We’re delighted to announce the first DCHRN event of 2018, featuring Professor Melissa Terras, who has recently joined the University of Edinburgh (and the DCHRN steering group) as Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage. Come and hear from Melissa about some of her thinking around openness and the use and re-use of digitised content. There will be time afterwards for discussion and networking. All are welcome, and registration is free.
Friday 9 February 2018, 3-5pm
Informatics building room 4.31/4.33, George Square campus, University of Edinburgh.
Wandering Through OpenGlam: The Use and Reuse of Digitised Content
As the cultural heritage sector as a whole builds up its banks of digitised content, some of which is openly licensed and available for reuse, our thoughts should turn to the use and users of this material. In this discussion, Melissa Terras will describe the changing perspectives on the current digitisation framework that become apparent when you try to reuse content, rather than create or host it. What are we doing to facilitate use and usage of digital representations of library, archive, and art materials? What barriers are in place to allow users to access materials, for use in the way they want? And what legal, ethical, cultural, and technological frameworks are driving forward the type of material which is available, and how it can be reused?
Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, which she joined in October 2017, leading digital aspects of research within CAHSS at Edinburgh, as well as building digital capacity in the new Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts, humanities, and wider cultural heritage and information environment that would otherwise be impossible. With a background in Classical Art History and English Literature (MA, University of Glasgow), and Computing Science (MSc IT with distinction in Software and Systems, University of Glasgow), her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts.She is an Honorary Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003-2017, Honorary Professor in UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which she directed 2012-2017, and previously Vice Dean of Research in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-2017). Her books include “Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts” (2006, Oxford University Press) and “Digital Images for the Information Professional” (2008, Ashgate), and she has co-edited various volumes such as “Digital Humanities in Practice” (Facet 2012) and “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013) which was recently translated into a Russian Edition (Siberian Federal University Press 2017). Her latest monograph on the representation of academics in children’s literature is in production with Cambridge University Press. She is currently serving on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries, and the Board of the National Library of Scotland, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Fellow of the British Computer Society.You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.