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.
Caricature, DHums, Literature, Public talk, Research

‘Simpsons Did It!’, or Roy got there first and some other matters

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Last week I wrote a little something about categorising the webpage-cum-page, a facet of which covered the problem of versioning and unique user perspectives. Today I have been re-reading Roy Rosenzweig’s 2003 article ‘Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era‘ when I noticed something that sounded familiar:

The problem is still worse because of the ability of digital media to create and represent complex, dynamic, and interactive objects – another of their great virtues […] That is most obviously true of computer games and digital art, but even a large number of ordinary web pages are generated out of databases, which means that the specific page you view is your own “creation” and the system can create an infinite number of pages (742, my emphasis)

South Park S06 E07 comes to mind. The ‘Simpsons Did It!‘ problem of digital curation.

Among his many interests, Roy was questioning boundaries of access and use of scholarly material before most even realised the internet had made those boundaries open to question (there is a horrible irony in the fact that the DOI for his seminal 2003 paper is currently not working). Open Access might have got itself into a horrible administrative pickle in the UK of late, but we appear to be lurching in the right direction: a JISC conference next month on OA publishing in HSS (book now!) should be a useful opportunity to reflect on just how far we’ve come. I’m proud to make my work freely available, and am delighted that my latest article has been published in an open access journal: ‘Locating Gulliver: unstable loyalism in James Gillray’s The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver‘, Image (&) Narrative 14:1 (2013). This article derives from a talk I gave just over a year ago at the Nottingham Contemporary, and argues that even the most ostensibly loyalist prints designed by James Gillray could have been interpreted as fundamentally ambiguous, to the point of mocking his sometime loyalist paymasters. It builds on some conversations with and reflections by Steve Poole, and was a pleasure to write in between working on the ever gestating book.

Returning to the topic of openness, the BBC has this week joined the crowdsourcing bandwagon (a wagon so popular it has made the OED) and asked the public to help tag the World Service Radio Archive. I have deep respect for both the BBC and the World Service, and yet my first instinct to this call is why? Not that I want paying for any potential work I put in, but just why? Why should I bother? Why this project and not another? In short, I’m not sure the case for contributing is being made explicit enough. Answers on a postcard.