Digital Humanities Seminar Series

26 April 2013

Digital Humanities is a field of research and teaching that has been growing dramatically around the world, especially over the past 5 years. There is and has been considerable activity of this kind at UWS across a number of Schools and Institutes, and 2013 sees the formal establishment of a Research Group in Digital Humanities at UWS, based in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts.

The growth in such activity more widely in the region led to the founding in 2011 of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, with the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. This seminar takes advantage of the presence in Sydney of two distinguished visitors from Canada, and marks the first formal event of the new Research Group.

Professor Ray Siemens and Dr Lynne Siemens will each make a presentation, followed by questions and discussion. Both speakers have a wealth of experience of digital humanities both in Canada and internationally, so it is anticipated that the discussion will be wide-ranging. Presentations and Biographies.

Professor Ray Siemens will speak on 'Education and Training in the Digital Humanities: Converging local initiatives and their international context.' This talk considers digital humanities education and training in its many contexts — from local informal interactions to formal, dedicated doctoral programmes. It assesses the developing programmes that range from basic understanding of key concepts to emerging trends in content- and process-modelling, social and public engagement, and large-scale problem-based research.

Dr Lynne Siemens will speak on 'Collaborative Research Projects in the Digital Humanities: Building and sustaining from the local to the international.' Researchers are taking increasing advantage of digital resources, tools, and methods to explore new and different kinds of research questions. One result is the emergence of larger and more complex projects requiring different work practices that include collaboration with colleagues locally, nationally and increasingly internationally. This raises questions around the type of processes needed to build and sustain teams and their projects while meeting the many challenges that come with working across disciplines, distance, time and culture/language groups. This talk addresses these questions and suggests best practices for Digital Humanities teams to consider in their collaborations.

Speakers: Professor Ray Siemens and Dr Lynne Siemens, University of Victoria, Canada