Tuesday 24 November 2009

We're Hiring!

You may have heard rumours that UCL is getting its own Centre for Digital Humanities. Well, its true! Claire Warwick is the Director, and I'm the Deputy Director. More about this all soon - we are gearing up to the big launch in the spring.

In the meantime, we are hiring for three positions! Centre Co-ordinator, Teaching Fellow, and Research Assistant. All three are part time positions, which means if people wanted to mix and match to become a full time roll, we would consider that.

More info about the jobs can be found here.

Get in touch if you have any queries!

Thursday 19 November 2009

Understanding Image Based Evidence

On Tuesday I participated in an excellent workshop, Understanding Image Based Evidence, as part of the eScience and Ancient Documents project at the University of Oxford. We looked at issues of fidelity of digital images, and how image based evidence is used for reasoning, particularly in papyrology and palaeography.

Couldn't be there? Well, my PhD student, Alejandro Giacometti, took some pretty good notes...

Twitterverse

If its been quiet around here, its because I've been hanging out elsewhere. In class, lecturing, for one - and as with many other scholars, I've been gradually, and more frequently, becoming immersed in the stream on twitter (@melissaterras).

A couple of things you should know about if you are interested in Digital Humanities. Dan Cohen has put together a fabulous tweet roll of folks in the Digital Humanities, currently numbering 279 active tweeters. James Cummings has another list of 50 digital humanities folks (and although the two lists have some overlap, they dont feature all the same peeps).

Dan Cohen has also gone one stage further - using the new Twitter Times site, he's pulled together a "virtual" journal, that takes all the tweets from his DH list, and produces a changing overview of what people in the DH community are pointing to, and talking about at any one time. Digital Humanities Now is then a "passively edited" DH journal - a fantastic place to dip into daily to see what the community is finding interesting.

Read more about how it works on Dan Cohen's blog.

Finally, the future has arrived. Phew. Twitter is making more and more sense.

(Twitter seems to me like someone leaving some toy money, an old boot, and an iron in a field, and those who found it going on to create Monopoly. Hurrah!)

Tuesday 10 November 2009

The Bluebirds Have Returned to Amersham. I Repeat.

I love my laptop bag. The kind of thing you pick up quickly in a rush without much thought, that turns out to be a well loved and trusty friend. Its tardis like capabilities never fail to amaze me (laptop and lunch and pair of shoes and 30 student essays and lecture handouts and an umbrella? sure!). I would share with you the brand, but it doesnt discernibly have one. It was cheap, and I've never ever seen anyone else with the same one.

Until last week on the train. I put my laptop rucksack up in the rack next to one which was exactly the same.

How tempted was I to do the ole' spy-who-loves-me switcheroo of the cases?

Then I imagined the work carnage that would ensue, and just went on my merry way, thinking when did I get so unadventurous. Mental note - must put a business card in my laptop bag in case it gets separated from me, in a cold war secret stealing stylie.