Searching Digital | Sept 21, 24 & 29

Searching Digital: methods, tools, and standards of research in digital humanities: online workshops organised by the Centre for the Study of the Balkans, Department of History, Goldsmiths University of London

Sept 21, 24 & 29

Please sign up to the different sessions using the separate tickets, when you 'register now'

The Goldsmiths’ Centre for the Study of the Balkans in collaboration with the Department of History of Art, Birkbeck University of London, and supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership is organising a series of focused trainings in specialised digital skills, procedures and standards that are currently considered to be among the essential ones applied in the research of the humanities in any historical context or space.

The field of Digital Humanities (DH) is among the fastest growing fields of scholarship, opening up wide opportunities for a ground-breaking research of an interdisciplinary character and global outreach. However, the practical implementation of this field often shows substantial gaps, among which certainly a variation of scholars’ knowledge about digital tools, methodologies and standards.

This series of trainings opens the ground for discussing some new specialised tools, resources and standards needed for an efficient and creative research in the highly sought fields of digital humanities. How to digitise, store and restore, manipulate, and interpret the knowledge of the past? What are the technical, ethical and interpretative challenges involved in this? How to best use your practical knowledge in digital cataloguing, archiving, mapping and analysing diverse types of historical primary sources?

The series’ six training sessions graft upon the experience of international scholars who contributed to the development of efficient digital solutions to the challenges of their field. Using the examples of their own expertise in early-modern and modern history, politics, film studies and preservation, heritage and library/archival collections, the trainers will direct the applicants to develop efficient tools and solutions to their own research questions in any field of humanities.

The series consists of six full-day sessions that will be held in June and September 2021. The June workshops will be held online. The mode of training in September will depend on the actual situation with the covid-19 pandemic and will be confirmed by the end of June 2021.

------------------------------

September 21 - Online

1000-1600

Letters: modelling and analysis with Mag. Dr. Thomas J.J. Wallnig, Privatdoz, Institute of Austrian Historical Research and Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria

Letters are historical sources relevant across centuries and continents. But what would be the technical preconditions for comprehensive queries, in-depth analyses, and the re-use of letter data? The workshop will address these problems from the perspective of data management, before proceeding to the interaction between data modelling and analysis. Two hands-on sessions will include basic TEI XML and the use of selected online tools.

----

September 24 - Online

10:00-16:00

Digital Memoryscape with Prof. Nevena Daković, Theory and History Department, Faculty of Drama Arts, University of Belgrade, Serbia

The term digital memoryscape emerges from the notions of (cinematic) cityscape and cultural memoryscape. The former refers to the ways in which cityscape is narrativised and mapped out in cinema; the ways it hybridises the real, present-day city, its past, and the imagined city of the future; and the modes in which it allows the fiction to rub up against facts, myths or previous representational and media traditions. The latter is „understood as comprising multiple sites of memory connected by a particular associational logic (e.g. national, ethnic, religious, village, etc.)“ and including „a plurality of different forms of mnemonic phenomena, ranging from individual acts of remembrance to transnational contexts” (Keightley and Pickering, 2013). Thus, the digital memoryscape understood as digitally mediated and mapped urban heritage and its lieux de mémoire is sustained by the concepts of digital memory making and digital place making. The development of the rewarding synergy of the digital practices - representational patterns, structures of display, new collections, novel archival and curating practices, narrative genres etc. - demands, in return, the appropriation of the theories of memory and related rethinking of text, narrative, representation, mapping etc. - that all have intrinsically changed with the digital turn.

Theoretical considerations are exemplified through the presentation of the BDM – Belgrade digital memoryscape - project conceived as the making of the multipurpose and multilayered digital presentation of Belgrade memoryscape. Digitally mediated (hi)stories of the urban past and digitized (Erll 2011; Bernecker 2008) artefacts work as a narrative arc from art and media texts, historical documents to real cityscape explored by the GPR and the methodology of the forensic architecture (Weizman 2010). The making of BDM presents the development of the project from the setting of the initial criteria for the selection of the memory sites, through archival research, narrative analysis, technical standards of digitisation to the design of the digital presentation.

Belgrade memory narratives, in themselves rich in identity, projected onto the digital memoryscape and connecting real and virtual topography, reflect the multicultural identity of the Balkan metropolis. The capital of the succeeding states, placed at the intersection of Europe and the Balkans, the East and the West, a bridge between cultures and civilizations of Orient and Occident, Belgrade is paradigmatic noeud de mémoire et d`histoire. Furthermore, BDM becomes a space of the interplay of urban/national memory and identity that contributes to their promotion and visibility in the global digital world.

How do we model and plan digital memoryscape of the chosen city or of one its lieux de memoire? How do you decide about the place and topic? What are the research and archival sources? What type of media and narratives do we employ (fiction, faction, history, literature, films, music, oral testimonies)?

----

September 29 - Venue TBC

10:00-16:00

Would you rather…?: The ups, downs, uses and dilemmas of digitising history with Dayna Miller, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections I Library and Learning Services.

This session will discuss the approach that Kingston University Archives and Special Collections has taken to digitisation. From decisions about digitisation priorities to lessons learned from the Coronavirus Lockdown, participants will hear about practical challenges that funding, staffing, and moving premises can pose to a digitisation programme. In addition, the session will raise questions over why archives digitise at all. Looking at ethical as well as pragmatic concerns, participants will have a chance to consider the benefits of digitisation for researchers and for archives, but also the disadvantages, and the fine balance that archives must strike for one to outweigh the other.

The session will also provide an opportunity to engage with material from a number of the Archive’s collections. This includes a 15th Century Serbo-Croat Armorial from the Vane Ivanovic Library as well as more recent historical items; all of which can be viewed in a wider context than might first appear. Participants will work through a series of ‘archive dilemmas’ represented by these items and will be asked to apply to them a methodology presented during the session along with their own ideas about what it means to digitise history.