We are pleased to welcome Professor Tim Hitchcock to Cambridge Digital Humanities on the 7th and 9th of June.
7 June 2022
Oral History Archives Online: The Connected Histories of the BBC
Six years ago the BBC entered into an AHRC funded collaboration with the University of Sussex to make oral histories gathered from BBC employees across a period of fifty years accessible through the production of a new digital collection, associated with new tools and interfaces. The resulting Connected Histories of the BBC project, finally completed this year, forms the starting point for this workshop, which will explore the development of new approaches to the digitisation of oral history archives and the organisation of online search. Amongst other things it will address how we can best represent and search large collections via a ‘macroscope ‘approach, and how to present large mixed media archives in forms that lends themselves to scholarly research.
The workshop will include an introduction and presentation by Tim Hitchcock and Ben Jackson, brief comments from respondents, and an open discussion.
For more information, and to register, visit: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/events/34136/
9 June 2022
Infrastructures and what they Determine: A Long Table Discussion
Invitation only
The infrastructures we rely upon condition the forms of knowledge we produce and how our work is evaluated, valued, or circulated. This Long Table takes up questions this raises: How do infrastructures influence outputs? What constitutes an infra-structure in the Digital Humanities? How do super structural or representational aspects of scholarly production relate to the uncertain operations of ‘lower level’ infrastructures – and is this a useful way to think about system architectures? As new technical and social infrastructures emerge and evolve (for instance via archival science, through expanded forms of image sharing, via networking, as machine learning); we seek to better understand the systemic, uneven, and discriminatory systems within which we work – and within which we live.
Many voices in the Digital Humanities have recently sought to address these issues. For instance via UK research projects including Full Stack Feminism, through Alan Liu’s calls for infrastructural change to build towards language parity in DH, via calls for archival justice made in relation to collections ranging from community archives to the largest of institutions, through debates about circulation, access, and privacy, open access. The importance of accounting with infrastructure has become ever more apparent. Critical Race Theorists addressing decolonization and historians of social movements; have asked whose voice is silenced and whose is amplified? The right to be remembered – and the right to be forgotten are in heightened tension. This Long Table asks how the Digital Humanities can help (re)think infrastructures.
The Long Table will include very brief introductory contributions from Tim Hitchcock, and others. This is followed by a Long Table discussion.
Long Table Format: designed to facilitate a flow of conversation; speak and listen as appropriate by moving to the table to take part in the conversation, listening in from the sides. Tap somebody out of the discussion to take their place at the table, retire from the table as the conversation moves on and develops and the areas of expertise shift and re-map.
