A Decade in Digital Humanities (Melissa Terras, 27 May 2014)

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H-Digital-History Talk: A decade in Digital Humanities (Melissa Terras, 27 May 2014) Discussion published by Ulrich Tiedau on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 Tonight (6.30pm BST, London time), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, will be giving her Inaugural Lecture titled A decade in Digital Humanities. Although now sold out, this event will be streamed live online at and in the Garwood Lecture Theatre from 6.30pm (1st Floor, South Junction, Wilkins Building, UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT). See also the coverage in the Times Higher Education supplement. A Decade in Digital Humanities In 2004, Blackwell published their Companion to Digital Humanities, lending a new name to the use of computing in the arts, humanities and heritage sectors: the term “Digital Humanities” has been much used, and much criticized, since. In this lecture, Melissa Terras looks back at the decade she has spent at UCL working in the area of applying computing to different areas of humanistic research, ranging from Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts, to Roman documents from Hadrian’s Wall, to 3D scanning of museum collections, to an app for text analysis. A decade on from the coining of the term Digital Humanities, what do we now understand about the potential and issues for the application of computing in the arts and humanities? Venue Speaker Melissa Terras is the Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL's Department of Information Studies. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature, Computing Science (MA, MSc, University of Glasgow), and Engineering (DPhil, University of Oxford) her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras. Citation: Ulrich Tiedau. Talk: A decade in Digital Humanities (Melissa Terras, 27 May 2014). H-Digital-History. 08-15-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3276/discussions/28046/talk-decade-digital-humanities-melissa-terras-27-may-2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1.

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A Decade in Digital Humanities
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2016 9) 1637-1650 ~ ~ ~ УДК 009:004.9 A Decade in Digital Humanities Melissa Terras* University College London London, UK Received 15.02.2016, received in revised form 07.05.2016, accepted 09.06.2016 The paper reviews the meaning and development of digital humanities giving the ex-amples of work published in various DH areas. The paper discusses what using these technologies means for the humanities, giving recommendations that can be useful across the sector. Keywords: digital humanities, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Innovation Curve. DOI: 10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-7-1637-1650. Research area: culture studies. I decided to call my paper “A Decade in paper gives me a rare chance to pause and look Digital Humanities” for three reasons: behind me to see what the body of work built up 1. The term Digital Humanities has been over this time represents. commonly used to describe the application 3. You’ll have to wait for later in the paper to of computational methods in the arts and see the third reason... humanities for 10 years, since the publication, in Who here would be comfortable defining 2004, of the Companion to Digital Humanities1. what is meant by the term Digital Humanities3? “Digital Humanities” was quickly picked up by This paper is also related to the week of UCL the academic community as a catch-all, big tent2 Festival of the Arts, celebrating all things to name for a range of activities in computing, the do with the Arts and Humanities at my home arts, and culture.
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Book of Abstracts
The Association for Literary and Lingustic Computing The Association for Computers and the Humanities Society for Digital Humanities — Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs Digital Humanities 2008 The 20th Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities and The 1st Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Society for Digital Humanities — Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs University of Oulu, Finland 24 – 29 June, 2008 Conference Abstracts International Programme Committee • Espen Ore, National Library of Norway, Chair • Jean Anderson, University of Glasgow, UK • John Nerbonne, University of Groningen, The Netherlands • Stephen Ramsay, University of Nebraska, USA • Thomas Rommel, International Univ. Bremen, Germany • Susan Schreibman, University of Maryland, USA • Paul Spence, King’s College London, UK • Melissa Terras, University College London, UK • Claire Warwick, University College London, UK, Vice Chair Local organizers • Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, English Philology • Riikka Mikkola, English Philology • Mikko Jokelainen, English Philology • Ilkka Juuso, Electrical and Information Engineering • Toni Saranpää, English Philology • Tapio Seppänen, Electrical and Information Engineering • Raili Saarela, Congress Services Edited by • Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen • Mikko Jokelainen • Ilkka Juuso • Tapio Seppänen ISBN: 978-951-42-8838-8 Published by English Philology University of Oulu Cover design: Ilkka Juuso, University of Oulu © 2008 University of Oulu and the authors. _____________________________________________________________________________Digital Humanities 2008 Introduction On behalf of the local organizers I am delighted to welcome you to the 25th Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) at the University of Oulu.
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The Stuff We Forget: Digital Humanities, Digital Data, and the Academic Cycle
The Stuff we Forget: Digital Humanities, Digital Data, and the Academic Cycle Professor Melissa Terras Director, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities [email protected], @melissaterras Vindolanda Texts • Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, England • Texts from AD 92 onwards • Two types – ink texts • Carbon ink on wood. 300 texts survive – stylus tablets • recessed centre filled with wax. 100 texts Close up - Tablet 1563 .Complex incisions .Woodgrain .Surface discolouration .Warping .Cracking .Noisy image .Palimpsest .Long process Image processing: illumination correction Original image After illumination correction Image processing: woodgrain removal -1 Original image After woodgrain removal With thanks to Dr Segolene Tarte, eSAD project, OeRC 1996 - 2008 http://www.collective.co.uk/thrones/htm/index.htm http://wwwcdn.actian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/data_icon1.png Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) •Jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer •Leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law •Influenced the development of welfarism •Advocated utilitarianism •Animal rights, •Work on the “panopticon” •Not founder of UCL, but... •60,000 folios in UCL Sp. Collections •40,000 untranscribed •Auto-icon Baked apple pudding 61/2 per peck. Apples 1 peck 3d peasemeal 12lb 1/2d malt dust 1/2 3/4d milk 1 quart 2d water - D0 - treacle — — — 1 2 eggs — — 1 labour - 1 91/4 Boil & mash the apples stir in the malt dust & treacle, press the mass into a pan; boil the meal, milk & water together till thick, add the eggs and the remainder of JB/107/110/002:
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Crowdsourcing Bentham: Beyond the Traditional Boundaries of Academic History’ by Tim Causer and Melissa Terras
This is a pre-publication version of ‘Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history’ by Tim Causer and Melissa Terras. It will be published in April 2014 in vol. 8 (1) of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/ijhac), and appears here thanks to Edinburgh University Press. 1 Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history Tim Causer, Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, University College London Melissa Terras, Department of Information Studies, University College London Abstract: The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative12 (Transcribe Bentham for short) is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription initiative which engages students, researchers, and the general public with the thought and life of the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), by making available digital images of his manuscripts for anyone, anywhere in the world, to transcribe. Since its launch in September 2010, over 2.6 million words have been transcribed by volunteers. This paper will examine Transcribe Bentham’s contribution to humanities research and the burgeoning field of digital humanities. It will then discuss the potential for the project’s volunteers to make significant new discoveries among the vast Bentham Papers collection, and examine several examples of interesting material transcribed by volunteers thus far. We demonstrate here that a crowd- sourced initiative such as Transcribe Bentham can open up activities that were traditionally viewed as academic endeavors to a wider audience interested in history, whilst uncovering new, important historical primary source material. In addition, we see this as a switch in focus for those involved in digital humanities, highlighting the possibilities in using online and social media technologies for user engagement and participation in cultural heritage.
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Image and Interpretation: Using Artificial Intelligence to Read Ancient Roman Texts"
Terras, M. and Robertson, P. (2005). "Image and Interpretation: Using Artificial Intelligence to Read Ancient Roman Texts". HumanIT, Volume 7, Issue 3. http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/3-7/mtpr.pdf Image and Interpretation: Using Artificial Intelligence To Read Ancient Roman Texts1 Terras, M. ([email protected]) Robertson, P. ([email protected]) Keywords Minimum Description Length, Ancient Documents, Artificial Intelligence, Vindolanda, Knowledge Elicitation, Agents, Information Fusion Abstract The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets have proved particularly difficult to read. This paper describes a system that assists expert papyrologists in the interpretation of the Vindolanda writing tablets. A model- based approach is taken that relies on models of the written form of characters, and statistical modelling of language, to produce plausible interpretations of the documents. Fusion of the contributions from the language, character, and image feature models is achieved by utilizing the GRAVA agent architecture that uses Minimum Description Length as the basis for information fusion across semantic levels. A system is developed that reads in image data and outputs plausible interpretations of the Vindolanda tablets. 1. Introduction The ink and stylus texts from Vindolanda are an unparalleled source of information regarding the Roman Army and Roman occupation of Britain for historians, linguists, palaeographers, and archaeologists. The visibility and legibility of the handwriting on the ink texts can be improved through the use of infrared photography. However, due to their physical state, the stylus tablets (one of the forms of official documentation of the Roman Army) have proved almost impossible to read.
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Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras
2021-09-24 Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the library collections of the future Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras List price £55.00 Product Details Format: Digital (delivered electronically) ISBN: 9781783303762 Published: 2nd Oct 2020 Publisher: Facet Publishing Dimensions: Description Legal deposit libraries, the national and academic institutions who systematically preserve our written cultural record, have recently been mandated with expanding their collection practices to include digitised and born-digital materials. The regulations that govern electronic legal deposit often also prescribe how these materials can be accessed. Although a growing international activity, there has been little consideration of the impact of e-legal deposit on the 21st Century library, or on its present or future users. This edited collection is a timely opportunity to bring together international authorities who are placed to explore the social, institutional and user impacts of e-legal deposit. It uniquely provides a thorough overview of this worldwide issue at an important juncture in the history of library collections in our changing information landscape, drawing on evidence gathered from real-world case studies produced in collaboration with leading libraries, researchers and practitioners (Biblioteca Nacional de Mex́ ico, Bodleian Libraries, British Library, National Archives of Zimbabwe, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Sweden). Chapters consider the viewpoint of a variety of stakeholders, including library users, researchers, and publishers, and provide overviews of the complex digital preservation and access issues that surround e-legal deposit materials, such as web archives and interactive media. The book will be essential reading for practitioners and researchers in national and research libraries, those developing digital library infrastructures, and potential users of these collections, but also those interested in the long-term implications of how our digital collections are conceived, regulated and used.
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OXFORD | 13 JUNE 2014 Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement LONDON | 27 JUNE 2014 SPEAKERS Applying New Digital Methods to the Humanities Dr Michael Athanson ArcGIS and Mapping the Humanities | Oxford Michael Athanson is Deputy Librarian and Geo-spatial Data Specialist in the Maps department at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Dr James Baker Sharing Data from a Researcher’s Perspective | Oxford James Baker is a Curator in the Digital Research team at the British Library, an historian of eighteenth century Britain, and an all round excitable tech human. He has held positions of Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art, was Associate Lecturer in School of History at the University of Kent, and acted as Assistant Project Manager of the ESRC funded ‘City and Region, 1400-1914’ project. Dr Rosemary Bechler “Audience Development … should be everyone's job.” | London Rosemary Bechler is openDemocracy Editor. She chaired the National Peace Council and Peaceworkers UK and edited New Times before joining openDemocracy in 2000. She edited four volumes of Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined (2003 – 2012) and wrote Unbounded Freedom – a guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organizations (2006) for the British Council. Her compilation from the Convention on Modern Liberty was published by Imprint Academic in 2010. Her doctorate was on Samuel Richardson: she has reviewed literature for the TLS and politics for the Political Quarterly. Dr Stewart Brookes Getting Medieval, Getting Palaeography: The DigiPal Database of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts | Oxford Turning the Final Pages: The Digipal Database of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts | London Stewart Brookes is Research Associate on the DigiPal project based at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London (digipal.eu).
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The Challenges and Prospects of the Intersection of Humanities and Data Science: a White Paper from the Alan Turing Institute the Alan Turing Institute
Humanities and data science special interest group The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A white paper from The Alan Turing Institute The Alan Turing Institute Authors Barbara McGillivray (The Alan Turing Institute, and University of Cambridge) Beatrice Alex (University of Edinburgh) Sarah Ames (National Library of Scotland) Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester) David Beavan (The Alan Turing Institute) Arianna Ciula (King’s College London) Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam) James Cummings (Newcastle University) David De Roure (University of Oxford) Adam Farquhar Simon Hengchen (University of Gothenburg) Anouk Lang (University of Edinburgh) James Loxley (University of Edinburgh) Eirini Goudarouli (The National Archives, UK) Federico Nanni (The Alan Turing Institute) Andrea Nini (University of Manchester) Julianne Nyhan (UCL) Nicola Osborne (University of Edinburgh) Thierry Poibeau (CNRS) Mia Ridge (British Library) Sonia Ranade (The National Archives, UK) James Smithies (King’s College London) Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh) Andreas Vlachidis (UCL) Pip Willcox (The National Archives, UK) Citation information McGillivray, Barbara et al. (2020). The challenges and prospects of the intersection of hu- manities and data science: A White Paper from The Alan Turing Institute. Figshare. dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164 2 The Alan Turing Institute Contents Summary ................................................................................................................................
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Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities in Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., and Unsworth, J
Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities In Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., and Unsworth, J. (eds), (2016) "A New Companion to Digital Humanities", (p. 420 – 439). Wiley-Blackwell. http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118680596.html © Wiley-Blackwell, January 2016. Author’s last version provided here with permission. As Web 2.0 technologies changed the World Wide Web from a read-only to a co- creative digital experience, a range of commercial and non-commercial platforms emerged to allow online users to contribute to discussions and use their knowledge, experience, and time to build online content. Alongside the widespread success of collaboratively produced resources such as Wikipedia came a movement in the cultural and heritage sectors to trial crowdsourcing - the harnessing of online activities and behaviour to aid in large-scale ventures such as tagging, commenting, rating, reviewing, text correcting, and the creation and uploading of content in a methodical, task-based fashion (Holley 2010) - to improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections. Building on this, within Digital Humanities there have been attempts to crowdsource more complex tasks traditionally assumed to be carried out by academic scholars: such as the accurate transcription of manuscript material. This chapter aims to survey the growth and uptake of crowdsourcing for culture and heritage, and more specifically, within Digital Humanities. It raises issues of public engagement and asks how the use of technology to involve and engage a wider audience with tasks that have been the traditional purview of academics can broaden the scope and appreciation of humanistic enquiry. Finally, it asks what this increasingly common public-facing activity means for Digital Humanities itself, as the success of these projects demonstrates the effectiveness of building projects for, and involving, a wide online audience.
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Crowdsourcing Bentham
Edinburgh Research Explorer Crowdsourcing Bentham Citation for published version: Causer, T & Terras, M 2014, 'Crowdsourcing Bentham: Beyond the traditional Boundaries of academic history', International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 46-64. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2014.0119 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3366/ijhac.2014.0119 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 This is a pre-publication version of ‘Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history’ by Tim Causer and Melissa Terras. It will be published in April 2014 in vol. 8 (1) of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/ijhac), and appears here thanks
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'Making Such Bargain': Transcribe Bentham and The
‘Making such bargain’: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription1 ............................................................................................................................................................ Tim Causer Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, University College London, UK Kris Grint Institute of Intellectual History, University of St. Andrews, UK Anna-Maria Sichani Department of Literary Studies, Huygens Institute, Netherlands Melissa Terras College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract In recent years, important research on crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector has been published, dealing with topics such as the quantity of contributions made by volunteers, the motivations of those who participate in such projects, the design and establishment of crowdsourcing initiatives, and their public engage- ment value. This article addresses a gap in the literature, and seeks to answer two key questions in relation to crowdsourced transcription: (1) whether volunteers’ contributions are of a high enough standard for creating a publicly accessible database, and for use in scholarly research; and (2) if crowdsourced transcription makes economic sense, and if the investment in launching and running such a project can ever pay off. In doing so, this article takes the award-winning crowd- sourced
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The Challenges and Prospects of the Intersection of Humanities and Data Science: a White Paper from the Alan Turing Institute the Alan Turing Institute
Humanities and data science special interest group The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A white paper from The Alan Turing Institute The Alan Turing Institute Authors Barbara McGillivray (The Alan Turing Institute, and University of Cambridge) Beatrice Alex (University of Edinburgh) Sarah Ames (National Library of Scotland) Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester) David Beavan (The Alan Turing Institute) Arianna Ciula (King’s College London) Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam) James Cummings (Newcastle University) David De Roure (University of Oxford) Adam Farquhar Simon Hengchen (University of Gothenburg) Anouk Lang (University of Edinburgh) James Loxley (University of Edinburgh) Eirini Goudarouli (The National Archives, UK) Federico Nanni (The Alan Turing Institute) Andrea Nini (University of Manchester) Julianne Nyhan (UCL) Nicola Osborne (University of Edinburgh) Thierry Poibeau (CNRS) Mia Ridge (British Library) Sonia Ranade (The National Archives, UK) James Smithies (King’s College London) Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh) Andreas Vlachidis (UCL) Pip Willcox (The National Archives, UK) Citation information McGillivray, Barbara et al. (2020). The challenges and prospects of the intersection of hu- manities and data science: A White Paper from The Alan Turing Institute. Figshare. dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164 2 The Alan Turing Institute Contents Summary ................................................................................................................................
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