeval manuscripts in English from Bodleian collections, will open in the ST Lee Gallery on 1 December. For the first two months it will be shown alongside Redesigning the medieval book, a display of contemporary book arts inspired by the exhibition and created as part of a workshop and competition run in collaboration with the English Faculty.

Research Uncovered—Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age

With apologies for the short notice, this talk is cancelled due to ill health. We hope to reschedule it.


What: Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age

Who: David M. Berry, University of Sussex

When: 13:00—14:00, Monday 5 February 2018

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: open to all

Admission: free

In times of deep economic and political uncertainty there is a pressing need to revisit the constellations of concepts grounding the idea of a university. This talk will examine the relevance of ideas that assembled the university in differing historical periods to think about how we might reassemble these notions for possible new constellations of an idea of a university in a digital age.

 

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex and a visiting scholar at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. His recent books include Critical Theory and the Digital (2014), Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (2015, with Michael Dieter) and Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age (2017, with Anders Fagerjord). He was recently awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for his new research on “Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age”.

 

Making Sense of Negotiated Text at Scale: a workshop

Register by email: see below for detailsWhat: Making Sense of Negotiated Text at Scale: a workshop

When: 11:30—14:30, Thursday 30 November 2017

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

Open to all

Free

Registration is required: please email Pip Willcox with your name, email address, and access and dietary requirements

How do we evaluate the relationship between different iterations of ideas in text form?

Speakers

  • Nicholas Cole and Alfie Abdul-Rahman: The Quill Project
  • Radoslaw Zubek, David Doyle, and Abhishek Dasgupta: Measuring Government Policy with Text Analysis project
  • David Price: DebateGraph—Exploring the Intention to Withdraw from the Union
  • Félix Krawatzek: Buying Words? The impact of donations on political language

This workshop brings together experts from four projects which are using digital methods to analyze, understand, and re-present negotiated texts. Taking UK government policy documents, the creation of the American Constitution, current political debate, and the economic cost of political language as their subject matter, each speaker will outline the motivation for their work and the approaches they have taken towards answering questions such as:

  • Are government regulations becoming more or less business friendly?
  • Which State’s representatives contributed the most successful proposals to the American Constitution?
  • What common threads of agreement are there in differing political viewpoints?
  • How much money does it take to change the language in the US Congress?

This workshop will be of interest to people working in history, politics, computational linguistics, visualization, or the application of digital innovation to research.

Alfie Abdul-Rahman is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre where she develops web-based visualization tools for humanities scholars, including for the Quill Project.

Nicholas Cole is a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College Oxford, specializing in the history of political thought and American Constitutional History, and directs the Quill Project.

Abhishek Dasgupta is a doctoral student at Exeter College, studying Foundations, Logic, and Structures in the Department of Computer Science.

David Doyle is an Associate Professor of Latin American Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, and co-investigator of the Fell-funded Measuring Government Policy with Text Analysis project.

Félix Krawatzek is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a Research Fellow at Nuffield College.

David Price co-founded DebateGraph with the former Australian cabinet minister Peter Baldwin and has led DebateGraph’s projects with, amongst others, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, CNN, the European Commission, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Radoslaw Zubek is an Associate Professor of European Politics, a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, and principal investigator of the Fell-funded Measuring Government Policy with Text Analysis project.

This workshop is convened by:

Registration

To register, please email Pip Willcox (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) with:

  • Your name
  • Your email address
  • Access or dietary requirements

Image credit: Global Academic Forum

Digital Approaches to the History of Science: a successful workshop

‘Digital Approaches to the History of Science’, the first of two planned workshops on this topic, was held at the History Faculty in Oxford on 28 September 2018. A total of nearly sixty attendees assembled to hear presentations from a selection of the most exciting current projects in this field from around the UK.

Professor Rob Iliffe, representing the Newton Project, addressed the ongoing challenges and complexity of digitizing and presenting the manuscript writings of Isaac Newton, and Alison Pearn spoke of the related issues faced by the digital side of the ongoing Darwin Correspondence Project. Lauren Kassell, of the Casebooks Project, introduced a very different type of material and spoke of the need to find new ways of representing, encoding and searching the mass of information contained in early modern medical-astrological casebooks.

After lunch two speakers discussed from complementary perspectives the opportunities represented by the very rich archive of The Royal Society. Louisiane Ferlier discussed the digitization of Royal Society journals and the work needed to clean and link the metadata about the articles in them. Pierpaolo Dondio described his work modelling and visualising the network of authors, editors and referees who controlled the content of those paper, and provided examples of the kinds of research outcomes such work can produce. A final talk turned to the use of digital humanities resources in the university classroom: Kathryn Eccles and Howard Hotson described the Cabinet Project, which has made a rich ecology of digital images and objects available to students on a growing list of Oxford undergraduate papers.

Rich discussions took place both around the individual presentations and over lunch and coffee, and this sell-out event has certainly stimulated interest and ongoing discussion about the distinctive opportunities for history of science created by digital scholarship and resources.

Reflections on discussion topics during the workshop by Pip Willcox

The event was supported by the Centre for Digital Scholarship (Bodleian Libraries), ‘Reading Euclid‘, The Royal Society and the Newton Project, and was organized jointly by the Centre for Digital Scholarship and ‘Reading Euclid’. The date for the second workshop will be announced shortly.

—Benjamin Wardhaugh, ‘Reading Euclid’

Top image credit: René Descartes, Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam, 1644), ‘Cartesian network of vortices of celestial motion’, p. 110. Bodleian Library Savile T 22. Edited in Photoshop by Yelda Nasifoglu.

Working with Spreadsheets: a workshop

Image of hand-drawn spreadsheet

What: Working with Spreadsheets: a workshop

When: 10:00—16:30, Tuesday 21 November

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

Access: open to all members of the University

Admission: free

Trainers: Iain Emsley and Pip Willcox

Registration is required: please see below

This workshop is designed for anyone who works with spreadsheets and wants to learn how to explore that data more efficiently and consistently. No prior experience is required. The hands-on workshop teaches basic concepts, skills, and tools for working more effectively and reproducibly with your data.

We will cover data organization in spreadsheets and OpenRefine for managing data.

By the end of the workshop participants will be able to manage and analyze data effectively and be able to apply the tools and approaches directly to their ongoing research.

The workshop draws on lessons prepared by Data Carpentry and adapted by the trainers for use with Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership data.

The methods that you will learn will be applicable to work in any field that uses spreadsheets. The EEBO-TCP subject matter we will use may be of particular interest to people working with library or early modern data.

Registration

To register, please email Pip Willcox (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) with:

  • Your name
  • Your ox.ac.uk email address
  • Your departmental affiliation

This workshop is run in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Scholarship and the Reproducible Research Oxford project.

For announcements about future workshops and related activities run by Reproducible Research Oxford, please see the project website, subscribe to the mailing list, and follow the project on Twitter @RR_Oxford.

Equipment

Participants are requested to bring a laptop. To work with with spreadsheets, you will need an application such as Microsoft Excel, Mac Numbers, or OpenOffice.org. If you don’t have a suitable program installed, you might like to use LibreOffice, a free, open source spreadsheet program.

You will also need OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) and a web browser, and to have Java installed.

If you cannot bring a laptop with you, please let us know before the day.

Trainers

Iain Emsley works for the University of Oxford e-Research Centre on digital library and museums projects. Having recently finished an MSc in Software Engineering, he has started a PhD in Digital Media at Sussex University.

Pip Willcox is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries and a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre.

Image credit: Stockbyte/Getty Images.