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[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

[Open Hours Week 6] Digital Literacy

Join us on Friday 30 November for a one-hour discussion between 12 noon and 1 pm at the Digital Humanities Hub in the sixth of our weekly Open Hours!

There are no readings for this week’s session, but some of the information below is up for discussion.

__________________________________

There are many  definitions of  “Digital Literacy”.

Two excellent large-scale projects have created similar iterations of the concept.

The JISC Project refers to ‘Digital Capabilities’ and is aimed more specifically at Higher Education. It puts ICT proficiency at the centre of the model.

JISC Project

 

 

 

 

The UNESCO Digital Literacy Global Framework (DLGF) project aims to “develop a methodology that can serve as the foundation for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) thematic Indicator 4.4.2”  (p.5).  This is one component of UNESCO’s SDG 4  –  “Quality Education” and is a large-scale project which aims to create a global framework leading to ‘better employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship in disparate contextual settings’.

UNESCO Global Framework of Reference on Digital Literacy Skills for  Indicator 4.4.2

(see table 5 for Digital Competencies)

Librarians have traditionally taught ‘Information Literacy,’ but how much ‘digital literacy’  instruction are we responsible for, and (how) should the university deal with upskilling its staff and students?

Links for discussion.

Beyond Fake News

Wall St Journal: Blue Feed, Red Feed

All Aboard: Digital Skills in Higher Education

Calling Bullshit (University of Washington)

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 30 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!

LIBRARIAN: Judy Fisher judy.fisher@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours – Week 5] Digital Humanities and Classics

Join us on Friday 23 November for a one hour discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub in the fifth of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Digital Humanities and Classics

This is the first of our sessions devoted to a specific discipline, Classics. In this session we’ll talk about how Classicists are using digital methods and tools. Joining us will be special guest Dr. Gwynaeth McIntyre who will talk about her work with Omeka.net as a teaching tool.

Reading – Digitally Mapping Cicero’s Networks, Letters, and Emotions

This short blog post from Caitlin Marley talks about her work doing a “mesoanalysis” of Cicero’s writings using a few different Digital Humanities methods.

https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/caitlin-marley/blog-digitally-mapping-ciceros-networks-letters-and-emotions

Projects – Museum of Classical Antiquities

https://biblio.uottawa.ca/omeka1/museumclassicalantiquities/

A great example of student work to digitise and display Classical artifacts.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 23 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!

LIBRARIAN: Christopher Seay christopher.seay@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours – Week 4] DH as.is.under.against Neoliberalism

Join us on Friday 16 November for a one hour discussion between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub in the fourth of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Neoliberalism, the Academy, and the Digital (in the) Humanities

This session circles back on digital wing to address one of the named spectres haunting Stewart Varner’s ‘What DH Could Be?’ piece from Open Hours Week One: Digital Humanities as ‘neoliberalism in the humanities’.

Join us for some respectfully robust discussion about neoliberalism in the academy and how ‘Digital Humanities’ might cause, enable, benefit from, and/or resist the current neoliberal organisational milieu in which we live and work.

Reading – The Dark Side of Digital Humanities

These four short pieces from North American scholars are versions of papers presented at  2013 MLA Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
 

Projects – Occupy MLA

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/occupying-mla/45357

A netprov (networked improvised narrative) initiated by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig in 2011 inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Anonymously as OccupyMLA, they used new media both to explore methods of creating literary fiction, and also to encourage discussion of the issues affecting non-tenure track (NTT) and other contingent academic staff within higher education in the USA and beyond.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 16 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: alexander ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz and Christopher Seay christopher.seay@otago.ac.nz

[Open Hours –Week 3] – Who’s Afraid of Digital Literature?

Join us on Friday 9 November between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for the third of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Digital literature

This session moves from the distant reading – and ideally not the distant memory – of last week’s focus on textual analysis, to the practice of close reading works of digital-born fiction and poetry – also known as digital (or electronic) literature.

After making some sense of what this stuff is, we’ll consider the relationship between digital humanities and creative media, and also what happens to the literary imagination itself when minds and machines commune, and compose.

We ask not how humanists are using computers to understand text (after Ted Underwood), but how computers might be using humanists…

 

Viewing – Leonardo Flores, “I ♥ E-Poetry,” TEDx Talk (2016)

Reading – Scott Rettberg, “Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities”

https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch9

Exemplar – Will Luers, “Tales of Automation”

http://will-luers.com/tales-of-automation/

 

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 9 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!

 

HOST: David Ciccoricco – dave.ciccoricco@otago.ac.nz