Blog

Brisbane.
Over the next couple of days, I’m at the Australia New Zealand Disaster & Emergency Management Conference (ANZDMC), where Jean and I will present our research into the uses of Twitter in the Christchurch earthquake later today. We begin with a keynote from Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin from the Queensland Police Service, though, who was District Disaster Coordinator for the Brisbane-based response to the 2011 floods.

From late November 2010, Queensland experienced some very heavy rain, and many rivers across the state reached record flood levels, this was worsened by Cyclone Tasha in north Queensland by the end …

Canberra.
And the (dubious) honour of presenting the final paper in the final session at DHA 2012 falls to … me. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add audio to this as soon as I can, too I've now finally also managed to add the audio, no thanks to a very dysfunctional Slideshare.

Canberra.
We’ve reached the last session of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, and it’s the one I’m in as well. But we start with Mark Coté, whose interest is especially in smart phones. He begins by asking whether long-term humanists may sometimes feel as overrun by the digital humanities as inner-city dwellers may now feel by smart phone-wielding users.

Nonetheless, the digital humanities are an exciting development, and there’s now a need for some conceptual inquiries into the digital humanities. One area for this is the relationship between the human and technology, which must question the nature of the human …

Canberra.
The final speakers in this DHA 2012 session are Monica Omodei and Gordon Mohr. Monica, from the National Library of Australia, begins by pointing out the importance of Internet content as raw data for humanities research – and even when the live Web is the object of study, its ephemeral nature means that archives of Web content are absolutely crucial for verifiability and reproducibility.

Relevant examples of such research include social network research, lexicography, linguistics, network science, and political science, amongst many others. Common collection strategies to develop archives of online content include thematical and topical archiving, resource-specific archiving …

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA 2012 is Anna Gerber, whose interest is in open annotation for electronic editions. She defines annotations as additional information attached to a digital resource or part of the resource, which do not modify the original content of the resource itself.

Such annotations traditionally exist as footnotes, endnotes, glossary entries, or in other forms, providing descriptions, explanations, or justifications for particular textual or formatting choices (especially in critical editions); they may also be used to link in secondary material. But such annotations – especially in digital editions – can also be used for comments, questions …

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 …