#DDOI2019: VIEW KEYNOTE LECTURES FROM DIGITAL DAY OF IDEAS 2019
The Digital Day of Ideas is an annual showcase and networking event for digital scholarship across the University, featuring workshops, seminars and invited speakers from the wider Digital Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences community.
Digital Day of Ideas 2019 took place on Wednesday 29 May at the University of Edinburgh Business School.
The day included keynote lectures from:
Professor Ethan Watrall (Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology; Associate Director of MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, Michigan State University)
Professor Lesley McAra (Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, The University of Edinburgh)
Dr Tamson Pietsch (Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences; Director of the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology Sydney).
After lunch, delegates attended parallel workshops; topics included LiDAR technology, Text analysis with R, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).
A series of lightning talks ran concurrently with the workshops, and a poster session took place during the evening reception.
Programme
9.00 Registration and coffee
9.30 Welcome & Introduction
Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, University of Edinburgh
9.45 KEYNOTE: ”Public or Perish”: Charting a Path for the Future of Digital Heritage
Ethan Watrall
The domain of heritage has undeniably entered an age in which “the digital” impacts all aspects of scholarship and practice. Curation, preservation, documentation, research, teaching, management, public outreach and engagement – all are inextricably intertwined with digital methods and computational approaches. But where does heritage go from here? What does the future of digitally inflected work within the domain look like?
Drawing upon a diverse range of examples from institutions, scholars, practitioners, and projects, this talk argues that the path forward for scholarship and practice in digital heritage is first and foremost publicly engaged. It is a future in which the practice of digital heritage is fundamentally collaborative and community driven, and the outcomes are open and discoverable, useful and usable.
10.45 Coffee break
11.00 KEYNOTE: Can data driven innovation change the world? A meditation on the purpose and values of the 21st Century University
Lesley McAra
The fast-moving developments in data, digital and artificial intelligence have been described by some, as marking a fourth industrial revolution, by others, as a ‘second renaissance’, transforming the modalities through which we encounter and understand social phenomena, with profound implications for the ways in which knowledge is produced, purveyed and consumed. Some commentators lay emphasis on the far-reaching social, economic and cultural benefits that these developments might procure, still others highlight their dystopic possibilities: structurally redundant populations, mass control and surveillance, unregulated tech conglomerates.
Using the Edinburgh Futures Institute as a case study, Lesley will offer some critical reflections on the role of the 21st Century University in navigating this complex terrain and the challenges and opportunities it poses for our scholarly community.
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Workshops & Lightning Talks
Workshop topics:
Digital Humanities and Remote-Sensing; Introduction to LiDAR
Working in 3D with the uCreate Studio
Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI): Introduction and hands-on
Cleaning Your Data with OpenRefine
Basic Text Analysis using R
Can you just Digitise? Digitising the Collections
15:00 Coffee Break
15:30 KEYNOTE: Why podcasting matters to historians: History Lab – Australia’s first investigative history podcast
Tamson Pietsch
As Impact and Engagement is becoming crucial to the funding, ranking and regulating of research, Humanities researchers are scrambling for ways to connect with audiences beyond the academy. At the same audio is becoming increasingly central to the way people access information culture: podcasting is replacing linear radio broadcasting and Google has announced that by 2020 it wants 50% of searches to be voice enabled.
The History Lab podcast exists in this gap. Launched in May 2018 as a national engagement platform for the Humanities in Australia it has attracted a large listenership, with the first five episodes receiving nearly 50K downloads. The show has shot up the Australian podcast charts and been listed in Apple podcasts “New and Noteworthy” section.
History Lab is an innovative collaboration between the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, community radio producers and collaborating researchers. It produces immersive episodes that bring to life the process of knowledge discovery. As such it goes far beyond the model of disseminating research findings, to instead incorporate the process of knowing itself, foregrounding how questions are asked and how are investigations pursued. In doing so History Lab opens up the process of knowledge making itself to wide public audiences.
16.45 Reception & Poster Session
18.00 Close