Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

Time

9:00 - 15:00, Monday 9th of June

Place

Nelson Room, Pollock Halls, Holyrood Park Road.

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Invited speakers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will present their projects and discuss the challenges, benefits and practicalities of digital humanities research. Participants will then have the opportunity to reflect on how they might utilise such methods in their own projects, talk through ideas with experienced digital scholars and get tailored advice about how best to take their ideas forward.

Following the workshop, participants will be able to bid for a small grant award in order to develop their digital research idea. No prior knowledge or experience of digital humanities or IT is necessary.

Programme

9.00 - 9.30: Opening Remarks and Participant Introductions

9.30 - 11.30: Session One

• David Cooper: Literary Mapping in the Digital Age: Some Forms, Thoughts & Reflections
• Emma Goodwin: Flexing Seed Funding and Extending Research Outcomes... The Case Study of Crowd Map the Crusades
• Heather Froehlich: Of Time, Of Numbers and Due Course of Things

11.45 - 13.15: Session Two

• Daniel Allington: Opportunities, Uncertainties, and Changed Working Relationships: The Affordances of “Digital” Research
• Frances Dickey: From Print to Project Muse: Editing the Online Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot

13.15 - 14.00: Lunch

14.00 - 15.00: Advice Workshop

Registration

The event is free but places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. To register send your name, department and a 200 word statement describing of your current research project and why you are interested in attending to Dr Lisa Otty by May 15th 2014.

Speaker biographies

David Cooper is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University (Cheshire) where his research focuses on the literature of space, place and landscape. His recent academic publications include the co-edited collection, 'Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry' (Liverpool University Press, 2013); and he is a founding co-editor of the new online journal 'Literary Geographies'. He has also published extensively on the exploratory use of digital technologies for mapping out literary texts and is currently co-editing 'Literary Mapping in the Digital Age' for Ashgate's Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series.

Emma Goodwin is a DPhil Candidate at Merton College, University of Oxford, writing a thesis entitled ‘Imagining the Experience of National Identity in late twelfth-century chanson de geste composed in French’. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Collaborative Skills Project, ‘Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagement in the Digital Humanities’ (dhAHRC). Emma also set up the DHCrowdScribe and CrowdMapCrusade (formally MapFirstCrusade) digital projects, which are affiliated to the dhAHRC project and supported by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH). Emma has published on crusade epic and medieval narrative verse and has presented in French and English both in the UK and overseas. She teaches medieval literature to French undergraduates and is a committee member of the Société Rencesvals (British Branch). Emma is a former bursary award holder of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School and will be taking up a funded internship in Digital Humanities at the Deutsche Literatur Archiv in Marbach, Germany in Autumn 2014.

Heather Froehlich is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she studies representations of gender in the Early Modern London plays as part of the Mellon-Funded Visualizing English Print 1470-1800 project between Strathclyde, UW-Madison and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her PhD asks if Shakespeare’s use of gender is representative of Early Modern Drama and Early English Print (EEBO-TCP phase I). You may know her from Twitter, where she tweets as:

Daniel Allington is a lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication at the Open University. Originally a literary theorist and book historian, he studies cultural topics using social scientific methodologies such as discourse analysis, thematic analysis, corpus linguistic analysis, and social network analysis. Over the last few years, he has moved from using commercial software applications developed for research purposes to creating bespoke applications for specific research tasks, which has given him a keen awareness not only of how digital tools expand the possibilities open to researchers, but also of how they close them down. He is currently leading the AHRC-funded research project, Online Networks and the Production of Value in Electronic Music, which combines quantitative analysis of a large ‘found’ dataset with ethnographic interviewing and observation:

Frances Dickey, Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, is a co-editor of The Online Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume III (JHU Press, forthcoming), Vice-President of the T. S. Eliot Society, editor of its journal Time Present, and author of The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2012), a study of the intersections between painting and poetry in portraits by Rossetti, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and other poets.