Digital Methods and Tools for Historical Research

Digital Methods and Tools for Historical Research
"Digital Methods and Tools for Historical Research" is the title of an international workshop to be held at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, on 18 and 19 November, 2011.

Organization: Luís Espinha da Silveira and Daniel Alves

Presentation: With this initiative we intend to discuss the implications of using digital technologies in the production and dissemination of knowledge in History. We seek to understand how a set of digital methodologies has influenced historical research, to discuss its advantages and disadvantages, as well as to identify innovative ways of linking the future of the digital world to the study of the past. On the first day, the meeting goes around four thematic sessions dedicated to the presentation and discussion of different methodologies (relational databases; geographic information systems; text encoding; digitization and preservation of digital memory). The program of that day closes with a conference on the significance of historical research in a digital environment. The second day will be filled with three workshops devoted to relevant digital tools for historical research, including GIS, text encoding, and reference management software. We expect this conference stimulates discussion about the interaction between History and Information Technology, and encourages its use by the academic community, especially young researchers.

Dates: 2011, November, 18th-19th (free attendance)

Location: I&D building, 4th floor, room 2 (FCSH, Av. de Berna, 26-C, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal)

Program:
Friday (18th) (Room 2, 4th floor, I&D building, FCSH)
9:00 – Opening
9:30 – 1st session: Primary sources and relational databases
John Bradley (King's College London), Silk purses and sow's ears: in what ways can structured data deal with historical sources?

Joaquim de Carvalho (Universidade de Coimbra), Combining source oriented and person oriented data models in prosopographical database design

moderator: Daniel Alves (IHC, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

11:00 – coffee break

11:15 – 2nd session: Interaction of space and time: GIS and History
Paul Ell (Queen's University Belfast), Humanities Geographical Information Systems: texts, images, maps

Luís Espinha da Silveira (IHC, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa), GIS and historical research: promises, achievements and pitfalls

moderator: Marco Painho (ISEGI - Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

12:45 – Lunch

14:30 – 3rd session: Decoding historical sources: Text Encoding
Malte Rehbein (Universität Würzburg), Text Encoding: a historian's perspective

Rita Marquilhas (Centro de Linguística - Universidade de Lisboa), The automatic research of digital editions

moderator: Andreia Martins (FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa and King’s College London)

16:00 – coffee break

16:15 – 4th session: Internet, digitization and digital preservation
Melissa Terras (University College London), Exploring the potential of Digital Humanities with the Transcribe Bentham project

Daniel Gomes (Portuguese Web Archive – Fundação de Cálculo Científico Nacional), Web archiving

moderator: José Borbinha (Instituto Superior Técnico)

17:45 – coffee break

18:00 – Closing conference
Peter Doorn (Data Archiving and Networked Services, Nederland), Computational history among e-science, digital humanities and research infrastructures: accomplishments and challenges

Saturday (19th) (Room T8, Tower B, FCSH)
Workshops (11:00 - 13:00):
A – Historical GIS (Luís Silveira and Ana Alcântara, FCSH-UNL)
B – Zotero (Daniel Alves, FCSH-UNL)
Workshops (14:30 - 17:30):
C – Text Encoding (Julianne Nyhan, University College London)
D – Atlas.ti (Pedro Sousa, FCSH-UNL)

Humanities 2.0: Collaborative Research and Copyright Challenges

The next session of Decoding Digital Humanities-Lisboa will be this Thursday, the 3rd of March. The meeting will take place at 18.00, at the I&D building of the FCSH, 1st floor (lounge).
The topic up for discussion is "Humanities 2.0: collaborative research and copyright challenges". We will talk about how the extended use of new technologies has affected the way we embark on scholarly activities today, namely how we engage in collaborative research. Is it possible to be isolated when so much of our work nowadays means engaging with the Web 2.0?
We will also discuss the implications of collaborative knowledge production for copyright. Collaborative work implies not only shared authorship; it also gives rise to a complex definition of individual contributions and, accordingly, to an unclear assignment of copyright ownership. Furthermore, how can we conciliate extant copyright concepts, ideas of authorship and open access to information?

Certainly the scholarly community has already reflected on these issues and we will discuss two texts - appropriately both published in blogs: Dan Cohen's 'Idealism and pragmatism in the free culture movement' and T. Mills Kelly's 'Making Digital Scholarship Count'.

Switching to English

After a long period of silence DDH-Lisbon is back in action! We'll post the new date for the second meeting soon.

We have also decided to switch to English. Although we first planned to have an online presence in Portuguese, we feel that publishing in English will allow us to communicate with the other DDH chapters.

Daniel has a blog in Portuguese where you can follow his activities and read his views on digital scholarship and digital history: Clio sabe surfar.

Humanidades Digitais. Reflexões académicas

O primeiro encontro do DDH-LX irá ter lugar no dia 30 de Novembro, às 18.30, na Livraria Pó dos Livros. Para iniciar a série escolhemos abordar o tópico: o que é um humanista digital e qual é o seu papel no panorama académico?
A conferência de Melissa Terras (University College London), “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon”, proporciona um bom ponto de partida. O texto encontra-se aqui; o vídeo da sessão pode ser visionado aqui.

Sugerimos ainda a leitura de um segundo artigo: Liu, A. 2003. The Humanities: A Technical Profession.
O encontro é organizado por Andreia M. Carvalho e Daniel Alves.