Sunday, March 30, 2014

Don't miss our review of Digital Humanities Australasia 2014 on Friday 11 April

Source: OpenClipart
And the UWA DH news keeps coming! Here are 5 things you should know:

1. The next meeting of the Digital Antipodes will be held on Friday 11 April, between 2-3pm in Arts 1.33.
We’ll be discussing major themes and concepts from Digital Humanities Australasia 2014. What were the main ideas that emerged? What do they mean in the context of our own research? If you were a conference delegate we would welcome your thoughts and reflections. For those did not attend the conference, this session will provide a useful overview of the latest DH debates and directions.

You can view a large selection of presentations from the event on the DHA2104 website.

Conference summaries published as blog posts:

Conference papers published as blog posts:

Please let me know if I have missed any articles or posts and I will add them to the list.

2. Welcome to the Arts Faculty - David Glance
We’ll also be welcoming a new member of the Arts Faculty - David Glance - who will be in attendance at our next meeting to discuss his new role as Director of Innovation. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about how UWA humanities researchers can gain support in developing new approaches to teaching and research.

3. Congratulations Toby Burrows
We are  thrilled to announce that Toby Burrows has been awarded a prestigious Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship to develop an exciting digital humanities project in the UK. He’ll be developing brand new methodologies to digitise a huge collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts. As a foundation member of the Digital Antipodes, Toby has provide an enormous amount of support and leadership over the last two years and will be sorely missed.

4. Congratulations Philip Mead
More fantastic news for the Faculty! Philip was recently appointed to the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University and will be spending the 2015-2016 academic year in the USA. Philip has been a strong and early advocate of Digital Humanities at UWA and helped form the Digital Humanities Hub in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Studies. We're looking forward to following his progress.

5. We’re seeking a new coordinator for the Digital Antipodes
I’ll be overseas from mid April until September 2014 so we're seeking a volunteer to facilitate meetings over the next 6 months. It’s a great opportunity to get more involved in the DH community. The role has greatly enriched my understanding of the DH landscape and I highly recommend it. Get in touch with me to find out more.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Special Event: Stanford University's Zephyr Frank reveals what it takes to create a social/spacial history of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro - 6pm, 27 March 2014

Stanford University Spacial History Project
Digital Antipodes!

If you’re interested in the ways in which computers and data can bring a nineteenth-century city to life, you won’t want to miss Zephyr Frank’s upcoming Fred Alexander Lecture:

From Information to Argumentation: Rio de Janeiro, GIS and the Digital Humanities
Date: 27 March 2014
Time: 6pm
Venue: Gentilli Lecture Theatre, First Floor, Geography Building UWA

The Fred Alexander Fellowship is awarded by the History Discipline Group for the purpose of bringing a distinguished scholar in the field of modern history to UWA. Zephyr Frank was nominated by Ethan Blue and I think the selection of a digital humanist for the fellowship is indicative of the exciting possibilities offered by spatial, textual and visual analysis within the humanities at UWA.

Read more about the Stanford University Spacial History project:
'Our projects operate outside of normal historical practice in five ways: they are collaborative, use visualization, depend on the use of computers, are open-ended, and have a conceptual focus on space.'

Explore Zephyr Frank’s research project, Terrain of History:
'We are creating a geographically precise digitized map of 1866 Rio de Janeiro with historically accurate delineations of streets and property—which include over 15,000 parcels in the central parishes. More than 300,000 historic records including names, addresses, and other detailed information covering the period 1840-1890 are also being organized in a database to reveal interconnections, networks, movement, and change over time.'