Report on the DCDC16 conference in Manchester

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Programme and branded tote bag from the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities 2016 conference

Hannah Petrie works in Digital Humanities Archives and Documentation in the College’s Digital Humanities Team. Her expertise includes working with archived data, documenting research projects on the web, and text encoding with TEI. She is currently contributing to an XQuery- and XSLT-based text archive system as part of an AHRC research project. She attended this conference along with two of her colleagues from Exeter: Graham Fereday from the Digital Humanities team, and PhD student Helen Angear.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities conference in Manchester, along with my colleague Graham Fereday and Exeter PhD student Helen Angear. DCDC is a national conference organised by The National Archives and Research Libraries UK.

This was the first time we had attended the DCDC conference, but judging by the conversations I had in the networking sessions, we were far from the only ones attending for the first time. My colleagues Graham and Helen were also presenting a paper in the Linked Open Data session, about our project Hardy’s Correspondents, digitising the collection of letters written to Thomas Hardy held at Dorset County Museum. Our talk was about reviving the conversations between Hardy and his correspondents by collating the two sides of correspondence for the first time, using TEI/XML text encoding within an eXist-db database to recreate that conversation. The talk was videoed, and, since I originally published this post, has been made available to watch on YouTube (‘Reviving epistolary conversations: linked data and dialogic approaches to letter collections’ in the conference schedule):

DCDC16 | Reviving Epistolary Conversations – University of Exeter

Although two days is the norm for a conference, after attending the large-scale Digital Humanities conference in the summer, it felt quite short and intense. There was always something interesting and relevant in each breakout session, and there were four keynote speeches over the two days, which gave the conference a community feel, with everyone attending the same talks and able to chat about the same things afterwards. It was heartening to be around a community of people who all knew the concepts and terminology that we work with day-to-day, such as impact, Linked Open Data, crowdsourcing, copyright, metadata, etc.

The keynotes were some of the standout talks. The National Holocaust Centre and Museum showed us how they tackled a problem that many institutions have to deal with – how to make sure that the testimony of people who have lived through a historical event is not lost after they die. In their case, they wanted to preserve not just their volunteers’ stories, but also the ability for visiting schoolchildren to ask them questions, which to them was a vital part of visiting the museum. Their solution was to 3D videocapture 10 of their volunteers telling their story, and to record their answers to around 1,000 questions each, using this to create a digital version of one of their volunteers, which can answer questions in real time by using the bank of recorded answers.

In Wednesday’s first keynote, Nicola Wright (London School of Economics Library) told us about the process of moving the Women’s Library to LSE, and talked about the emotive value of collections, how they should be accessible rather than hidden away in an ivory tower, and most of all, that they should be fun. In the last keynote of the conference, Carenza Lewis (University of Lincoln) gave an inspiring talk about engagement, and what an effect impact can have. To demonstrate the enthusiasm and drive of amateur historians, she showed us an example of a group who had been surveying local historic buildings, and preserving a record of them by knitting them!

My last session, a workshop on copyright, was one of the highlights. PhD student Andrea Wallace (University of Glasgow) and Prof Ronan Deazley (Queen’s University Belfast) created a playful exhibition designed to test the legal limits of the crossover between public domain works of art and their digital surrogates.

In the UK, when a copy is made of an original artwork, it is deemed to be a new work of art and generates a new copyright, unlike in some other countries such as the USA where a faithful reproduction of the original is also deemed to be in the public domain. Even if artworks are in the public domain, many institutions still claim copyright over the digital surrogates that they create of them.

For their project, they took the digital surrogates of public domain works of art from the websites of the famous institutions that held them, printed them out to the artwork’s original dimensions, and displayed them in an exhibition called Display At Your Own Risk.

Part of the aim of the project was to see whether institutions provided users with enough clear and concise information to avoid violating their image rights. They found that the terms of use were generally difficult to find on the websites, that they weren’t standardised, were confusing and were sometimes even contradictory. They concluded that although online collections are supposed to be about public engagement with the works, this restrictive approach to image rights was likely to put people off using them. They pointed to a case study of the Rijksmuseum, which has made over 150,000 of its images available in high resolution, free for anyone to download and reuse, and which runs a competition every year to encourage people to reuse its collections creatively. In the spirit of getting creative with public domain work, Wallace showed off the metadata skirt she had made, which was printed with information from one of the exhibition artworks, and which was one of the most memorable parts of the conference.

A more in-depth exploration of the project can be found at the art magazine Hyperallergenic.

Next, Simon Tanner (King’s College London) gave a talk about copyright in an OpenGLAM world, and reminded us that the current copyright laws are placing major limits on what we can research. Currently, most of the twentieth century is being neglected in research, because it’s so difficult or impossible to navigate copyright for these sources.

There was a lot of excitement about the session on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Fiona_Bradley/status/786238629316325376

https://twitter.com/RichardNevell/status/786228303170416641

If you work in the libraries or archives sector I would definitely recommend attending the DCDC conference if you get the opportunity. I met people from a variety of different organisations: local and specialist archives; historic properties; charities; university libraries; and PhD students. All of the sessions were relevant and interesting, and we benefited from the expertise of a variety of different sectors. I was struck by everyone’s shared interest in not only preserving history but also making it easily accessible to everyone.

Hannah Petrie

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