All posts by jwbaker

James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He is currently working on a history of knowledge organisation in twentieth century Britain. In 2021, I begin a major new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950'. Previous externally funded research projects have focused on legacy descriptions of art objects ('Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship', Arts and Humanities Research Council), the preservation of intangible cultural heritage ('Coptic Culture Conservation Collective', British Council, and 'Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development', British Academy), the born digital archival record ('Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities', European Commission), and decolonial futures for museum collections ('Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections', Arts and Humanities Research Council). Prior to joining Southampton, James held positions of Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, Digital Curator at the British Library, and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
Conferences, DHums, History

[live blog] #DHOxSS Kate Lindsay, Re-imaging the First World War. How can digital humanities move us beyond the trenches?

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[live blog, so excuse the errors, omissions and personal perspective]

Talk from @KTdigital, Manager for Engagement | Education Enhancement, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford.

Standard narratives of the war have a long history. But, global impact of the war often underplayed, as is gender. Anniversary provides an opportunity to tell new stories: so not just war poetry!

And yet, Oxford started digitisation in late-90s with Wilfred Owen poems, and then added more First World War poetry digital archive: oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit Teachers like digital collections: drafts of poems together on digital platforms challenge idea of final version. Public submission system for private ww1 collections. Know these people not IT literate. So held 6 roadshow days. 6500 submissions in 12 weeks. Captured stories as well as photographs of letters/objects. JISC funded Oxford to train other people in this model runcoco.oucs.ox.ac.uk @runcoco Initially no login. Just contribution to a community owned collection. Took this opportunity to explore how this model could be used for very different collections.

Europeana took the model @europeana1914. Very successful. Over 20,000 objects collected in Germany alone Continuing to offer training to Europeana on rapid digitisation. 60k objects in total digitised. Europeana 1914-1918 allows us to move away from Anglo focus on WW1: objects from all countries together. Eclectic collections. What do they mean? How can they be meaningfully used? Comments on the blog, bringing together disparate knowledge and family histories. Work with schools. Objects as a means of connecting children and heritage. General public ‘knows’ an awful lot about WW1. Project generated emails, people correcting descriptions (eg bus ticket). Public as providing context around the content.

Feed all this into high quality educational tools, in this case an OER ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk Wordpress base, community blog supporting teaching of WW1. Very much focused on the cultural stories that surround the conflict. Audio and video talks uploaded to iTunesU, 60k downloads (open licence: preferring CC-BY NC SA); resource library. Most popular areas the visualisations, which mash up data: scrapping wikipedia/media for content and mapping it. Or maps showing editors of WW1 related wiki pages: show the afterlife of particular battles. CWGC opened up data for graves viz: again, shows the global aspect of the war.

Snowball effect of the projects back to back, ready made audiences when new project launch. Measuring impact from the start helps one project roll into the next. Moving now from a project model to a consultancy model.