jamessmithies.org/blog RSS

Leveraging Scale and Opportunity: Digital HASS in Australasia

Slides of my talk 'Leveraging Scale and Opportunity: Digital HASS in Australasia', presented at eResearch Australasia, Melbourne, October 31 2024.

Large Language Models and Transnational Research

Slides of my talk with Karaitiana Taiuru, 'Large Language Models and Transnational Research: Introducing the AI as Infrastructure (AIINFRA) Project', presented at the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures Conference, 17 October 2024.

Australasian Research Software Engineering

Slides of my talk 'Australasian Research Software Engineering: From HASS Research Services to Infrastructural Milieux', presented at the Australasian Association of Digital Humanities (aaDH) seminar series, August 01, 2024.

Digital Modernity: Continuity and Change in the History of Technology, 1993 – 2023

Abstract and slides for my Miegunyah Public Lecture, 'Digital Modernity: Continuity and Change in the History of Technology, 1993 – 2023', delivered at the University of Melbourne, August 17th, 2023.

HASS Research Software Engineering (RSE) in the UK

Slides of my talk 'HASS Research Software Engineering (RSE) in the UK', a contribution to the 'Bridging the Digital Divide in HASS Panel' held at the University of Melbourne, August 23, 2023.

Career Pathways in Arts & Humanities RSE in the UK and Beyond

Slides of my talk 'Career Pathways in Arts & Humanities RSE in the UK and Beyond '. Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering (RSE) Summer School, University of Cambridge / Zoom, 25 July 2023.

Book Launch: Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data

Video of the panel discussion for the launch of the open access book, Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an interdisciplinary project (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). The roundtable discussion was led by hosts Professor Jane Winters and Professor James Smithies, with the authors, Professor Ruth Ahnert and Professor Emma Griffin. Unfortunately, Dr Mia Ridge and Dr Giorgia Tolfo were unable to join the discussion.

The Phenomenology of Technical Knowledge: Research Software Engineering, Product Development, and Digital Humanities

Slides of my talk 'The Phenomenology of Technical Knowledge: Research Software Engineering, Product Development, and Digital Humanities' presented via Zoom at the Bridges (Bridges between disciplines: Gender in STEM and Social Sciences) Conference, September 16th 2022.

Modes of Historical Analysis: Digital Approaches to Global and Imperial History

Slides of my talk 'Modes of Historical Analysis: Digital Approaches to Global and Imperial History'. Balliol College Global & Imperial History Research Seminar, University of Oxford, 25 February 2022.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans: Rethinking the Technology of Literature & Culture

My talk 'Mysterium tremendum et fascinans: Rethinking the Technology of Literature & Culture', presented at the 'Literature & Culture and/as Intelligent Systems' digital workshop, University of Stuttgart, 16 December 2021.

Announcing my departure from KDL: New starts, new possibilities

I’ll be leaving King’s Digital Lab (KDL) this month, after 6 wonderful years, for a new role as Professor of Digital Humanities in King’s Department of Digital Humanities (DDH). Although merely a move over to the other half of Digital Humanities at King’s, and a return to a department I used to hold a fractional appointment in, it represents a significant milestone in my career. I’m grateful to the many people who have supported me to this point, in New Zealand, Australia, Jordan, and the United States, as well as the UK.

Architecture and Research Software Engineering (Podcast)

Contribution to a Code for Thought podcast, hosted by Peter Schmidt (UCL) and with Steve Crouch from the Software Sustainability Institute/Southampton (UK) and Keith Gutfreund from Elsevier, Boston (USA).

Framing the Problem: AHRC IRC UK-Ireland DH Network

My talk about Research Software Engineering (RSE) career paths for the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network workshop 'Capacity Enhancement in DH: Training and Beyond', 15 December 2020.

DHN2021 Archiving & Sustainability in King's Digital Lab

Slides of my talk 'Archiving & Sustainability in King's Digital Lab', presented at DHN2021 as part of the panel discussion 'Towards deterioration, disappearance or destruction? Discussing the critical issue of long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects', chaired by Mats Fridlund (University of Gothenburg) and with Jessica Parland-von Essen (Senior Coordinator at CSC– IT Center for Science, Finland) and Victoria Johansson (Deputy Director of Lund University Humanities Lab, Sweden).

MaDiH (مديح): Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan: Update & Issues

Slides of my Zoom talks with Prof. Fadi Balaawi 'MaDiH (مديح): Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan: A Brief Update', and 'Risks, Challenges & Opportunities' presented at our MaDiH (مديح) project workshop 'Identifying datasets on Jordanian Cultural Heritage: User feedback' on October 13th 2020, hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL).

King’s Digital Lab as Experiment and Lifecycle

This SORSE talk, delivered with KDL Deputy Director Arianna Ciula, describes King’s Digital Lab (KDL), a Research Software Engineering lab operating within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London (UK).

Life in New Times: Artificial Intelligence and Modernity

Slides of my talk 'Life in New Times: Artificial Intelligence and Modernity', presented at the NIght of Ideas, Alliance Française, Jersey, January 30th, 2020.

Digital Humanities Labs & Global Cyber-infrastructure

Slides of my talk 'Digital Humanities Labs & Global Cyber-infrastructure', presented at the Rebuilding Laboratories Workshop, University of Birmingham, Institute of Advanced Studies, 19th November 2019.

King’s Digital Lab Research Software Engineering Career Paths

The slides of my talk 'King’s Digital Lab Research Software Engineering Career Paths', presented at the Russell Universities Group IT Directors Forum (RUGIT), 19 September 2019.

Research Software Engineering in Jordan: The MaDiH (مديح) Project

Slides of 'Research Software Engineering in Jordan: The MaDiH (مديح) Project', delivered at RSE2019, 18 September, 2019.

Innovation at the Intersection: Using STS to enable University – Technology Sector Collaboration

Slides of my talk 'Innovation at the Intersection: Using STS to enable University – Technology Sector Collaboration', delivered at the 4S Society for the Social Studies of Science conference, New Orleans, 04 September 2019.

Integrating DH into the longue durée: Research Laboratories, History, Methods

My talk 'Integrating DH into the longue durée: Research Laboratories, History, Methods', presented at the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ 2nd Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit and 3rd international DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop, 27 - 29 March, 2019.

Digital History and the Digital Modern

The text of my keynote talk and slides, for the launch of the Center for Digital History Aarhus (CEDHAR), Aarhus University, 22nd February 2019.

Curating our Technological Ruins: Towards an Aesthetics of Disaster Archiving

Slides for my talk 'Curating our Technological Ruins: Towards an Aesthetics of Disaster Archiving', delivered at the 'Public Humanities Infrastructure: A Post-Harvey Introduction to Critical Infrastructure Studies' event at the Humanities Research Centre, Rice University, January 25th, 2019. Readings are available on the Critical Infrastructure Studies site.

Research Software Careers: Establishing Local, National & International Pathways

Slides for my talk 'Research Software Careers: Establishing Local, National & International Pathways', at the launch of Research Software London, Imperial College London, October 18, 2018.

The Epistemology of the Machine: Natural Philosophy, Digital Laboratories, and Cultural Heritage

Slides for my talk 'The Epistemology of the Machine: Natural Philosophy, Digital Laboratories, and Cultural Heritage', at the Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival, University of Liverpool, 12 September, 2018.

From Lab to University: Towards an Institutional RSE Career Pathway

Slides for my talk 'From Lab to University: Towards an Institutional RSE Career Pathway', delivered at Research Software Engineering 2018, Birmingham University, 03 September 2018.

Digital Cultural Heritage in the UK: 5 Lessons Learned

Slides used in a 5 minute introduction to the 'Digital' theme at the AHRC / Newton funded workshop on Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development in Jordan, Jordan Musuem, Amman, 27-28 June 2018. After a brief overview of activity across the UK digital cultural heritage sector, I explore 5 questions people designing major digital projects should consider: Governance & Management, Access, Complexity, Scale, Sustainability.

Interrogating Global Humanities Infrastructure

The text of my contribution to the Critical Infrastructure Studies panel at MLA 2018, New York (January 6th, 2018), 'Interrogating Global Humanities Infrastructure'.

Four talks from 2017

A selection of four talks from 2017, at the Bodleian Library, DH2017 (Montreal), University of Cologne, and DPASSH 2017 (University of Sussex).

Systems Development & Application / Data Lifecycle Management in King’s Digital Lab

The slides of my talk 'Systems Development & Application / Data Lifecycle Management in King’s Digital Lab', Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, November 30th, 2017.

Mechanizing the Humanities? King’s Digital Lab as Critical Experiment

The slides and text of my co-authored talk 'Mechanizing the Humanities? King’s Digital Lab as Critical Experiment', DH2017, Montreal, August 10th, 2017.

Humans in the Loop: King’s Digital Lab as Socio-technical System

The slides of my talk 'Humans in the Loop: King’s Digital Lab as Socio-technical System', University of Cologne, July 26th, 2017.

Preserving 30 years of Digital Humanities Work: The Experience of King’s Digital Lab

The slides and abstract of a talk at the DPASSH (Digital Preservation for Social Sciences and Humanities) conference, co-authored with Anna-Maria Sichani and Carina Westling, University of Sussex 14-15 June 2017.

Full Stack DH: Building a Virtual Research Environment on a Raspberry PI

The text and slides of my presentation to the DH2016 conference, Kraków, July 11 - 16, 2016.

Old Bailey Online research in New Zealand, and a full data source

With the approval of the Old Bailey Online team, I’m happy to report that the full dataset of the Old Bailey Online can be downloaded here: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/~r.sainudiin/datasets/public/OldBailey/. More sources for the data are expected to follow but this seems a nice way to build on the work underway in New Zealand.

Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Video: This panel discussion of Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder's Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (M.I.T. Press, 2015) occured on January 27th, 2016 at the University of Oxford. It was part of the TORCH Books at Lunchtime Series, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute.

Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities

Video: This is a video of my contribution to the workshop 'The Frontiers of DH: Humanities Systems Infrastructure', presented by the UC Digital Humanities Programme during November 2015. See also Prof. Paul Arthur: Smart Infrastructures for Cultural and Social Research, Prof. Alan Liu: Against the Cultural Singularity, and (earlier in the month) Dr. Tim Sherratt: Towards A Manifesto for Tactical DH Research Infrastructure.

Introduce data mining to your History course in 2 minutes

https://www.mashape.com/ offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that perform common text analysis tasks, including the one we’ll use for this tutorial: Named Entity Recognition (NER). Text analysis is a good way to introduce students to data mining. You can use text documents, or a URL.

From the Wayback Machine: Do we need a Systems Analysis of the Digital Humanities?

This post was first published at ideasunderground.com on 24 May, 2009. I’ve reproduced it here partly because that blog no longer exists, partly because it’s a lazy-but-efficient way of offering an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time to a new audience, and partly because I’m (sadly, perhaps) still quite taken with it. It fits well with my belief that scholars – especially in a post Edward Snowden world – need to understand the engineered nature of the virtualmachines they use in their work (regardless of whether they want to build digital outputs or not). Achieving a robust level of scholarly self-consciousness in the digital age is a challenge that most people have (I suggest) given up on, in the face of technological advance rather than methodological choice or epistemological orientation. This has huge implications for the integrity of future scholarship, but opens up equally fascinating areas for research and analysis.

Digital Humanists as Master Builders

I’ve been thinking about the now relatively long-standing debate in Digital Humanities about ‘who’s in and who’s out’ and wondering if there’s an angle we haven’t been considering (by writing ‘we’ this makes an assumption I’m ‘in’, of course, which I have to admit feels both presumptive given there’s a chance I don’t fit someone else’s criteria and odd given I’m a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities). My suggestion is that we need to stop only thinking about the specific technical skills a digital humanist needs, and consider the function the (extra)discipline plays in the broader community, as well as the role(s) it is likely to need to play in the future.

Speaking Back to America, Localizing DH Postcolonialism

I’ve put off writing this post for a long time, and I’m still not sure about publishing it because I need to keep thinking it through and catching up on some reading on the topic. Perhaps I should also note that readers from New Zealand, Australia, and other ex-commonwealth nations (as well as Britain) might find it bemusing. The backstory is that I’m writing to a North American audience on a topic specific to the digital humanities. Here goes.

Requirements for a New Zealand Humanities eResearch Infrastructure

This is the text of a talk given at eResearch 2013, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, July 03, 2013.

I can only offer a very formative overview of this subject here, but I’m keen to at least put it on the radar. As everyone knows, vast amounts of our cultural heritage are either being digitized and put online or being born online, and this has significant implications for the arts and humanities. In particular, it forces us to start increasing our understanding of, and capability with, the engineered technologies that deliver resources to us online. It will always be difficult getting the balance right – we’re never going to be engineers – but we need to start working through the issues.

Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach

This post was republished as ‘Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1:1, Fall, 2012.

The topic of appropriate standards for the evaluation of scholarly digital outputs has come up in conversation at my institution (the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) recently and I’ve realised I haven’t got a ready or simple answer, usually replying that such standards are extremely important because we need to ensure scholarly digital outputs attain to the same standards as, say, monographs, but that they’re evolving. The conversations normally don’t go much further than that. This post, then, is an attempt to get my thoughts down on paper so I can point colleagues to a handy url summarising my thoughts. Much of it will merely repeat common knowledge for digital humanists, but might be of interest.

HIST 450 Digital History Seminar – Additional Reading

This list is intended as an additional resource for the University of Canterbury HIST 450: History as a Discipline (Honours) class. The Centre for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/) maintain another very useful list, many of which are represented below. Some historical method textbooks will also have sections on computing-related issues. The Zotero Digital History group influences is another essential resource.

Introduction to Digital Humanities

This talk was given to the University of Canterbury History Department, New Zealand, March 14^th, 2012. The talk aimed to introduce both the Digital Humanities, and a proposed new programme in Digital Humanities to colleagues in the College of Arts, School of Humanities. The paper is divided into three parts:

‘Introduction to Digital Humanities, with apologies to Stanley Fish’.
Everyday Digital Humanities.
Pedagogy and Deployment Models.

Theory, Systems and Vino

I’ve been watching the current Theory Debate via Digital Humanities Now this past week or so with interest but have only just found the time to write down my reaction to it. It’s a topic that has been dear to my heart for some time now. It touches on the question of where the digital humanities stand in relation to the core tradition, and what direction it’s going to take as a practice (I’m not sure I’m keen for it to become a ‘discipline’ in the traditional sense of the term). I’ve often said that if DH is to be taken seriously by the analog humanities it will need to begin to engage with some core humanities practices, develop some kind of theoretical framework(s), identify some core methodologies, and generally produce some writing that has recognizable intellectual ‘grunt’.

The moral imperative of the digital humanities

I’ve been taken by the final report of the Comité des Sages (‘the reflection group on bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online’) , The New Renaissance (January 2011). It articulates a moral imperative that has long been a driving force of the digital humanities but is infrequently surfaced, perhaps for good reason given the dangers of mixing intellectual and cultural movements with claims that they coincide with the morally correct.

Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure

A few comments (specifically from @jasonaboyd) about infrastructure at the recent Victoria THATCamp sparked an idea, and I’ve thrown together a site called Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure. The idea is that, while Amazon Web Services might not be suitable for all (or even many) digital humanities projects, and the platform isn’t exactly user friendly to people uncomfortable with the command line, it does offer an extremely scalable cloud infrastructure and a nice way to package up web application stacks for distribution.

The Story of Linux

The Story of Linux, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. A video from the Linux Foundation.

Digital Humanities: The Pacific Node

Tom Scheinfeldt’s recent blog entry ‘What Digital Humanists Like’ suggests the discipline is structured in a similar way to social networks, with the main conversation based on Twitter and an organizational structure best conceived as a series of horizontally (as opposed to vertically or hierarchically) organized nodes. My feeling is that the digital humanities also need to be conceptualized from the point of view of engineering and the history of technology, but that’s another issue.

The Social University Model

People keeping an eye on the digital humanities Twitterverse (or Digital Humanities Now) may have already come across this set of slides describing CUNY’s move to develop a social university. I’m reposting here to pick up those people – hopefully New Zealanders! – who missed it. It’s time to get with the program…

JISC Podcast: The use of technology by arts and humanities researchers

This podcast by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) offers an excellent overview of “how technology can support researchers working in the arts and humanities…”. It provides a useful supplementary resource to my last post. It can be found in its original context here and on iTunes here.

An Open Letter to New Zealand Humanities Academics

‘Open Letters’ are often dramatic affairs, but this one has a more pragmatic purpose: to give New Zealand university staff working in the humanities a leg-up into the digital humanities, and point out where they should focus their attention. My activities over the past few years have hit the radar of some of my close colleagues, and latterly a slightly wider audience with the publication of this blog and www.humanitiesmachine.org.nz, but I’m constrained by only working in the digital humanities in my spare time, and outside a university setting. I’m grateful to Paul Millar at the University of Canterbury Humanities Computing Unit for both setting up the unit (it represents a significant advance) and adding me, and therefore my occasionally intemperate ideas, as a Research Associate, but we need to get more people onboard.

Humanities Machine – A New Zealand Digital Humanities Portal

For those of you who follow my blog but aren’t on Twitter, a quick note that New Zealand now has a digital humanities portal. Humanities Machine is presented in partnership with the University of Canterbury’s Humanities Computing Unit, and has been put live slightly earlier than expected because of the recent earthquake. I view this very much as ‘Version 1.0′ and hope it can be developed further, perhaps even being completely remodeled and extended as part of an antipodean One Week One Tool kind of program.

Digital scholarship and academic research

I’ve been blogging a bit more than I planned to these last few weeks, but want to draw readers attention to this video of Krisztina Holly, Vice Provost for Innovation at the University of Southern California, speaking about the way digital scholarship will change university research. It’s doing the rounds of academic Twitter streams and is associated with the recent buzz over an article on open access review policies that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 24th. Click here to see Holly’s video.

Skills Framework for the Information Age

People involved in the digital humanities will presumably be interested in this, but it will probably be of interest to anyone involved in developing university courses in situations where proof of alignment to the ‘real world’ is required. I’m referring to the UK’s Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

How to build a national digital humanities infrastructure

DARIAH has published the results of a survey into the state of the digital humanities in Greece that should interest New Zealand humanists. Greece is at an early stage of development and work is being done to identify present and future requirements. The report can be read here. It may interest more traditional researchers to learn how digital humanities infrastructures are being built around the world; simply put, it isn’t as organic as it was in the ‘early days’, when communities of like-minded researchers found each other and worked to gain critical mass.

Digital Anarchism and the Digital Humanities

Further to my purpose of offering NZ humanists some snapshots of what the digital humanities are about, here is an excerpt from Todd Presner’s ‘Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge’. I particularly like the paragraph below, but I’m uncomfortable about his calls in the (UCLA) Digital Humanities Manifesto to label anyone who wants to close off open web spaces as an ‘enemy’. This style of DH will appeal to post-structuralists, digital anarchists, and postmodern Marxists, but I personally don’t support calls to remove Capital from the digital world – I suspect I’d have to find yet another new career if that happened.

Digital Humanities 2010 Keynote….and the purpose of this blog

I think this blog, and my associated Twitter account that I’ve added to the sidebar for all those non-twitterers out there, is finding its focus. Unlike my previous blog and websites, which were focused towards the international digital humanities community, I’d like this one to provide digital humanities news for busy New Zealand humanities scholars who don’t have the time – or perhaps the inclination – to keep up with developments in this emerging field. So no polemics (if I can help it), just a series of posts to keep people up to date.

Technological Agnosticism

I’ve long held that both digital and analog humanists need to take a more agnostic approach to technology. Digital humanists are getting there, but neither group seems to have the level of maturity present in the commercial and public sectors in this regard (evidenced by continued debates about the pros and cons of this or that format or presentation medium – the ‘fors’ and ‘againsts’). I’ve been reading ISO/IEC26514 (2008), which is the international standard for the development of user documentation, and am impressed with it on this score.

Digital Manifesto, THATCamp Paris

Geoff Rockwell’s report on centerNet 2010 reminded me how much work is required to get the Asia-Pacific region up to speed in the Digital Humanities. Where better to (re)start than the Digital Manifesto produced at THATCamp Paris on 18-19 May, 2010? Click here for the website and on the image for a scalable version.