Category: digital humanities

[Open Hours Demonstration] Virtual “Reality”: an experiential introduction

Join us on Friday 29th March as we host another Open Hours session between 1 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui!

Topic  – Virtual “Reality” : an  experiential introduction to the real, the unreal, and the just plain cool of VR technology

Our guest this week is Brandon Couch from the English and Linguistics Programme, who will be demonstrating the VR capability in our Creative Media suite and introducing some of its (non)fictional worlds of virtual possibility. Join us as we explore and discuss!

Virtual reality (VR) – the futuristic, far-off technology humanity has dreamt of since we first learned to put images on an electronic screen, is undeniably ‘here’. From the leisure and fun of the Holodeck in Star Trek to the dystopian prison of The Matrix, the concept of a fully engrossing virtual world in which the imagination is the only limit has captured human wonder, curiosity, and anxiety for decades.

Today, the technologies of virtual reality and its counterpart, augmented reality – the overlay of digital features onto the world we see around us – have rapidly advanced, and we have virtual environments which allow participants to engross themselves in worlds both fictional and factual. These include: a virtual reality participant can find themselves face to face with a dragon in the VR adaptation of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, then moments later soar above a digitalised copy of the Grand Canyon in Google Earth VR. They can meditate, train, or dance with people from across the planet in Altspace VR, or experience another dimension – literally – of painting and visual art in the 3D VR art program Tilt Brush.

VR technology has near-boundless potential, and with the virtual experiences available to us now, it’s certainly exciting to consider what the future may hold.

Samsung’s Virtual Reality MWC 2016 Press Conference | Wikimedia Commons

Reading & Viewing

Virtual Reality – Chris Woodward | Explain That Stuff!

An intelligent medium-density overview of VR for the non-technically minded.

Why Virtual Reality is about the change the world – Joel Stein | Time Magazine

A feature article from 2015 outlining the changes that VR headsets could  bring.

I spent a week in a VR headset, here’s what happened – Jak Wilmot | Disrupt

WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 29th March 2019

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

CONTACT: Alexander Ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours] Teaching and Researching with the Audio-Visual Essay | Catherine Fowler

Join us on Friday 22nd February for an Open Hours discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub!

Topic – Teaching and Researching with the Audio-Visual essay

Our guest this week is Catherine Fowler from the Media, Film and Communication programme. She will consider the promise and challenge of audio-visual essays as a research, publishing, and teaching tool.

Over roughly the past 5 years Film and Media scholarship has been animated by the idea of the Audio-Visual essay. Increasingly the argument is made that media studies has always been held back by the inability to respond to our objects of study in their language; rather, when we write about the audio-visual we are always inevitably translating, and something is lost in translation. With the DVD came the opportunity to undertake videographic analysis: by stopping, slowing and repeating images students and researchers have been able to interrogate stylistic features and analyse how the art and politics of films come about. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital editing tools videographic analysis has entered another level.

The audio-visual essay has been born as both a form of assessment for students and research for scholars. The introduction of audio-visual essays raises questions familiar to all those working with digital tools: how can they be ‘counted’ as research? How can they be used to create new knowledge? And how can we ensure that audio-visual essays improve and support students’ writing tasks and scholarship rather than putting both in peril?

Reading & Viewing

Dead Time – Catherine Fowler, Claire Perkins, and Andrea Rassell

Explore both the essay and the creators’ statement in this audio-visual essay published in the [in]Transition journal. Co-creators Fowler, Perkins and Rassell seek on one hand “to respond to debates about whether media scholars can discover anything new by using eye tracking methods”, and on the other “to contribute to discussions as to the balance between the expository and the poetic in audiovisual essays….”

Unseen Screens: Eye Tracking, Magic and Misdirection – Tessa Dwyer and Jenny Robinson

Another piece from [in]Transition which gives some useful background to what research on eye tracking screens typically ‘looks like’.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 22nd February 2019

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

CONTACT: Alexander Ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours] Transcription, text recognition & cultural heritage computing

Join us on Friday 15th February for a one hour discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for this week’s Open Hours!

Topic – Transcription, text recognition & cultural heritage computing

Dr Steven Mills is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. His research is in computer vision, using computers to extract useful information from images and videos. He has a particular interest in cultural and heritage applications, including collaborations with archaeologists, archivists, and artists. He will present the results of preliminary work using deep neural networks to recognise letters and words in handwritten documents from the Marsden Online Archive. He will also attempt to explain what deep neural networks are, apart from “very mysterious”.

Lynn Benson is the Researcher Services Manager for Hocken Collections. She will explore some international initiatives and developments that are possible paths for the Library to follow in our goals to improve delivery of our digitised and born-digital collections.

Reading – Here’s How Google Deep Dream Generates Those Trippy Images | Madison Margolin

An introduction to the images produced by Google’s Deep Dream computer vision platform with an excellent video explanation by Dr Mike Pound.

You can even try generating your own images with one of the online Deep Dream generators:  https://deepdreamgenerator.com/

Image of the Otago University Clocktower processed and filtered by the Google's Deep Dream software
A Deep Dream of the Otago University Clocktower

Projects – READ, Visualize the Public Domain, Venice Time Machine, Arabic Scientific Manuscripts, Gravitron

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 15th Feburary 2019

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

CONTACT: Alexander Ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz

Te Pōkapu Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui | the Digital Humanities Hub: Coming up in 2019

 

Heard about the digital in the Humanities, but wondering what all the fuss is about?

2019 will be a busy and exciting year at Te Pōkapu Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui | the Divisional Digital Humanities Hub as we explore local.global projects, demonstrate tools, and critique thinking and practice in the digital realms.

Continue reading “Te Pōkapu Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui | the Digital Humanities Hub: Coming up in 2019”

[Open Hours Week 7] – Form 3 Party this Friday!

 

Ever wonder how new digital humanities courses are created?

At the University of Otago, all it takes is a Digital Humanities Hub, some imagination, and a mysterious document called a Form 3. For this week’s Open Hours, we invite you to help us dream up and develop DIGI200, a new digital humanities paper in the works for 2020…

Join us for our “Form 3 Party” this Friday 7 Dec from 12 noon to 1pm, as we chart a course called DIGI200: methods and critique, which promises to: develop exciting project-based assessment; cultivate keen critical eyes on our current digital culture; and draw on a wealth of inter-disciplinary and cross-divisional expertise at Otago in the process.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 7 December 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

HOST: David Ciccoricco

[Open Hours – Week 2] – A ‘New Modesty’? Reading and analysing texts with computers

Nau Mai Haere Mai ! Join us on Friday 2nd November between 12 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for the second of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Digital Methods and Tools for Analysing Text

Following on from last week’s spirited discussion about what Digital Humanities (DH) could be, this week we will be exploring weird and wonderful possibilities for reading and visualizing texts using quantitative methods and statistical analysis.

Reading – Seven ways humanists are using computers to understand text | Ted Underwood

“In short, there are a lot of new things humanists can do with text, ranging from new versions of things we’ve always done (make literary arguments about diction), to modeling experiments that take us fairly deep into the methodological terrain of the social sciences.”

This 2015 blog post gives a useful, engaged overview of ways in which Humanities scholars are reading and analysing texts in digital realms. The author, Ted Underwood, teaches in both Information Sciences and English Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in North America. 

Image - Textual Map of different approaches to digital text analysis - Ted Underwood
A few things you might do with text by Ted Underwood

Projects & Tools – QueryPic and VoyantTools

QueryPic – http://dhistory.org/querypic/create/

A tool developed by Tim Sherratt, Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at University of Canberra to offer an additional way of seeing, searching and understanding the digitised newspapers made available by Trove and Papers Past.

VoyantTools – https://voyant-tools.org/ 

VoyantTools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts, developed and maintained by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell. It can be used to model and visualize textual corpora, as in the wordcloud below which uses The LA Review of Books Special Interview Series The Digital in the Humanities to attempt a distant reading definition of ‘Digital Humanities’.

Join us in the Hub to explore, enquire and discuss!

WHEN: 12pm – 2pm, Friday 2nd November 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

LIBRARIANS: Chris Seay – christopher.seay@otago.ac.nz, and Lisa Chisholm – lisa.chisholm@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours Week 1] – What Could Digital Humanities Be?

Join us this Friday 26th October between 12 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for our first Open Hours!

Topic – Possibilities for the digital with/in Humanities

Rather than add to the definitional drama that the “what is…” formulation provokes, we thought that we’d start by asking a slightly different guiding question: What could Digital Humanities be?

Reading – What DH Could Be | Stewart Varner

Our first reading, and the inspiration for this approach, is a 2016 blogpost by Stewart Varner, Librarian and Managing Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, entitled What DH Could Be. His musings were inspired by Élika Ortega, scholar at NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks at Northeastern University in Massachussetts, USA. She was in turn inspired by the twitter hashtag #WhatifDH2016 – an digital intervention to suggest improvements for the annual Digital Humanities conference.

Projects – William Blake Archive & Invisible Australians

To accompany the questions and possibilities that Varner traverses, I propose two projects to explore:

Join us in the Hub to explore, enquire and discuss!

WHEN: 12pm – 2pm, Friday 26th October 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

DUTY LIBRARIAN: Alexander Ritchie – alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz

Announcing Open Hours @ Te Pokapū | The Hub

Wondering what the ‘Digital’ Humanities are and what all the fuss is about?

Hoping to connect with others for pointers on digital tools or resources?

Looking to start a digital project but don’t know where to begin?

Starting from Friday 26th October, Open Hours will provide a weekly opportunity to explore the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui, and chat with a Humanities Librarian to find out more about the ‘Digital Humanities’ (or DH) at Otago and beyond. Continue reading “Announcing Open Hours @ Te Pokapū | The Hub”