What: Illuminating David Livingstone’s 1870 Field Diary with Spectral Imaging

Who: Adrian S. Wisnicki, Megan Ward, Roger Easton, Keith Knox, James Cummings

When: 13:00—14:00, Wednesday 16 November 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

The Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project is an international digital humanities collaboration to apply advanced imaging technology to the study of the manuscript of Victorian explorer David Livingstone. Previously featured in a National Geographic documentary, the project has now concluded its second phase of research (2013–16) and members of the team including scholars and scientists will present on the results. The first phase (2010–13) confirmed that spectral imaging could be applied to recover “invisible” text in some of David Livingstone’s most damaged texts. In the new phase, the team takes the technology in a new direction—to study the material history of Livingstone’s 1870 Field Diary in order to understand its passage across space, time, and through many, many hands. The team will discuss the image processing techniques applied to the diary and how these techniques have helped uncover significant new information about the diary and the many environments through which it has circulated.

Dr Adrian S. Wisnicki is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a faculty fellow of the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. His research focuses on the digital humanities, Victorian studies, and African studies. He directs Livingstone Online and the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Academy, and the Modern Humanities Research Association.

Dr Megan Ward is an assistant professor of English at Oregon State University and Associate Director of Livingstone Online. She specializes in digital archives, material histories, technology studies, and Victorian realism, and is completing a book project titled Human Reproductions: Victorian Realist Character and Artificial Intelligence. She co-directs both Livingstone Online and the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project.

Dr James Cummings is a Senior Academic Research Technology Specialist for IT Services at the University of Oxford. James is founding Director of the annual Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School and previously chair of the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council. His PhD was in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds and he was Director of Digital Medievalist (2009-2012).

Dr Roger Easton has been on the faculty of the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science of the Rochester Institute of Technology since 1986, where he teaches courses in imaging mathematics and optics. Since the mid 1990s, his research interests have focused on imaging tools for historical objects, primarily manuscripts. He was head of the imaging team for the Archimedes Palimpsest project and been a member of the teams for the David Livingstone Diaries, the Martellus World Map, and the palimpsests at St. Catherine’s Monastery.

Dr Keith Knox is an imaging scientist with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL). He has 40 years experience in conducting research in scanning, printing and astronomical image processing. Keith retired in 2015 to focus his efforts on the imaging and recovery of cultural heritage information from historical documents and artifacts.

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.

What: Peaches and lemons are foodstuffs. Trying to classify historical texts using the BBIH Thesaurus.

Who: Simon Baker, Jonathan Blaney, Marty Steer

When: 13:00—14:00, Thursday 6 October 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required

The Institute of Historical Research collates and classifies a large variety of material relating to History in UK Higher Education. With the rise of open access publishing and the proliferation of web resources, keeping up has become more and more difficult. Funding from the AHRC has allowed the IHR’s digital team to explore ways of automatically classifying works based on features such as book blurbs, article abstracts, titles and metadata.

This talk will cover the challenges the AHRC-funded TOBIAS project has met in classifying this material, using the Royal Historical Society’s fine-grained vocabulary of British and Irish history. Techniques the team is trying range from “bag of words” string matching to machine learning.

Simon Baker is the editor of the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH).

Jonathan Blaney is the Project Editor for British History Online.

Marty Steer is the Website Manager at the Institute of Historical Research.

All three speakers are engaged with the TOBIAS project, funded under the  AHRC’s Follow-on Funding Impact & Engagement Scheme.

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 series.

What: A corpus stylistics approach to the discourse of adoption in Picture Books: Social uses of multimodal creativity

Who: Coral Calvo Maturana

When: 13.00—14.00, Wednesday 10 August 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is not required

This presentation explores the discourse of adoption through an analysis of how adoption is linguistically and visually delineated in a corpus of picture books. The aim is to understand how adoption is portrayed, and what the concerns and viewpoints of the three main participants are: child, adoptive parents, and birth parents, as well as those of the voices that surround them.

The study combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis, in which computer-based software is combined with the closer analysis of the individual texts.

The project lies under the umbrella of the major enterprise of understanding how adoption is conceived, the words and patterns used to talk about it, how it is visually represented, and in what ways these choices depict, challenge, and reshape society’s understanding of parenthood and families.

Dr Coral Calvo Maturana is English Lecturer at the University of Cádiz in Spain. Her research interests include stylistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodality. Her doctoral thesis: ‘Motherhood and Poetic Voices in The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay: a corpus stylistics study’, resulted in her special interest in the discourse of adoption, and its multimodal representation in both literary and non-literary texts.

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.

BOOK FREE TICKETS!

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF VENUE: WESTON LIBRARY LECTURE THEATRE.

What: Digital Hermeneutics and Cross Platform Research: Walking to the Theatre in Shakespeare’s London

Who: Thomas Dabbs

When: 13.00—14.00, Thursday 1 September 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is not required but is advisable to ensure your place

By exploring the cross-platform interoperability of new or relatively new digital projects in development, this talk will present a street view of theatre routes that London playgoers walked before and during the Shakespearean period. It will examine the physical environs experienced while ambling to the theatres inside and outside the city and also probe into another crucial walk, the stroll through the St Paul’s precinct.

The nave of St Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk, and the bookshops of Paul’s Cross churchyard instantiated, by a type of cultural accident, a general centre for hearing the news and, for readers, the gateway to remaining au courant. Walking and browsing in this area was something of a prerequisite for playgoers and, for playwrights, a locale where one could hear what was on the buzz and also a reservoir from which to cull material for successful plays.

There have been a number of recent and fines studies connecting London city life with the early modern theatre. This talk will examine how digital initiatives may advance this field by offering more insights into theatre going and into how plays were fashioned for then current audiences by Shakespeare and other playwrights.

Thomas Dabbs is a professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, where he has taught Shakespeare and the English Bible since 2003. Prior to this Dabbs taught at Hiroshima University. He is the author of Reforming Marlowe: the Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist and Genesis in Japan: The Bible beyond Christianity. His recent research and publication focuses on the St Paul’s cathedral precinct in early modern London and the impact of this area on Shakespearean drama. He is a native of the state of South Carolina in the USA.

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.

What: Digital Humanities: Ferment in the Field

Who: David Berry

When: 13.00—14.00, Thursday 2 June 2016

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

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is required 

As Digital Humanities continues to grow and develop as a discipline, both in terms of its interdisciplinary work and the development of research questions specific to itself, there has emerged a number of controversies about its supposed nature. These critical voices have been articulated from a number of disciplinary traditions, but tend to be mostly from the humanities.

This talk will look at the developing field of digital humanities, and examine these sites of controversy in terms of the the changing nature of humanities research, partly due to the undoubted expansion of digital resources and digital scholarship more generally, but also in terms of the history and development of the field of digital humanities understood as somehow contrary to the humanistic pursuits of the university. This talk will look at a number of ways in which digital humanities does indeed suggest new ways of working for the humanities, but also how these can augment existing approaches, rather than necessarily being in opposition to them, but also why they raise such anxieties around the future of the humanities and the university in a digital age.

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, the editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (with Michael Dieter). His forthcoming book in 2016 is Digital Humanities (with Anders Fagerjord).

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.