The Yellow Milkmaid

Social Semantic Web: Interview with EuropeanaTech

Posted on May 16, 2013

Last week, EuropeanaTech released two major new documents. Today’s blog looks at the work and the people behind one of them, interviewing Maarten Brinkerink and Marlies Olensky.

First of all though – a quick look at the two new documents.

The first, titled, ‘Core Inventory of FLOSS in the Cultural Heritage Domain, second iteration‘ analyses the Free/Libre and Open-Source Software landscape and provides a baseline for the development of innovative applications in the Europeana Network.

The second, called ‘Functional specifications for social semantic functions‘ is the first step in a process of building two prototypes that will articulate user-generated metadata with semantic functions in Europeana v2.0′s R&D work package. It provides functional specifications and a description of prototypes. To find out what that’s all about, we’ve spoken to two of the minds behind it.

Read full post here. (Originally posted on May 10, 2013)

Category: Short Takes
121133_dh-header

Umeå University: New PhD course “Digital History: The theory and practice of historical thinking in the digital age”

Posted on May 16, 2013

The Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University invites PhD students from the Nordic countries to the semester-long course exploring the theory and practice of digital history. The PhD course will be thaught in English during the fall semester of 2013 and part of the lectures and seminars will be held online. Apply no later than June 28th.

How do digital tools and resources change the study of the past? What skills and competencies will historians need to cope with digitized archival sources and born-digital material? How can historians use the web for scholarly communication? There is little doubt that digital tools and resources potentially enable new forms of scholarship, directing our attention to new questions or providing new answers to established narratives in the field. Yet graduate training in history has only to a small degree engaged with the challenge of digital media. This Nordic PhD course aims to enable its participants to meet this challenge through a semester-long exploration of key themes, methods, tools, and discussions in the emerging field of digital history.

Read full post here. (Originally posted May 14, 2013)
 

Category: Programs & Courses
Scholarship-1

Digital Treasures PhD Scholarships: Call for Applications

Posted on May 13, 2013

The Centre for Creative and Cultural Research is seeking two PhD students to join its new Flagship Program, Digital Treasures. The Digital Treasures program builds on our strengths in digital design and cultural heritage. Digitisation is transforming cultural collections into digital treasure-houses, and opening up new opportunities, and new challenges, in how we represent, access, and apply these collections. Our recent projects such as ManlyImages, Trove Mosaic, and Australian Prints and Printmaking provide a taste of what’s possible. Students in the program will work with staff includingMitchell Whitelaw, Ana Sanchez Laws, Sam Hinton and Stephen Barrass.

The Digital Treasures PhD program is

  • applied: focused on addressing the challenges and opportunities faced by our research partners in major cultural institutions
  • practical, and practice-led: students will develop practical projects working with digital collections, supported by training in digital design and production
  • industry-linked: students will work closely with partner institutions including the National Library and the National Archives, with internships built in to the PhD program.

Eligibility
We are seeking high achievers from fields including digital media and design, cultural heritage, fine arts, and humanities. Applicants should have demonstrated excellence in academic research, including a First Class Honours degree, Research Masters, or equivalent. There are two scholarship places available for Australian students commencing in Semester 2 (August 2013).

Students in the program will receive a $10,000 per annum top up in addition to an APA of $24,653 per annum. Funding will also be available to support research costs including travel and equipment. Students will be expected to be resident in Canberra, and to participate actively in the research community of the Centre.

Expressions of Interest
To register your interest or for further information contact Mitchell Whitelaw:mitchell.whitelaw@canberra.edu.au or ph (02) 6201 5184. The deadline for expressions of interest is 24 May 2013; successful applicants must also apply for and be granted a PhD place and an APA or equivalent scholarship. The Centre will support successful applicants through this process.

See the UC web site for further information on PhD and Scholarship applications.

Read full post here.

Category: Grants & Fellowships

Il Design della Comunicazione e la ricerca digitale nelle Scienze Umane e Sociali. Strumenti, metodi, interfacce

Posted on May 13, 2013

La recente espansione di social media, tecnologie mobile e strumenti di analisi in grado di elaborare grandi quantità di dati, sta contribuendo alla formazione di nuovi metodi ed oggetti di studio nelle scienze umane e sociali. Accanto a fenomeni ed oggetti non digitali, si configurano oggi nuovi spazi di produzione culturale e interazione sociale intrinsecamente legati al digitale, in termini di schemi e formati.

All’interno dell’attuale svolta computazionale, interfacce visuali, visualizzazioni di informazioni, approcci fuzzy hanno permesso anche a chi diffidava di numeri, calcoli e computer di avvicinarsi a metodi di ricerca computazionali. Questi nuovi contesti disciplinari guardano al design come un indispensabile insieme di pratiche e conoscenze da integrare nelle loro attività. Lo scenario interdisciplinare, orientato al progetto e alla collaborazione, che oggi emerge, offre un contesto ottimale per lo studio e l’applicazione della cultura e delle pratiche del design, soprattutto in relazione agli approcci interpretativi, centrati sull’utente e sulla dimensione contestuale tipici del design della comunicazione e delle interfacce. Il design di visualizzazioni ed interfacce per accedere, osservare ed esplorare queste nuove forme ed espressioni culturali e sociali, è oggi elemento centrale nelle attività di ricerca. Partendo dalla volontà di comprendere le opportunità per il progetto della comunicazione all’interno degli scenari attuali e futuri provenienti dalle intersezioni tra studi sociali e umanistici e tecnologie digitali, la ricerca mira alla definizione di nuovi metodi e pratiche di progettazione a supporto dei processi di ricerca degli e negli ambienti digitali, attraverso interfacce e visualizzazioni per l’accesso e la manipolazione di dati ed informazioni.

Read full post here.

Category: Grants & Fellowships
db_european_capitalsb_zegel_ohp5-300x200

Reference cultures in Europe – Major European research grant awarded

Posted on May 13, 2013

How did the large and cultural powerful countries Britain, France, and Germany influence public debates in smaller countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg?

Cultural historians and digital humanists at UCL and the universities of Utrecht and Trier will address this question in the new research project Asymmetrical Encounters: E-Humanity Approaches to Reference Cultures in Europe, 1815–1992‘ for which they have been awarded a grant of €1 million by HERA(Humanities in the European Research Area). In the UK, Ulrich Tiedau (UCL Dutch/Digital Humanities) will be the Principal Investigator.

The project will explore cultural aspects of European identity and how reference cultures have changed over the course of the past two centuries. Using innovative digital techniques the project team will mine and analyse digital collections of the National Library of the Netherlands, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg and other European libraries with large repositories of digitised newspapers and periodicals. Text mining and sentiment mining open up the perspective of a quantitative approach to the history of mentalities, allowing researchers to discover long-term developments and turning points in public debates, as well as to map vectors of cross-cultural influences.

HERA is a collaboration between the AHRC and twenty other European research funding organizations, with the aim to stimulate the collaboration between leading research institutions in Europe. This year funding was made available for new and exciting humanities-centred projects on the theme “Cultural Encounters”.

Read full post here. (Originally posted May 7, 2013)

Category: News
IMG_7045_estonia-1024x682

Improved access to newspapers: The Europeana Newspapers Project

Posted on May 13, 2013

This is a brief post to highlight the activities of The Europeana Newspapers Project (ENP), a network of 18 partners (and 11 associated partners) working together to make more than 18 million digitised newspaper pages (including 10 million pages of full-text content) available via the Europeana ecosystem of online services, with aggregation carried out by The European Library.

The project will improve discoverability of content through the application of refinement methods for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Layout Recognition (OLR), named Entity Recognition (NER) and Page Class Recognition. It also addresses the challenges around quality evaluation for automatic refinement technologies, transformation of local metadata to the Europeana Data Model (EDM), and metadata standardisation in close collaboration with stakeholders from the public and private sector.

Demonstrations of the evaluation tools, OLR, NER tagging and the role of ground truth will take place at ENP first dissemination workshop on refinement and quality assessment at the University Library Svetozar Markovic, Belgrade, 13-14 June.

The British Library is a networking partner in the ENP and will be hosting an information day and a dissemination workshop in 2014.

For further information about the project, visit its website and follow Europeana Newspapers on Facebook and @eurnews on Twitter.

Read full post here. (Originally posted May 7, 2013)

Category: Short Takes
keep looking »
  • A PressForward Publication Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media In Collaboration with Hist.net

  • Categories

  • RSS Top Tweeted Stories in the Global Perspectives Community

  • PressForward Publications