Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow and AHRC Theme Leader Fellow for Digital Transformations, gives the closing keynote for the 2017 DHOXSS. We think of digital humanities as being chiefly concerned with abstract data, tagging and quantitative techniques, but it also has roots in a long tradition of using a variety of technological aids to examine the physical characteristics of objects such as manuscripts, paintings or pots. As new materials and technologies such as conductive ink or...

Martin Poulter, Oxford's Wikimedian in Reseidence, gives a masterclass in using Wikimedia for digital research. The Wikimedia family of projects includes some projects that are less well-known than the flagship Wikipedia, but highly relevant to the Humanities. Wikidata has facts and figures about tens of millions of items, Wikimedia Commons has tens of millions of freely reusable images, many from cultural heritage organisations, and Wikisource has hundreds of thousands of historical texts. ...

Kevin Page, Iain Emsley and David Weigl talk about using The HathiTrust Digital Library to conduct research in this interstice workshop. Within the Andrew W. Mellon funded ‘Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA)’ project, the University of Oxford e-Research Centre have developed new tools and approaches to facilitate study of the HathiTrust Digital Library. This workshop will inform participants of the latest developments from the project, and provide attendees with the opportunity to...

Pip Willcox and David De Roure give a presentation on Ada Lovelace, one of the early pioneers in computing. In the 200 years since Ada Lovelace’s birth, she has been celebrated, neglected, and taken up as a symbol for any number of causes and ideas. A symposium to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth narrated many of these, including accounts of her generative relationship with Charles Babbage and his Difference and Analytical Engines. This talk traces some of the paths the idea of...

Professor Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute and Laird Barrett, Senior Digital Product Manager for the Taylor and Francis Group, give a talk for DHOXSS 2017. Digital research, computational techniques and big data are often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their...

Dr Nicholas Cole and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman discuss the Quill Project, a software platform developed to aid research and teaching of the history of Parliamentary-style negotiations, and particularuarly the creation of the Constitution of the United States. They will discuss the research problems that the platform was created to address, and the process of building the tools for both data-entry and a diverse readership. We will address the design-choices that we have adopted to encourage a...

Giles Bergel gives a talk on using new technologies to understand the history of books and printing. The first point of access for image collections has traditionally been the catalogue. Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning have opened up new ways of describing, searching and researching the visual record. This talk will outline the state of the art in the field, demonstrate some recent applications, and provide pathways for participants who wish to apply these techniques...

Cristina Dondi and Matilde Malaspina of the 15C BOOKTRADE project, give a talk for the 2017 DHOXSS. Cristina will present 15cV, a powerful tool for the visualization of the movement of fifteenth-century printed books, from the time and place where they were printed to where they are today, via the many places and people who distributed, purchased, owned, and annotated them during the intervening 500-year period. This tool enables unanswered historical queries on the impact of printing on...

Panel chaired by Pip Wilcox, with Barbara McGillivray, Megan Senseney and Nicholas Cole.

Dr Diane Jakacki, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Faculty Teaching Associate in Comparative Humanities, Bucknell University , gives the opening keynote to the 2017 Digital Humanities at Oxford Seminar School. As humanists we are trained to think across methods while we focus on a particular theoretical or praticable approach to our research. As digital humanists we undertake that same type of training to find a digital method that best helps us ask questions of, analyse, and share our...

Isabel Galina, (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) gives the closing keynote for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. For over a decade now Open Access (OA) has fundamentally changed the way scholarly publishing works. In the Digital Humanities (DH) the development of new types of scholarly publications in the form of digital projects presents an interesting scenario for the continuation of the OA movement. In this talk I will discuss how DH projects disrupt...

Pip Wilcox, Curator of Digital Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the 2016 DHOXSS on Shakespeare's First Folio, held by the Bodleian.

Maria Telegina, (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The history of graph (network) theory (GNT) started with an attempt to find a single walking path, which crosses, once and only once, each of the seven bridges of old Königsberg; this is known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem. Since 1736, when Leonhard Euler proved the problem to be unsolvable using a very simple graph, GNT was developed, and it...

Cristina Dondi, (Modern Languages, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The five-year ERC-funded 15cBOOKTRADE Project has developed digital tools to investigate, on solid and extensive evidence, the impact of the introduction of printing on early modern society. The Material Evidence in Incunabula is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding,...

Chris Powell, (The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Institutions like Universities and Museums possess considerable volumes of handwritten personal archives, the content of which may be of research interest. However, these archives remain largely untranscribed and their content unknown. We describe our early investigation of word shape analysis, and particularly the decomposition of those shapes in to graphic motifs,...

Carolin Rindfleisch, (Faculty of Music, University of Oxford), gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Richard Wagner’s music, and particularly his composition with ‘leitmotifs’ (musical entities with a characteristic identity, that are used to construct musical form and to convey musical meaning) have been interpreted differently in a wide variety of academic as well as audience-aimed introductory literature. A comprehensive analysis of these interpretations can...

Judith Siefring, (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The sight of readers taking their own photographs of books, manuscripts and other objects in special collections reading rooms and museum study spaces is becoming increasingly commonplace. This kind of ‘DIY digitization’ reflects changing technologies but also evolving research practices and institutional policies. Its prevalence warrants proper reflection. Why do...

Ralph Schroeder, (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford) and Laird Barrett (Taylor & Francis) give a talk for the DHOXSS 2016. Big data is often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways forward. Particular attention will be paid to data sources, and debates...

Scott Billings, (Oxford University Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford), Theodore Koterwas, (IT Services, University of Oxford), Jessica Suess, (Oxford University Museums, University of Oxford), give a talk for the DHOXSS 2016. Over the past nine months Oxford University Museums and Oxford University IT Services have been collaborating on a research project to look at best practice in terms of delivering collections content to users within museum and gallery spaces via their...

Alfie Abdul-Rahman, (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. In this lecture, I will present a web-based visual analytics approach for detecting similarity between texts. ViTA: Visualization for Text Alignment is the result of our “Commonplace Cultures: Mining Shared Passages in the 18th Century using Sequence Alignment and Visual Analytics” project under the Digging into Data Challenge Program (III) and it is a...

Deb Verhoeven, (Deakin University) gives the opening keynote talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.

James Loxley, University of Edinburgh, gives the final keynote in the DHOXSS 2015. The creation of the discipline - if that's what it is - of the digital humanities has gone hand in hand with the ever more pervasive pertinence for humanities academics of a 'digital scholarship' conceived more generally. Scholarship, in Ernest Boyer's influential terms, consists of the different intellectual activities of discovery, integration, application and teaching; each of these activities has been, and...

Daniel Burt, Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. This presentation will primarily focus on using Filemaker Pro to produce The Online Corpus of Inscriptions from Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA), which contains around 40,000 inscriptions in pre-Arabic languages including Safaitic, Dadanitic, Hismaic, and Thamudic. We will examine the functionality of the database, and look at the technical challenges that were faced when producing the system. In...

David Zeitlyn, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the DHOXSS 2015. This presentation is based on the practical experience of archiving 46 thousand (plus) images taken by a Cameroonian studio photographer over a 30 years period as part of the British Library 'Endangered Archive Programme' (EAP). I will discuss some of the practical and conceptual issues of working with images collections, looking at how face recognition and pattern matching...