Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui
We’re thrilled to announce the start of Otago’s Literary Games Group – an open, informal, undergraduate group devoted to the critical study of literary videogames.
The group will meet weekly in the Digital Humanities Hub (Arts Building room 1W4, on Wednesdays at 11am.
Contact literary gamer Jacob Cone for more details: conja458@student.otago.ac.nz
It is with regret that we have decided to call off this DH Bytes seminar and others in the series planned for this semester.
This will probably come as no surprise to most of you, especially given the government and University announcements of Monday and the consequent necessary shifts in our ways of working, teaching, learning and researching.
We hope to revisit the series for Semester 2, and will be in touch when we are able to go ahead.
Take good care in these challenging and unsettling times!
Join us on Thursday 26 March at 1pm for the inaugural dhBytes seminar at 1pm in Seminar Room 6 at the University’s Central Library | Te Iho Mātauranga o Te Whare Wananga o Otago.
The session will feature two presenters from the University Library, Alexander Ritchie and Judy Fisher, who will each speak for 15 minutes on data and drama in the Humanities. Following that we will have some kai, coffee, and discussion. We will also offer an update on DH initiatives at Otago.
The Otago University Digital Humanities Initiative and OU Library are pleased to announce the DH Bytes seminar series, which follow on from last year’s Open Hours Discussions in the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pōkapu Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui.
DH Bytes are a series of three, themed, interdisciplinary seminars in semester one 2020, that will happen monthly on Thursdays at 1pm in the Central Library. They will focus on collaboration, conversation, and connection across disciplines, programmes, departments, and projects both critical and generative.
Continue reading “Announcing DH Bytes – Digital Humanities Seminars this semester”
The Digital Humanities Hub has a new researcher in the mix, the result of a new partnership with Signal ICT Graduate School!
Kerian Varaine will be working on text analysis and data visualisation projects with staff in English & Linguistics. Please welcome Kerian to the Otago DH community!
We’re pleased to announce our first “Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA)-affiliated Research Assistant” for the University of Otago Humanities Division Digital Humanities Hub.
Gavin Ashworth, an artist and art history/linguistics student who has worked in artistic spaces in Sydney and Dunedin, started his role earlier this month.
The main task of the ADA-affiliated Research Assistant is to conduct data analysis of the Aotearoa Digital Arts Network online archive and compare that to other online collections internationally, with the aim of increasing the presence of NZ digital art and literature in those collections.
We’re pleased to announce the addition of a free pop-up workshop to precede this year’s Digital Humanities Expo:
WHO: Dr Christopher Thomson (U. Canterbury)
WHEN: 10 – 11:30am, Monday 14th October 2019
WHERE: HR ITS Training & Development Room 1, 270 Leith Walk [map]
HOW: spaces are limited – register here http://tiny.cc/DHPopUp
CONTACT: email alexander[dot]ritchie[at]otago for further information
This free workshop is for anyone who wants to learn how to use simple code to pull text from webpages for their research.
Using programming language Python, we will work from examples to understand the key steps needed to achieve common tasks, such as obtaining a ‘clean’ text from the web to use for further analysis, or selecting pieces of information and organising them in a structured form, such as a spreadsheet. We will introduce some programming concepts along the way, but will focus on the ‘big picture’ – that is, understanding how these techniques can be used in academic contexts, and how to apply them to your own work.
Register here – http://tiny.cc/DHPopUp
Christopher Thomson is Head of Digital Humanities at University of Canterbury and Co-director of the UC Arts Digital Lab
Join us for this last session in the current iteration of Open Hours, as we reflect on our work so far and think about what comes next. We would like to hear how we have done, and what you would like to see happen in the Hub in the weeks and months to come!
For the last 9 months, Humanities Librarians have been hosting Open Hours presentations, discussions and drop-ins at the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pōkapu Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui. We sought to offer gentle introductions to digital thinking, tools, methods and projects for humanities research and teaching. Our aim was to create an open forum for asking questions, exchanging ideas and methods, and forming connections with colleagues across ‘Digital’ Humanities and between disciplines at Otago.
Now, as we mark Puaka Matariki and anticipate the beginning of semester two in 2019, this pilot collaboration between the OU Library and the Otago DH group is coming to an end. We would love to hear your perspective, so join us for some collaborative critique, crackers and cake.
In many ways, I think you could turn around and look to the digital humanities not as a sign of the apocalypse but for paths out of this mess. Here’s a field that has been working for years on open access research and publication platforms, on ways to articulate and valorize work done outside of narrow, elite channels, and on how to value scholarship that’s collaborative and interdisciplinary.
The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Bethany Nowviskie | Melissa Dinsman interviews Bethany Nowviskie
In 2019, we have been privileged to host some fascinating Open Hours discussions covering topics ranging from digital art and 3d modelling, through machine learning and data wrangling, to audiovisual essays and visualisation:
WHEN: 12pm – 2pm, Friday 5th July 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 [dot] ritchie [at] otago.ac.nz
Join us on Friday 28th June as we host another Open Hours session between 1 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui!
This week’s discussion is with David Hood who works in Human Resources as an Adviser in IT Training and Development. In this position he is responsible for training students and staff in a variety of software applications, and included in this are classes on how to stay safe in the digital environment. However, in his spare time, David is a digital activist, using publicly available data to highlight or unravel misconceptions in social and political issues in the media.
David will discuss some of his data discoveries – including his findings when the alt-right Canadian speakers Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern’s visit to New Zealand caused havoc in the Twittersphere.
Notes & Links from Chloe’s talk [Google Doc]
Our guest this week is Chloe Geoghegan, Art curator at Te Uare Taoka o Hākena | Hocken Collections. Join us as she presents some of her favourite digital art works by contemporary artists, and hear how an Honours paper in digital humanities at UC helped her with her curatorial education.
Artists are hypersensitive to social shifts. They have an innate ability to pick up on trends before they become the norm and highlight them, often by creating art that holds a mirror up to society, asking us to look again with a more self-critical, self-reflective eye. In today’s art world, where mass production, mass consumption and an impending sense of doom follow the most conscious around, artists are taking note, and using the screen as a mirror to force those who take the time to take a closer look.
Sanchez, Michael: “Contemporary Art, Daily.” In Art and Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, edited by Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw, and Nikolaus Hirsch, 52–61. Berlin: Sternberg, 2011.
The competitive image ecology of Contemporary Art Daily is a reflection of economic competition. With a record number of art students graduating from prestigious graduate programs in a market with less money to purchase their work, competition is more intense than ever. And although art since the recession arguably looks more friendly and less strategic, it is, in fact, strategic to the point of paranoia, since it must compete within an increasingly rapid and invasive system of image distribution joined with a system of social surveillance and exchange.
WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 21 June 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
This week we will be viewing and discussing the keynote from last year’s DH Expo.
Harkanwal Singh was the first full-time data journalist working in the Aotearoa NZ media, and was Data Editor at the New Zealand Herald Newspaper until mid-2017. He is currently Founder and Principal at Elements Data Studio, which produces, consults on, and trains people in data visualisation.
His talk is an engaging, wryly-humorous discussion of visualisation, interpretation, narrative and design, which includes some practical suggestions for techniques, tools, and languages to try, and some stellar examples of possibilities.
WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 14 June 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