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Open Hours in June & DH Expo 2019

As semester one teaching ends, exams begin, and Puaka Matariki approaches, we thought it a good time to update you about upcoming Digital Humanities happenings in Te Pokapū | the DH Hub.

Open Hours  @ Te Pokapū

Open Hours are informal sessions where staff and postgraduate researchers, teachers and librarians can explore digital projects, demonstrate digital research tools, and critically discuss the context and politics of the digital in the Humanities. These are informal discussions, hosted by a librarian, academic or postgraduate student presenting on a Digital Humanities (DH) topic, and all voices (and people belonging to them) are welcome.

On Fridays in June at 1pm, we will be hosting critical discussion and viewing sessions on topics including archaeology, data ‘stories’, digital art practice, digital security, and a wrap-up of the year so far:

Te Pokapū | The Hub will also be open from 12 – 1pm on Fridays for the hour before these discussions. You are very welcome to stop by and check out the space, or chat to a Humanities Librarian about your research or teaching.
More details about the Open Hours and Drop-In Sessions can be found on the news section.

Otago Digital Humanities Expo 2019

This year’s Digital Humanities Expo will take place on 14th October in the Burns / Arts Building – watch the new OU Digital Humanities Expo pages for more details and updates over the coming months. Programme details and videos (where available) from past Expos are also now available on those same pages.
The OU DH Expo is an annual event organised by the Digital Humanities Working Group to showcase Otago University’s digital humanities scholarship alongside national and international speakers and projects.

Learn more about Te Pokapū | The Hub 

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[Open Hours Discussion] Analogue archaeology and the digital toolkit | Dr Tim Thomas

Join us on Friday 7th June as we host another Open Hours session between 1 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui!

Topic  – Analogue archaeology and the digital toolkit

Our guest this week is Dr Tim Thomas from the Department of Archaeology at Otago. He will be discussing his experiences in using digital technologies within Archaeology and sharing some of the projects he’s been working on.

Tim’s work is often interdisciplinary and uses multiple sources of data, including archaeological evidence, oral history, and archival records. He has experience in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and through various research projects has been working with new digital forms of data collection, documentation and dissemination – including the use of a drone to map and 3D model landscapes.

Reading

These readings discuss the importance, and limitations, of preserving cultural monuments and heritage sites around the world (at risk from natural disasters, war, tourism or urbanisation) and how advancing technology such as 3D scans and drones are assisting Archaeologists, Researchers, Libraries, Museums and nonprofit organisations around the world to achieve this.

Google Unveils Incredibly Detailed 3D Models of At-Risk Heritage Sites

Preservationists race to capture cultural monuments with 3D images

Projects

Open Heritage  – Open Heritage is an initiative to provide free access to high resolution 3D data of cultural heritage sites across the world. It is a joint project between CyArk, Historic Environment Scotland and the University of South Florida Libraries. This includes two 3D models and data sets from New Zealand Waitangi Treaty Grounds- Waitangi – Ngātokimatawhaorua and Waitangi – Te Whare Rūnanga.

 

WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 7th 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: Lisa Chisholm: lisa.chisholm@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours Discussion] Generous Interfaces: Delivering Access to Rich Cultural Heritage Collections

Join us on Friday 12 April for an Open Hours discussion between 1 and 2pm at the Digital Humanities Hub | Te Pokapū Matihiko o Te Kete Aronui!

Topic  – Generous Interfaces: Delivering Access to Rich Cultural Heritage Collections

Our guest this week is Lynn Benson, Researcher Services Manager at Te Uare Taoka o Hākena | Hocken Collections. She will explore international initiatives that offer possible paths to follow, as OU Libraries seek to provide ever better access to their digitised and born-digital collections for teaching and research. Lynn is particularly interested in the different ways institutions are experimenting with how to present digital collections to support different searching methodologies for these particular kinds of research collections.

Viewing

The Goldfinch: a bird’s-eye view | Mauritshuis

Still image with text" A little piece of nothing ... but very good" from the website The Goldfinch: a bird's-eye view | Mauritshuis
Frame from The Goldfinch: a bird’s-eye view | Mauritshuis

Discover the story behind The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1654), and explore the exquisite possibilities of generous multimedia access to one of Mauritshuis’ astounding collection of Dutch paintings from the Golden Age. This collection also includes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, and The Bull by Potter.

Projects – Time Machine, Visualize the Public Domain, Gravitron

  • The Time Machine Project – Self-described as “by far the most ambitious and far-reaching project ever undertaken using Big Data of the Past”, this EU-funded internationally-collaborative project is building a map of European history that spans thousands of years.
    Visualize the Public Domain | New York Public Library – an experiment by NYPL Labs to help patrons understand and explore the more than 180,000 images released by NYPL into the Public Domain.
  • Gravitron – the work and thoughts of Geoff Hinchcliffe, senior Design lecturer at ANU, about design, data, computation and interface aesthetics.

WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 12 April 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 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 February 8th] Finding & Cleaning Data

Join us on Friday 8th Feburary for a one hour discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – How to find and clean data

Humanities data is often messy and hard to access. This session will introduce us to using OpenRefine to access and clean up data, using DigitalNZ collections as an example.

Readings

A Gentle Introduction to Data Cleaning

The Quartz guide to bad data

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 8th 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!

LIBRARIAN: Chris Seay chris.seay@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours 2019] What Could Digital Humanities Be (Redux)

Join us this Friday 1st February between 12 and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for our first Open Hours for 2019!

Topic – Possibilities for the digital with/in Humanities

We are starting the year by reposing our 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 – Bomb Sight, William Blake Archive & Invisible Australians

To accompany the questions and possibilities that Varner traverses, we propose three projects to explore:

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

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 1st 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!

LIBRARIANS: Judy Fisher judy.fisher@otago.ac.nz & Lisa Chisholm lisa.chisholm@otago.ac.nz

[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