Thank you, David Howell!

On 9 June David Howell gave a spell-binding seminar to a packed Centre for DIgital Scholarship: It’s a kind of magic: early results from Analytical Imaging in the Bodleian Libraries.

After a tour through some of the fascinating and high profile conservation projects David has worked on, he turned to a history of analytical imaging techniques, the tricks our eyes use to make sense of the world around us, and, via the mantis shrimp and C5 BCE Persia, to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and hyperspectral imaging. We were very grateful to colleagues from Special Collections for bringing items from the collections to illustrate David’s talk. Alan Coates, Rare Books Assistant Librarian, brought an incunable (a printed book from the earliest years of print), and Gillian Evison, Head of the Oriental Section, brought some of the oldest items in the Bodleian’s collection, the fifth-century BCE Arshama clay seals.

You can recapture a little of the magic through a Storified version of tweets from the seminar, or through David’s slides, which he’s kindly published through Slideshare:

Thank you, David De Roure!

David De Roure‘s seminar Digital Scholarship: Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines presented a magisterial view over the field, tracing paths through it, and pointing to future directions.

We are grateful to David for inaugurating our mini-series of seminars at the Centre for Digital Scholarship, which was so well-attended it had members of the audience sitting on tables.

Sadly we weren’t able to record the seminar, but you can get a flavour of it from the slides David has kindly shared:

There is also a Storified version, appropriately enough, of social media around the seminar.

Seminar—Digital scholarship: Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines

We are delighted to announce the first, open seminar in a series looking at projects and activities in digital scholarship across the University of Oxford.

David De RoureWhat: Digital scholarship: Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines

Who: David De Roure

When: 13.00—13.50, Thursday 28 May 2015

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

Seminar: Today we are witnessing several shifts in scholarly practice, in and across multiple disciplines, as researchers embrace digital techniques to tackle established questions in new ways and new questions afforded by digital and digitized collections, approaches, and technologies. This seminar addresses current activity in digital scholarship, framing it in its multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary settings.

Speaker: David De Roure is director of 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.

This seminar is open to all. No booking is necessary. You can download a flyer for it.

Please meet inside the Parks Road entrance of the Weston Library (opposite the King’s Arms). If you are already in the Library, you can find the Centre for Digital Scholarship on the first floor of the Weston Library, through the Mackerras Reading Room and around the glass walkway.