Institutionalized Memory

Extracts from Attila Marton's study Social Memory Institutions in the Digital Age about 'institutionalized memory':

Memory was structured in places that required the knowledge of the topography from parts of the orator. In this sense, the museion was the worldly counterpart to the imagined memory palace. Constructed as walkable spaces, the key was the rationale according to which the items themselves were ordered. Weinberger (2007) refers to this setup as the first-order of order or the order of the things themselves, which still can be found in most public libraries and museum exhibitions today.

The differentiation of books into a communication medium rather than a memory device co-evolved with the emergence of libraries as autonomous organizations dedicated to the collection of print media.

The beginning of an internal differentiation of libraries into public libraries as opposed to national and research libraries can be observed in those times (18th century). It is also the beginning of the shift from memory to information – from past tradition to future exploits (Connerton 1990).

The opening of memory institutions as educational facilities for the wider public marks the era of the modern library and museum accompanied by the professionalization of their caretakers from the mid 19th century on.

Esposito (2002:183-286) refers to this paradigm as “culture as memory” or “modern memory.” An explanation as to why culture organizes social memory would be too much of a distraction at this point [...] Instead, the dissertation will focus on, what Weinberger (2007) calls, the second-order of order. The prime example is the card catalogue constructed according to abstract criteria of categorization and order – according to a logic (“kata logos” in Ancient Greek) that is applicable to an infinite knowledge space mediated by communication media and cultural artefacts. In this sense, the card catalogue embodies a higher level of abstraction in social memory. The items themselves are forgotten. It is the rules of the catalogue that are being remembered. The order of the things themselves is abandoned and replaced by the professional order of representations of things or, so-called, surrogates. Taking books as an example, their content is forgotten and filtered by the descriptive categories that fit onto a catalogue card.

Review of the ‘Impact of the Funding Change for Researcher Development’

A review of the ‘Impact of the Funding Change for Researcher Development’ has just been published by RCUK. This is the outcome of a 2013 survey covering institutional strategy for researcher development, its organisation and delivery, feedback and review mechanisms, funding issues and remaining or emerging challenges and opportunities. It is intended to enable institutions to compare their position with overall directions and context.

The RCUK announcement is here: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/140709/

Isaw Papers

Available via http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/

   - 1. Prologue and Introduction
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/elliott-heath-muccigrosso/>
(Thomas
   Elliott, Sebastian Heath and John Muccigrosso)
   - 2. Linked Open Bibliographies in Ancient Studies
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/acheson/> (Phoebe Acheson)
   - 3. Linked Data in the Perseus Digital Library
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/almas-babeu-krohn/> (Bridget
   Almas, Alison Babeu, Anna Krohn)
   - 4. Herculaneum Graffiti Project
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/benefiel-sprenkle/> (Rebecca
   Benefiel and Sara Sprenkle)
   - 5. The Homer Multitext and RDF-Based Integration
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/blackwell-smith/> (Christopher
   Blackwell and D. Neel Smith)
   - 6. Moving the Ancient World Online Forward
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/elliott-jones/> (Thomas
   Elliott and Charles Jones)
   - 7. Linked Open Data and the Ur of the Chaldees Project
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/hafford/> (William B.
   Hafford)
   - 8. ISAW Papers: Towards a Journal as Linked Open Data
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/heath/> (Sebastian Heath)
   - 9. Beyond Maps as Images at the Ancient World Mapping Center
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/horne/> (Ryan Horne)
   - 10. Open Context and Linked Data
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/kansa/> (Eric Kansa)
   - 11. Geolat: Geography for Latin Literature (Maurizio Lana)
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/lana/>
   - 12. The Europeana Network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy (EAGLE)
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/liuzzo/> (Pietro Maria
   Liuzzo)
   - 13. Bryn Mawr Classical Review
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/mackay/> (Camilla MacKay)
   - 14. Byzantine Cappadocia: Small Data and the Dissertation
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/mcmichael/> (A. L.
   McMichael)
   - 15. Coinage and Numismatic Methods. A Case Study of Linking a
   Discipline <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/meadows-gruber/>
(Andrew
   Meadows and Ethan Gruber)
   - 16. Exploring an Opportunity to Link the Dead in Ancient Rome (Katy
   Meyers) <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/meyers/>
   - 17. RAM 3D Web Portal
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/murray/> (William Murray)
   - 18. Assessing the suitability of existing OWL ontologies for the
   representation of narrative structures in Sumerian literature
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/nurmikko-fuller/> (Terhi
   Nurmikko-Fuller)
   - 19. Berkeley Prosopography Services
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/pearce-schmitz/> (Laurie
   Pearce and Patrick Schmitz)
   - 20. Linking Portable Antiquities to a wider web
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/pett/> (Daniel Pett)
   - 21. Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Resource (Eric Poehler)
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/poehler/>
   - 22. It’s about time: historical periodization and Linked Ancient World
   Data <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/rabinowitz/> (Adam
   Rabinowitz)
   - 23. Publishing Archaeological Linked Open Data: From Steampunk to
   Sustainability
<http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/reinhard/> (Andrew
   Reinhard)
   - 24. Mining Citations, Linking Texts
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/romanello/> (Matteo
   Romanello)
   - 25. Linked Data and Ancient Wisdom
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/roueche-lawrence-lawrence/>
(Charlotte
   Roueché, Keith Lawrence, and K. Faith Lawrence)
   - 26. Linked Open Data for the Uninitiated
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/seifried/> (Rebecca
   Seifreid)
   - 27. Pelagios
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/simon-barker-desoto-isaksen/>
(Rainer
   Simon, Elton Barker, Pau de Soto, and Leif Isaksen)
   - 28. Linked data and the future of cuneiform research at the British
   Museum <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/taylor/> (Jon Taylor)
   - 29. Integrating Historical-Geographic Web-Resources (Tsoni Tsonev)
   <http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/tsonev/>
   - 30. Moving from Cross-Collection Integration to Explorations of Linked
   Data Practices in the Library of Antiquity at the Royal Museums of Art and
   History, Brussels
<http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/vankeer/> (Ellen
   Van Keer)

Digital Humanities 2014 Conference Keynotes Streamed live 8 - 11 July 2014

Four keynote speakers at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference had their presentations live-streamed:

* Bruno Latour
* Ray Siemens
* Bethany Nowviskie
* Sukanta Chaudhuri

The talk, entitled 'Communities of Practice, the Methodological Commons, and Digital Self-Determination in the Humanities' considered the Digital Humanities positive role in the process of the Humanities (digital) self-determination, in the context of trends shaping and influencing change in the Humanities and the cultures of the university.

Keys issues included, the important (and profitably-elusive) process of defining 'Digital' Humanities; foundational notions of the methodological commons and communities of practice, and the ways in which these originate, are fostered, are engaged, and themselves engage; and the value of an open approach to current and future work on modelling humanistic data and process, in ways that build on these foundations to embrace the communities and constituencies served by the Humanities.

More info can be found here: http://dh2014.org/program/keynotes/

Europeana Strategy 2015-2020

Europeana's new strategic plan is now available to download from the publications page of their website:

http://pro.europeana.eu/publications

Recent Events 2014: Cultural Values and Digital Humanities Workshops

I wanted to write up notes from two workshops I attended recently; the first 'Cultural Values?' (15 May 2014), was a workshop to share current research at the University of Leeds, linked to the theme of cultural value; the second, 'Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement' (13 June 2014), was a digital humanities workshop organised by dhAHRC in Oxford.

Cultural Values?

In this workshop, selected researchers gave 3 minute talks, introducing their research. The topic of cultural value is being examined in a range of fields but shared concerns include problematising the definition of cultural value, and challenging assumptions that would equate it simplistically with economic or exchange value. Here's a summary of some of the speakers' topics.

Experiencing the Digital World: the Cultural Value of Digital Engagement with Heritage
 See: http://www.digitalheritage.leeds.ac.uk/ (Laura King and Paul Cook)

What is the purpose of digital engagement in the Arts and Humanities?

* Digital tools can become expensive furniture in museum space
* Digital is just one tool in the curator's toolbox
* Is it the medium or the message that is important?

People get entranced by the digital (a fetishisation of the future that seems incongruous with the past) - the relationship between past, present and future is important. The notion of value is often future-oriented - impact with regard to value. But how does digital engagement help people experience heritage? Understanding “end users” and evaluation is key (see Nina Simon, 'digital tools constitute a broken feedback loop'). The sector is more driven by policy than by bottom up processes. 'Experiencing the Digital World' project on-going until August (Simon Popple is involved).

'A Culture is no Greater than its Woods': Forests and Cultural Values
(Amy Cutler)

* Ancient trees
* Using the forest as a public conduit for culture and social ecological utopia
* 'Wilderness' and 'ancient woodland' defined as social categories
* New and competing discourses

Arts and Humanities Research/Teaching and Cultural Values
Anna Upchurch

See new book: Humanities in the Twenty-first century: Beyond Utility and Markets - http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?is=9780230366633

* Values and ideas vs. entrepreneurship
* NESTA toolkit for entrepreneurs (value-led)
* How ideas could be considered 'values' - Human Values Theory

Pararchive Community Groups, History, Heritage and Culture
See: http://pararchive.com (Andy Tuner)

* Collaborating with Science Museum and BBC (via Simon Popple)
* Different legitimating mechanisms for value (making it an object of scrutiny)
* Democratisation of space, people creating their own spaces
* Social analysis and policy (Geography dept at Leeds)

Approaching Cultural Value as a Complex System: Experiencing the Arts and Articulating the City in Leeds
(Stuart Murray and Jonathan Gross)

Relocating cultural value from the space of the event to cultures of everyday life.

* Participation-experience and anthropology-phenomenology
* Public-private space the and etiquette of being and being in place with art
* Keenness to understand and access the experience of participants in new ways
* Does feedback culture detract sometimes from the art, from the experience?
* Where is everyday life?
* Where is the value of an event?
* What is the value of the arts?
* Participatory and reflexive practice (thinking with not about)

Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement

The dhAHRC workshop consisted of a series of presentations related to the field of the digital humanities, touching on issues including digital transformations, specialist IT skills, copyright and IPR, open data, and licensing.

Ethical Issues in Digital Humanities (DH)
(Anna Crowe)

ICCPR - article 17: 'no one will be subject to disproportionate interference'.

Where does data come from? What is open data? Personal data is not open data; even non-identifiable data can be personal because the nature of personal data in the 21st century makes the likelihood of it remaining non-identifiable lower (see Unique in the Crowd study).

For useful guideline around privacy see:
* Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements
* Virginia Tech - Twitter guidelines

Reassembling the Republic of Letters
See http://www.e-enlightenment.com/ (Howard Hotson)

Engagement activities (see Early Modern Letters Online - three strands: emlocollect, emloedit, front end website).

Prosopographical approaches underpin letters info, used to map intellectual networks.

Linked to COST project under e-infrastructures strand of Horizon 2020.

The Zooniverse
See https://www.zooniverse.org/ (Robert Simpson)

'Cognitive Surplus' - see Clay Shirky; this is the principle behind many of the crowdsourcing projects on Zooniverse.

Human input informs approaches to training machines to do the work (e.g. Snapshot Serengeti, Old Weather) - Simpson interested in developing a project specifically for children.

Zooniverse is now developing crowdsoucing tools as a free online service, for which it received a Google global impact award.

Sharing Data from a Researcher's Perspective 
(Ernesto Priego and James Baker)

Differences between file formats (e.g. Word, Excel, PDF) suggest different degrees of openness. To encourage re-use, build re-usability into the process and format from the start.

Although research papers given at conferences may not be at a suitable stage for publishing online, the slides from the presentation could be made available to increase researcher visibility.

Crowdsourcing in the Community
(Ylva Berglund Prytz)

Have the idea and the specific community in mind from the start.

Three levels of history (e.g. the history of WW1):
* Official records
* Soldiers' diaries and associated items
* Personal reminiscences (see e.g. Age Exchange)

From The Great War Archive project to Europeana 1914-1918

Scholarly Social Machines 
(David de Roure)

This idea is developed from Tim Berners Lee's idea of social machines:

"Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration. The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines".

Big, data, more people participating in digital culture, along with new social processes happening in realtime (e.g. unsubstantiated rumours on Twitter).

The ability to create new forms of social processes is happening at a citizen and population level. There's a methodological shift in the digital environment (audience driven) - post-digital approaches are required to understand these changes.

See also The End of the Paper

Supervision References

From Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces by Louis Marin

"The book is [...] a text whose reality is nowhere [...] in the same moment utopia is the book in which the book has been deconstructed by showing the process that constructed it" (p. 65). Here's he's talking about More's Utopia, but there are interesting implications for almost any digital text or project.

In Marin's view, the work of the utopic text is to unmoor the elements of social reality from their commonplace associations, to dislocate them in preparation for a "scientific" rearticulation to which the utopian text and its author must remain blinded. For, in the beginning of theory lies the end of utopia.

After his lengthy analysis of More's book, Marin summarizes his position in a brief chapter called "Theses on Ideology and Utopia." A utopia, he writes, is "an ideological critique of ideology": "for the impacted system of ideological representation, utopia substitutes the mobility of a figure constructed on the dialogic scene by the complex discourse of tabulation." "The utopian critique is ideological" in that "the two operations that produce the utopian figure—metaphoric projection into a non-place and a non-moment and metonymic displacement by the rearticulation of the analogic continuum of reality" are not raised to a "meta-language" of critical theory (pp. 249-50).

In utopia, critical negativity remains fictive: utopia plays with, but abides within, the given world of discourse. Marin can now explain how utopia is both inside and outside the ideological system of representation—the puzzle which, we recall, started him on the project of writing the Utopiques. A utopian text is in essence self-deconstructive: it is "not without a referent, but has an absent referent."

Further refs

Wounds and Utopia (Michael Ann Holly): http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/arthistoryvisualstudies/events/wounds-and-utopia/

D. Vance Smith: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v028/28.2smith.html