Blog

Canberra.
We’ve entered the final afternoon of the Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 conference, and the next session I’m attending starts with Danny Kingsley, whose interest is in the changing nature of scholarly communication. Such communication generally follows a cycle from publication to reading to ideas to research to new publications, but there is no generic scholarly researcher: there is also an invisible college of people who share an interest in a topic, but may not be immediately connected to the research.

Scholarly communication ranges from ‘urban’ science models (lots of researchers, fast-moving, high volume and speed of publications, especially through …

Canberra.
The final speaker in this DHA 2012 session is Sarah Colley, who brings us back to a core definition of archaeology (as dealing with the human past, and writing history, based on archaeological evidence). There is a wide range of stakeholder groups in Australian archaeology, from government agencies through local groups to media organisations, with no requirement for formal, central accreditation.

There are a number of codes of ethics for archaeologists in Australia, through; these deal inter alia with stewardship of tangible and intangible heritage, the rights of key stakeholders and traditional owners, minimum standards for fieldwork and analysis …

Canberra.
The next speaker in this DHA 2012 session is Alice Gorman, whose focus is on the use of social media to communicate archaeological research. Archaeology remains poorly understood; popular portrayals of the discipline, from Indiana Jones to Time Team, don’t necessarily have much to do with actual practices in the field.

Alice’s interest is in space archaeology (from earth-bound technological artefacts to space junk), and in thus protecting our cultural heritage; under the moniker ‘Dr Space Junk’, she’s been sharing her work through a blog and a presence on Twitter.

There are obvious differences between such presences …

Canberra.
This is a very fast-moving DHA 2012 session – the next speaker is Adela Sobotkova, who’ll present the Bulgarian experience in archaeological remote sensing in Bulgaria. Remote sensing extracts information from photographic images captured from space; such information has been used for site mapping and for the detection of new archaeological sites.

This has been deployed in Bulgaria for a number of regional archaeological projects, for example for mapping a substantial number of Thracian burial mounts in the Kazanlak valley. This was also an exercise in measuring the reliability of remote sensing approaches – and as it turned out …

Canberra.
The next speaker in this session at DHA 2012 is Shawn Ross, presenting the NeCTAR federated archaeological information management systems project. This is a major, multi-partner project which aims to manage digital data from creation to archival.

The idea here is to break data out of ‘destination Website’ silos, and to develop a federated rather than centralised system; it utilises existing resources wherever possible, and encourages the use of portable, machine-readable, and reusable data.

Archaeological data usage is still very eclectic, and often remains largely paper-based; the use of digital systems remains limited, and this needs to change. The …

Canberra.
After the DHA 2012 keynote, I’m in a session on archaeology, which starts with Penny Crook. She highlights the task of synthesising history and archaeology in this field, and notes the potential which digital humanities methods have in this context. More needs to be done here: especially, more connection of available datasets, and more collaboration in online environments. Penny points to two archaeological databases which she’s been involved in.

She notes the life history of archaeological objects, from material extraction to manufacture, exchange, use and reuse, and discarding (plus rediscovery through archaeological work, of course). Each of these phases …

Canberra.
And we’re starting the final day of the Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 conference. The day begins with a keynote by Julia Flanders, who challenges us to rethink collections. This begins by asking what we mean by a ‘collection’, in the first place: collection implies agency, a collector who creates a sense of order amongst the entities they collect.

There’s a bounded comprehensiveness which is implied by the term, too – a completeness may have been achieved through the collection. A collection is an aggregation of individual items which are not just meaningful in themselves, but importantly also in their …

Canberra.
The final speaker at DHA 2012 this afternoon is Mitchell Whitelaw, whose interest is in data visualisation. The work he’s presenting here builds on the Prints and Printmaking Australia Asia Pacific database, and Mitchell’s project has explored the opportunities to present these data (20,000 works, 4,000 artists) in new, visual ways.

Mitchell has done similar work for other national archives collections, as well as for Flickr Commons image datasets. Such work provides exploratory visualisations of cultural collections, so far mainly with applications built in Processing and Java – but those technologies don’t work very well in browser environments, so …

Canberra.
OK, I skipped the first afternoon session at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 for a quick excursion to Parliament House – and thanks to the vagaries of Canberra taxi services, missed half of the first paper in the next session as well. So, we pick up again with Stewart Wallace from the Dictionary of Sydney project. The dictionary contains some 22,000 entities called ‘factoids’, linked together in various ways.

As a project, it is about urban history; it began with the work of historians, and attempts to reflect their journeys, and to connect their knowledge. The underlying architecture comprises a …

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at DHA 2012 is Antonina Lewis, who begins by highlighting the question of entities in describing linked data. Along with additional issues, such as data storage and retention, they raise a range of key questions for the creators, custodians, and curators of linked data.

Importantly, interpretation of data requires context; this is especially true for collections of coded data, where coding schemes and the various provenance of data sources are also crucially important for meaningful interpretation.

Antonina herself works on a rich archive of the source material used for Australian opinion polls from …