Digital Humanities

Student Internship Reflection – Jordan Lloyd-Head

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Hi, I’m Jordan and I am currently working towards my BA History degree. This year, I have worked as an intern with the Digital Humanities Lab and I will be reflecting on the experience and skills that I developed in this blog post.

One of the best things about working in the labs is the extensive range of possibilities available, which gave me the opportunity to work with 2D, 3D, and Audio-Visual digitisation. My favourite area of work was 3D digitisation in the Makerspace, which houses our 3D printers and 3D workstation. This was an area which I became particularly interested in and one that would be of particular use to any future intern interested in cultural heritage. I loved 3D Digitisation because it required me to create things. 3D has so much potential for education as it creates a hands-on learning experience and makes digital education more accessible and is an area that I would definitely recommend getting into! In addition to my 3D work, I learnt how to code, played with Arduino boards, and also completed highly precise Photoshop stitching on our Saxton’s ‘Atlas of England and Wales’ project. Continue reading →

Digital Humanities Intern Team Showcase 2020

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Our intern cohort of 2019/ 2020 created individual presentations to share their experiences of working in the DH Lab and talk about their digital projects. Find out more about the benefits of the internship to their learning as Humanities undergraduates and the positive impact on their progression and aspirations.

Eve Alderson – BA History & French

Francis Elsender – BA Theology & Religion

Sophie Hammond – BA History

Laura Jones – BA History & Archaeology

Jordan Lloyd-Head – BA History

Tumisang Mbedzi – BSc Archaeology & Forensic Science

Volunteering in the Digital Humanities Lab

 

Student Internship Reflection – Eve Alderson

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My name is Eve and I’ve just completed my last assignments as a final year History and French student at the university. Working as an intern in the DH Lab this year has been an incredible experience, allowing me to truly make the most of my final year at Exeter.

This internship has enabled me to develop so many skills throughout the year, related to both DH and the more general world of work. With regard to my DH skills, I have had the opportunity to be trained in 2D and 3D Digitisation, 3D printing and Audio-Visual techniques. I am particularly interested in 2D digitisation techniques because they allow us to study more closely and preserve historical documents and manuscripts, as well as the use of digital archives, to make them accessible to the wider public. Throughout the year I have been able to get involved in numerous projects of this kind, which has really enabled me to hone my skills. Continue reading →

Student Internship Reflection – Francis Elsender

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Hi, my name is Francis Elsender and I am a final year Theology and religions student. I originally wanted to be a Digital Humanities Lab intern because I am a big fan of technological innovations as well as the humanities but felt there really wasn’t a discipline that successfully blended the two together until I found out about the Lab. My favourite thing about working for the lab has to be the sheer variety of things we get up to on a day to day basis, many of which I would never have had the chance to encounter by just doing my degree. Thanks to working at the lab, I am now proficient in video and audio editing, digitisation of 2D and 3D objects, handling artefacts and texts and I could probably give photography and 3D printing a good shot too! All my co-workers will tell you that my favourite part of the lab is the AV suite as it allows us to make the humanities accessible to all through the resources we create. Continue reading →

Student Internship Reflection – Sophie Hammond

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Name: Sophie

Degree: BA History

Favourite project?

In my second term, I worked in partnership with Exeter City Football Club’s Grecian Archive to digitise VHS match tapes. This has been a standout project because it has given me invaluable experience in a leadership position, as I have been responsible for developing a workflow for the digitisation process and liaising with Archive staff.

What skills have you developed?

Working in the DH Lab has allowed me to interact with several exciting technologies, including 2D digitisation, 3D printing and Photoshop. Through my experience of digitisation, I have built upon my photography skills and have developed a strong attention to detail. Working on the advisory desk has also enabled me to strengthen my interpersonal skills through interaction with Lab visitors. During my internship, I have developed transferrable organisational, communicational and leadership skills. I have also gained self-confidence, as I have been given the opportunity to express my creativity within an enthusiastic team. Continue reading →

Digital Humanities partnership with University of British Columbia, Okanagan

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Members of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab recently visited the University of British Columbia, Okanagan to to continue our very fruitful collaboration with the AMP Lab and the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Studies (FCCS). Following an initial visit with Prof. James Clark the previous year, Dr. Charlotte Tupman and 2nd-year UG student intern Connor Spence, who is one of our outgoing Digital Humanities interns, were very kindly hosted for the week by Prof. Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab, and Dr. Emily Murphy, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, along with their student intern Stephen French.

Connor Spence presenting Exeter’s DH Internship scheme to FCCS colleagues

One of the aims of our visit was to further our work on two training modules – one on audio digitisation and one on text encoding – which will be offered to Exeter and UBC-O students as online, self-paced modules. During the course of the week, we tested and edited our training modules, sharing them with members of UBC-O’s Department of World Literatures and Department of English and Cultural Studies and gaining valuable feedback during the process. Continue reading →

Force K6, Digitising Betty Cresswell’s Imperial soldiers collection

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We are delighted to share this post by Katie Learmont. Katie, our Graduate Business Partner Technical Assistant, has been working at the Digital Humanities Lab for four months as a Technical Assistant. Prior to joining the team, she undertook a masters in Library and Information Studies at UCL and has worked and volunteered in a variety of settings, including Eton College, the Royal Academy of Arts, V&A and the European Parliament. Katie’s experience sparked an interest in how 2D and 3D digitisation can benefit academic teaching and research, and led her to join the Exeter Digital Humanities team.

One of my key responsibilities as Graduate Business Partner was to support our Intern team to undertake a small digitisation project relating to Muslim Indian soldiers in Europe during the Second World War. On 3rd December 1939, 1723 men, mainly “Punjabi Mussulmans” and 2000 animals left Punjab for France to assist the British army with transporting supplies and equipment over rough ground. After they were evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940, many RIASC (Royal Indian Army Service Corps) soldiers settled in military camps across the UK before returning to India in February 1944. Four RIASC men were billeted with Herbert Foster, who ran a tree nursery and chicken farm at the Plateau, Shirley Hollow. In 2016 Foster’s daughter, Betty Cresswell, met with Ghee Bowman (who is currently undertaking an AHRC funded PhD research project) at her farmhouse in rural Derbyshire. Betty showed him a small photography collection, featuring her parents with Captain Gian Kapur (Gian Kapur corresponded with the family regularly until his death in 1985), and the others, as well as press cuttings, letters, slippers and brass objects. Betty had met the Force K6 soldiers in 1940 when she was just three years old, and although she couldn’t remember them clearly she could remember the smell of chappaties cooking!

Betty Cresswell, Herbert Foster and Force K6 soldiers

Betty Cresswell, Herbert Foster and Force K6 soldiers

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We welcome our new Digital Humanities Intern team for 2018/19!

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In June, the Digital Humanities team recruited six new College of Humanities undergraduates to advisory intern positions, based in the Digital Humanities Lab. The interns commenced work with us at the beginning of the new academic year, and we are pleased that our new cohort are joining us for a much longer internship. We received an impressively large number of applications and, following a competitive interview process, we were pleased to appoint candidates with a keen interest in the field, enthusiasm, strong problem-solving skills, and an interest in careers within the Digital Humanities.

The team have put together an introduction to their roles below, and some background on their own interests. The team bring with them positive energy and new perspectives on our projects and we welcome them and their ideas to the Digital Humanities Lab research community:

Hello! We are Hannah, Eleanor, Ciprian, Connor, Corey and Dan, and we make up the Digital Humanities Advisory Intern Team 2018/19. Over the next academic year we will be assisting our colleagues in their research endeavours and helping with the day-to-day running of the lab.

After our initial training, we are already enjoying experimenting with using the 3D printers and other equipment, and we are settling into our advisory desk work and lab duties. We looking forward to expanding our skills and applying them to external and personal projects over the coming year. Continue reading →

Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-5)

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Cotton Operative’s dwelling – ‘Illustrated London News’.
Courtesy of the ‘Cotton Town digitsation project’, and accessed via GeraldMassey.org.uk

During the American Civil War, the supply of cotton to the UK stopped, and the Lancashire mills and factories that relied on it shut down, causing sudden mass unemployment on a scale previously unknown. The cotton industry was the hub of the industrial revolution, and whole families would work in the cotton mills, meaning that the loss of income hit even harder.

In response to the crisis, many former cotton workers wrote poems about their situation, and these were published in regional newspapers. In the 1860s, there were 200 local newspapers in Lancashire reporting on local and national news, and many of these papers also published a daily or weekly poetry column. This ‘Cotton Famine poetry’ has not previously been collected together and interpreted, so the Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-5) project, funded by the AHRC and led by Dr Simon Rennie, aims to identify these poems, collect them together from their disparate locations in regional archives, and interpret them, making them freely available in a searchable text database developed by Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. We are also including audio recordings of the poems, including those in dialect.

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What difference does digital make? The present (and future) of Digital Humanities in the UK

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Recently we welcomed a distinguished guest speaker to the DH Lab, Professor Jane Winters of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, to give a seminar on the current landscape of Digital Humanities (DH) in the UK.  Prof. Winters discussed the results of a major new survey, commissioned by the School of Advanced Study, the British Academy, the British Library and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, into DH research, teaching and practice in universities, GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and the creative industries. The aims of the report were to document the current landscape of DH research, teaching and practice; identify what kind of support this needs; and explore possible demand for a UK-based DH network or association and the nature of the role that such an organisation could play.

Interpreting the statistics of the report for a highly engaged audience, Winters drew out from the facts and figures a picture of a diverse DH landscape, in which respondents identified themselves as belonging to almost forty different research areas.  More than three quarters also had extensive involvement in teaching, either in their subject area or in DH.  Winters noted that not all digital research and digital scholarship is described by its practitioners as ‘Digital Humanities’, even when it is firmly rooted in the study of Humanities sources and their related areas of specialisation.  As researchers within universities, we therefore need to ensure that when we collaborate with creative partners or GLAM institutions, we try to use a common language to describe what we do: this will help not only in the project itself, but also in how we communicate what we do to those outside our particular areas of expertise.

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