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
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.
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.
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