The Methods Network staff · Neil Grindley Senior Project Officer Activities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected] Torsten Reimer Senior Research Project Co-ordinator

EditorialThe past few months have been busy for the MethodsNetwork. We are especially pleased with the numberand scope of activities that we have been able to fund,ranging from service-oriented computing to CGIanimation. Read more about the outcomes of theseactivities and plans for future events inside. If you wouldlike to apply for funding to support an activity, see ourlatest call for proposals for activities on page 9 Thedeadline is 30 June.

Two concerns of vital interest to the Methods Networkcommunity are the sustainability of digital resources andthe need to demonstrate evidence of value of suchresources. On page 2 David Robey, Director of the AHRCICT Programme, reports on two Methods Network ExpertSeminars that focused on these important areas.

In January, Torsten Reimer joined the Methods Networkteam as Senior Research Project Co-ordinator. Torstenwas previously web co-ordinator for the University ofMunich and project co-ordinator for the historydepartment there. Torsten is working to expand theMethods Network outreach programme and buildinglinks within and between arts and humanitiescommunities. He writes about progress so far anddeveloping plans on page 9.

Lorna Hughes, the Methods Network Manager, iscurrently on maternity leave and I have been delightedto work with and supervise the Methods Network teamduring her absence. We look forward to welcomingLorna back in May.

Sheila AndersonDirector, AHDSCo-Director AHeSSC

Summer 2007 - Issue 4

The Methods Network staff

Lorna HughesManageremail: [email protected]

Hazel GardinerSenior Project OfficerActivities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Neil GrindleySenior Project OfficerActivities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Torsten ReimerSenior Research Project Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Lydia HorstmanPublications and Administrative Officeremail: [email protected]

Stuart DunnResearch Associate in e-Science Methods email: [email protected]

AHRC ICT Methods NetworkCentre for Computing in the Humanities King’s College LondonKay House7 Arundel StreetLondonWC2R 3DX

Tel 020 7848 2689Fax 020 7848 2980

Email [email protected]

http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk

Inside this issue:

Outreach and community: Read about theMethods Network’s new approaches tocommunity building on page 9

Recent activities: Simulation softwaredemonstrated by Red Legion at the Talking CGIpanel at the Art of British CGI conference. Areport on the panel is on page 5


(Edinburgh University) will elaborate on last year’s Methods Network workshop on Collaborative Text Editing. 2 July - Mark Hedges (AHDS), Melissa Terras(University College London), Shirley Crompton(Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils) will discuss Grid Enabling Humanities Datasets, an issue that will become increasingly important as grid scientists and arts and humanities scholars engage ever more closely. 6 July - e-Science and Performance will be addressed by Gregory Sporton (University of CentralEngland), Russell Beale (University of Birmingham) and Angela Piccini (Bristol University). 23 July – The final lecture will be given by Stuart Jeffrey (AHDS Archaeology) and Femke Reistma(University of Edinburgh) on Aspects of Space and Time in Humanities e-Science.

The final lecture will be followed immediately by theMethods Network workshop Space and Time: Methodsin Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past,convened by Stuart Dunn (AHeSSC) and Leif Isaksen(Oxford Archaeology). This direct collaboration betweenthe AHeSSC theme and the Methods Network will seek toprovide a discipline-wide overview of geospatialmethodologies in the key areas of Scale, Heterogeneityand Standards and Metadata. Vince Gaffney (Universityof Birmingham), William Kilbride (Glasgow Museums)and Tom Elliott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)are confirmed as keynote speakers, and each session willbe rapporteured by a distinguished scholar.

More information is available on the AHeSSC website(http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/theme). Further details mayalso be obtained from Stuart Dunn([email protected]) or Tobias Blanke([email protected]).

Methnet Newsletter 4 9/5/07 1:21 pm Page 1

Activities

Sustainability and evidence ofvalue for ICT in the arts andhumanities

David Robey, Director, AHRC ICT Programme,writes about two Expert Seminars: Sustainability ofDigital Resources in the Arts and Humanities (29November 2006) and Evidence of Value: ICT in the Artsand Humanities. (11-12 January 2007)

With the current uncertainty about the future funding ofArts and Humanities ICT support in the UK, the topics ofthese two Methods Network Expert Seminars havebecome particularly urgent. Until now the UK has had amodel system for ensuring the sustainability, through theArts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), of thesubstantial body of arts and humanities digital datafunded by public bodies. At the time of writing, however,there is considerable doubt that this system will bemaintained. The need to collect evidence of the value ofICT in the arts and humanities is all the more pressing iffunders are to be persuaded of the need for the kind ofsupport system that the AHDS has provided.

Sustainability of DigitalResources in the Arts andHumanities was held atKing’s College London on 29November 2006. Theexperts gathered togetherincluded data creators,funders, and strategicagencies. The key issuesaddressed were the need for

a set of high-level principles to govern the productionand preservation of data resources (Michael Jubb of theResearch Information Network), the range of issues to betaken into account at a more practical level in the artsand humanities (David Robey of the AHRC ICTProgramme), a model system of quality assurance fordata resources (David Bates and Jane Winters of theInstitute of Historical Research), and the need to sustainnot just the data produced but the centres of expertisethat produce it (David Shepherd of the HumanitiesResearch Institute, University of Sheffield). Participantswere especially impressed by the detailed andsystematic attention that the Andrew Mellon Foundationgives to the entire life-cycle of the data resources that itfunds (Suzanne Lodato) - far more than public funders inthe UK are able to afford.

The Expert Seminar report and papers given on the dayare available from

http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/es7mainpage.html.

Evidence of Value: ICT in the Arts and Humanities washeld in Cambridge on 11 and 12 January 2007, jointly withthe Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences andHumanities (CRASSH). This gathered together a goodnumber of mostly local participants representing anunusually wide variety of disciplines and types ofexpertise in the arts and humanities. The seminar wasparticularly helpful and stimulating for teasing out therange of issues that arguing the value of ICT involves andthe different kinds of value that we need to think about.There is value for the producer and for the consumer,quantitative and qualitative value, value in the short andin the longer term, direct value and mediated value. Thevalue of ICT can consist in: the convenience that it affordsresearchers; opening up new questions and creatingnew knowledge; confirming existing knowledge; creatingnew forms of output and dissemination; enablingcollaboration, interaction, networking, communitybuilding; facilitating access and the aggregation andintegration of resources; guaranteeing preservation.

John Knell of the Intelligence Agency made a suggestivedistinction, in his paper ‘Whose Art is it Anyway?’,between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ personalization in the use of ICTfor art communication: the latter involves its role infacilitating and enhancing the consumption of art objects,the former involves the consumer as producer, activelycontributing to the artistic process. There are interestingand potentially radical implications here for scholarlyresearch as well, though the academic world may not beready for all of them. More cautiously, the point was alsomade that value is often multivalent and unforeseen, apoint that shouldn’t need too much arguing in an artsand humanities context but, as was observed by MaryJacobus, the CRASSH Director, ‘We don’t use the tools weourselves develop to show the value of what we do.’

More information about the seminar and copies ofspeakers’ papers are available from:http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/evidencevalue.html

2 11

ICT GuidesAn introduction to ICT Guides

Craig Bellamy, Research Associate, ICT Guides,writes about new developments for this initiative.

ICT Guides is a JISC-funded initiative housed at the AHDS,King’s College London.

The purpose of ICT Guides is to provide a focal point fornew and established digital arts and humanitiesresearchers to find out about projects, the technicalmethods and tools they employ, and the individuals andcentres involved in their realization.

The first iteration of ICT Guides was launched in late 2006at De Montfort University. During this first stage ofdevelopment, projects constructed within a UK fundingcouncil context were listed. In this next stage, projectscreated within specific subject communities, andemploying specialized methods, are being emphasizedwhich gives scope to include projects from all corners ofthe globe. This may include communities around say,nineteenth-century history and electronic textual studies,or the history of reading and the methods employed ingathering and presenting evidence. Recent additions toICT Guides have included the PARADESIC (the Pacific andRegional Archive for Digital Sources in EndangeredCultures) project from Australia, and an e-Sciencedemonstrator project, Virtual Vellum. This projectinvestigates technologies that facilitate the retrieval,manipulation and annotation (‘hotspotting’) of very high-resolution image datasets using the UK’s high capacityResearch Grid.

ICT Guides also intends to explore the development of aVirtual Research Environment (VRE), using open-sourcetechnologies such as SAKAI and encompassing bulletinboards, Wikis, and other such applications. It is hopedthat this facility will give project developers an onlinespace for discussion of their technical methodologies.

eSCIENCE

eScience arts and humanitiestheme begins

Stuart Dunn, Research Associate, AHeSSC, outlinesthe first phase of theme activities.

AHeSSC is undertaking a major series of activities incollaboration with the e-Science Institute (eSI), part of theNational e-Science Centre in Edinburgh. Funding hasbeen won for a ‘theme’ on arts and humanities e-Science. eSI themes aim to ‘achieve new insights into aspecific topic by investigating it in depth over a sustainedperiod’. The AHeSSC theme will commence on 30 April2007 and finish on 31 March 2008.

The first phase of activitieswill comprise seven publiclectures. Sheila Anderson,director of the AHDS andco-director of AHeSSC, willprovide an openinglecture on 30 April, whichwill set out the theme’saims and its context asdefined by the AHDS e-Science Scoping Study. David Robey, Director of the AHRCICT Programme, will follow Sheila Anderson’s lecture witha presentation on the AHRC-JISC-EPSRC e-ScienceInitiative, its impact and likely outcomes.

The remaining lectures will comprise two or morespeakers. A leading arts or humanities e-Science earlyadopter will give a presentation on the cutting-edge workthey are engaged in, followed by a paper from ascientific expert giving a technical perspective on theissues raised.

18 June - David Shepherd and colleagues from theuniversities of Sheffield and Lancaster will discuss Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities, an overview of how artistsand humanists can employ advanced methods andtechnologies in collaboration. 19 June - Mark Greengrass (University of Sheffield,and an Associate Director of the Methods Network)and Oscar Corcho from Manchester University, willlecture on Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability for Humanities Data. This is a critical topic in particular for historical and textual studies. 20 June - Gabriel Bodard (King’s College London), Juan Garces (The British Library) and Jean Carletta

“Evidence of valuefor ICT in the artsand humanities isvital to persuadefunders to ensurethe sustainability ofthis digital data.”

“The theme willinvestigate arts andhumanities e-Sciencein depth.”


Advanced Technologies forCollaborative Performance

Alan Blackwell, CRASSH, University of Cambridge,reports on this workshop organized by Alan Blackwelland Ian Cross, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, andJulio d'Escrivan and Richard Hoadley, Anglia RuskinUniversity. (20 - 21 December 2006).

The aim of this workshop was to train practice-basedresearchers in the performing arts to make better use ofICT technologies that support live collaboration inperformance situations. The workshop leaders were JulioD'Escrivan and Richard Hoadley of Anglia RuskinUniversity; Ian Cross of the Cambridge University Centrefor Music and Science; and Alan Blackwell of the Cruciblenetwork for research in interdisciplinary design.

The workshop was based in the recently upgraded musictechnology teaching facility at Anglia Ruskin University,which contained two group studios each equipped withnine G5 dual-processor Macintoshes. Collaborativefacilities included networked sound processing withstudio monitors, local MIDI keyboards and audioprocessors on each workstation, shared headphones forpair work, and central video projection facilities.

Workshop delegates represented cultures and musicacross the globe. Everyone brought a fresh perspectiveon musical collaboration and technology and a wealth ofexperience in many composition and performancetechniques and technologies. Delegates includedtechnical specialists in the use of SuperCollider andMax/MSP; professional exponents of mixed genreperformance and a small selection of practitioners fromother performance genres such as poetry, live video artand others. The workshop was divided into mixeddiscipline teams for hands-on development andinstruction, ensuring that programmers did not raceahead of performing collaborators. Participants wereprovided with a broad range of inexpensive sensors anda short hands-on introduction to the process of

interfacing these toperformance softwaresuch as SuperCollider.

The whole group sharedexperiences duringunstructured breaks with astructured sharing ofexperiences in the finalsession. Work in progresswas captured and sharedby facilitators moving from team to team. The overallambition was to emulate a ‘collaboration masterclass’ asthe most appropriate model for practice-based researchworkshops applying technology in the performing arts.

At the end of the day, all of the participants met overcoffee to talk about the workshop: what they hadachieved, whether it met their expectations and whetherit was a good model for future events. The response wasoverwhelmingly positive - everyone had found the eventboth educational and enjoyable. Many had madecontacts that they looked forward to exploring in thefuture; others had a taste of technologies that could taketheir work and art in new directions.

This is an extract from the full report of the workshopwhich is available at:http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/act13.html

The Potential of High SpeedNetworks as a New Space forCultural Research, Innovationand Production

Graziano Milano, Freelance Artist on the seminarhe developed in partnership with King's CollegeLondon and the MARCEL Network, supported byUniversity of London Computer Centre, held at Centrefor Computing in the Humanities, King’s College,London. (19 March 2007).

This one-day seminar incorporated researchers fromcomputing, arts and humanities disciplines, arts andmedia practitioners, cultural producers andrepresentatives from UK independent media artsorganizations. The scope of the event was to explore thepotential of the high speed UK educational internetnetwork ‘SuperJanet’ as a space for creative productionsand to identify the opportunities for new types of researchthat innovative networked ICT tools may facilitate

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Apply for Funding from theAHRC ICT Methods Networkdeadline 30 June 2007

Hazel Gardiner, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, reports on the call for proposals foractivities.

The Methods Network invites the arts and humanitiesHigher Education community in the UK to submitproposals for Methods Network activities. Activities mayinclude workshops, seminars, focused workgroups,postgraduate training events and publications.

The Methods Network is keen to support both single- andcross-disciplinary proposals and those that encouragenew collaborative frameworks between technicalspecialists and arts and humanities researchers. Theprimary emphasis is on the use and reuse of digitalresources.

Proposals for hybrid activities such as workshop /seminar / workgroup combinations are also welcomed,as are proposals for any other activity which falls withinthe Methods Network remit to support and promote theuses of advanced ICT methods in academic research.

Funding of up to £5000 is available for workshops andhybrid activities. Workshops provide training inadvanced ICT methods for community members withinacademic institutions. They engage with issues such as:formal methods in analysis of source data and thecreation of technical models; working with multipletechnologies; and other matters of vital practical interestto the community.

Funding of up to £2000 is available for seminars. Thesemay concentrate on highly-defined topics of interest andalso problem areas within the community or may have amore general focus.

For information on eligibility and how to apply for fundingsee the Methods Network website. Please be aware thatall applicants are expected to submit fully-formedproposals with full programme, budget and projectedoutcome details and with particular emphasis on theresearch significance of the proposed activity.Applications that fail to provide all required details willnot be considered for funding. For further informationabout submitting a proposal contact Hazel Gardiner([email protected]).

Bursaries for PostgraduateStudentsThe Methods Network is committed to building acommunity of scholars who use advanced ICT methodsin research in the arts and humanities, and hasdeveloped a bursary initiative to support postgraduatestudents. The scheme is intended to support studentswho wish to present papers at the Digital Resources forthe Humanities and Arts (DRHA) Conference or to attendthe Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) Conference.

Bursary winners in 2005 and 2006 felt that they hadgained tremendously from being able to attendconferences which they otherwise could not afford. Mostimportantly, attending conferences such as CHArt andDRHA provides students with the opportunity to makecontact with academics and practitioners in a focusedenvironment where developing ideas might bediscussed and advanced.

To be eligible to apply for a Methods Network bursary,you must be a postgraduate student engaged in full orpart-time study at a British academic institution. Furtherinformation and an online application form are availableon the Methods Network website.

3DVisA Student Award 2007Deadline 1 October 2007

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Research Fellow,3DVisA, outlines a newstudent award scheme.

The JISC 3D Visualization in the Arts Network (3DVisA)invites submissions to the 3DVisA Student Award 2007.The award will be for an essay on an innovativeapplication of 3D computer graphics to any area of studyin the arts and humanities. The winning essay will bepublished by 3DVisA and the author will receive abursary of up to £300, sponsored by the AHRC MethodsNetwork, to attend a UK conference of his or her choice.The 3DVisA Student Award is also sponsored by Intellectand Prestel publishers.

This award will be made to an undergraduate,postgraduate or Ph.D. student currently registered in theUK. The completed essay and application form must besubmitted by 1 October 2007. The winner will beannounced by 14 December 2007 and the winning essaypublished in the 3DVisA Bulletin in March 2008. Furtherdetails are available at http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/community/3dvisaaward.html.

Participants at the workshop used sensors and performance software for

collaborative performances

“The overall ambitionwas to find the mostappropriate model forpractice-basedresearch workshopsapplying technologyin the performingarts.”


between different sectors of the creative industries andthe research base.

This seminar was animportant opportunity forthe two communities tomeet and discuss futurechallenges, strategies andcollaborations in exploringthe advanced use of gridand network technologiesfor new forms of research,innovation and productionin the area of arts andhumanities.

The morning session examined the innovative ways inwhich UK small media arts organizations and creativeproducers have been using network technologies. ArtistsKelli Dipple, Ruth Catlow, Paul Sermon and ThorMagnusson each presented papers about a range ofprojects that have made use of high-speed networks andassociated technologies based on their own experienceas artists, curators and researchers.

Kelli Dipple considered remote and collaborative workingmethods, research and development processes,narrative, archiving and access. Her paper looked at herpersonal artistic practice alongside curatorial andinstitutional perspectives.http://www.macster.plus.com/gravelrash

Ruth Catlow, co-director of Furtherfield.org, talked abouther interest in developing 'artware' (software platformsfor generating art) that relies on the creative andcollaborative engagement of its users as co-producers ina network, rather than ‘audience’. She described thedevelopment of Furtherfield’s FurtherStudio with real-time, online residencies and VisitorsStudio, a platform foronline, multi-user, audiovisual-jamming.http://www.furtherfield.org

Paul Sermon's presentation focused on his work in thefield of telematic arts. His work explores the emergenceof a user-determined narrative by bringing remoteparticipants together in a shared telepresentenvironment through the use of live chroma-keying andvideoconferencing technology.http://www.paulsermon.org

Lastly, Thor Magnusson, co-founder of the ixi softwarecollective, spoke about his experience of musicalcollaboration over high-speed network and of softwaredevelopment. He highlighted the strong culture of usingopen source software to create unique musicalinstruments for the computer and demonstrated someexamples from his own work. http://www.ixi-software.net

The afternoon session revolved around an opendiscussion that addressed current working methods andresearch and access to high-speed networks in the UK.Delegates discussed problems and questions related tothe creative process and creative practice that they hadencountered in the pursuit of new forms of creativeactivities and productions. The session identified manymutual benefits that a closer working relationshipbetween the UK Universities and the independent mediaarts organizations could facilitate. It was agreed thathigh-speed internet technology allows a more"seamless" connection between theartist/researcher/curator/archivist and the student andprovides a crucial link to a wider audience for their work.Access to ‘SuperJanet’ brings structural and financialissues for small and medium arts organizations anddelegates considered what strategies need to bepursued in order to achieve that. A possible initiativesuggested during the day was the creation of a MARCELworking group to facilitate access to 'SuperJanet' for theUK independent Media Arts organizations. Theforthcoming seminar report will summarize thesediscussions and make recommendations for ways inwhich this issue can be taken forward.

Service-Oriented Computing inthe Humanities

Tobias Blanke, Research Associate, AHeSSC,considers this workshop jointly organized by theEPSRC Service-Oriented Software Research Network.(SOSoRNet) and the Methods Network, held at KingsCollege London. (18 - 19 December 2006).

SOSoRNet (Service-Oriented Software Research Network)is an EPSRC-funded network to share best practice andresearch in service-oriented software systems and tobring together academic researchers and industrial

94

A still from Paul Sermon’s telematic site-specific installation ‘Headroom’ produced

at Taipei Artist’s Village in April 2006

multiple connections within and between archivalcollections that are currently difficult, if not impossible, tosee.

For information about forthcoming case studies, contactHazel Gardiner ([email protected])

Outreach andCommunity

Connecting the Nodes: NewApproaches to MethodsNetwork community building

Torsten Reimer, Senior Research Coordinator,AHRC ICT Methods Network, introduces expansions toMethods Network outreach activities.

Over the last two years, the Methods Network hassupported the arts and humanities community byfunding activities and making available a wide range ofresources on the use of advanced ICT tools and methodswithin a research context. The variety of outputs andfollow-ups resulting from our activities and the continuedinterest in our programme demonstrate the need for aforum to discuss and explore these comparatively newapproaches. While being committed to continue thisprogramme over the next year, we are also thinkingabout new ways to further enrich our activities, expandthe outreach of the Methods Network and facilitatenetworking and collaboration between researchers andpractitioners in the arts and humanities community –ideally beyond the existence of the Methods Network.

An important step in this direction will be the expansionof the 'Get Involved!' section of the Methods Networkwebsite over the next few months. As part of this, aMethods Network blog will be set up to encouragediscussion by inviting guest authors from differentbackgrounds to comment on recent developments intheir fields and the use of ICT in arts and humanitiesresearch in general. This blog will also focus on specificthemes related to publications or events organized bythe Methods Network or partner organizations such asthe Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre(AHESSC), and ICT Guides, a database comprising ICTmethods, tools and projects hosted by the Arts andHumanities Data Service.

The wider communityplatform will eventuallyincorporate a variety oftools for online discussionand dissemination ofinformation. It will allowcomments on MethodsNetwork resources andwill point interested partiesto other relevantresources. A forum todiscuss the MethodsNetwork working paper Tools and Methods for HistoricalResearch has already been set up: (http://www.digital-historian.net). Fora such as the ‘Digital Historian’ aim topromote and encourage debate with experts andpractitioners in their respective fields as well as to provideadditional resources and support to those who have justbegun exploring the benefits of incorporating ICTmethods in their research. By integrating this feedbackinto revised versions of the working papers or by directlyfeeding sections of the papers into other onlinecommunities (such as subject- or method-related wikis ormailing lists) we intend to turn these work-in-progressdocuments into community-driven resources that willideally be kept up to date by their respectivecommunities.

The Methods Network community platform will also haveseparate sections for our activities, giving the participantsa space to discuss their interests and share information –before and after the respective event. This will facilitatethe organization of follow-ups and the dissemination ofselected materials and ideas to the community –allowing those not present at the activity to follow thediscussion and take part in it. We also hope to encouragenew ways of interaction between our users, for instanceby exploring the integration of ‘folksonomies’ into thesystem: this would allow users to tag resources or evencomments in a discussion forum and thereby create theirown taxonomy that would react to new developmentswithin a very dynamic area of research. Users will alsobe able to share their profiles, which will facilitate themaking of new contacts, particularly as communityactivities initiated by our partner projects AHeSSC and ICTGuides will also take place on the same platform.

For all questions or suggestions please contact TorstenReimer ([email protected])

“It was anopportunity forresearchers andrepresentatives fromthe cultural industriesto meet and discussfuture challenges,strategies andcollaborations.”

“The communityplatform is anopportunity tocontinue MethodsNetwork activitiesbeyond the existenceof the project.”

Speakers and participants at the workshop included application designers,

researchers and service providers.


58

practitioners. SOSoRNetjoined up with theMethods Network toorganize a workshop atKing’s College London inDecember 2006 toexamine the use of aservice-oriented approachin humanities computing.Service-orientation allows

the underlying platform implementation to be hiddenmaking resources on the Internet available asindependent services. The workshop brought togetherapplication designers, researchers, and serviceproviders from the arts and humanities community. Thepresentations offered case studies demonstrating howcomputing based on loosely-coupled services alreadybenefits the arts and humanities research communities,from archaeology to musicology. What follows is aselection from the case studies presented at theworkshop.

Stuart Dunn, Research Associate for the MethodsNetwork and AHeSSC, demonstrated how the workflowin archaeology might be enhanced by a networked andservice-based approach. Workflow in archaeology iswell-defined: an artefact is discovered and thenconnected to a corpus of previous work in the form ofexcavated artefacts, published interpretations andtheories as well as survey data and researchmethodologies. Most of this information is availableonline. A service-oriented architecture that maps thearchaeological research lifecycle can help make thisinformation more accessible. This can be achieved bycreating self-refreshing metadata repositories capturinginformation provided by linking past queries andanswers. This approach would make standardarchaeological collections more readily available and atthe same time integrate searching functionality beyondsimple keywords.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has beensuccessful in preserving digital data from the UK’s artsand humanities disciplines for more than 10 years. It isresponsible for collecting, preserving, cataloguing, anddistributing the most relevant digital resources in eachsubject area. Andreas Mavrides presented a project thataimed to embed the AHDS preservation process into aset of services that may be distributed and looselycoupled to serve an organization like the AHDS.Furthermore, the AHDS is looking at ways of automatingthe ingestion of materials and of generating associatedmetadata. They are reviewing the complete workflowfrom the moment of deposit by the creators to the finalabsorption into the repository held at the AHDS Executive.The challenges are to minimise human intervention whileat the same time upholding the quality of preservation.

J. Stephen Downie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), gave a presentation on the MusicInformation Retrieval Evaluation Exchange (MIREX). Thisseeks to repeat the success of the Text RetrievalConferences (TREC) evaluation approach by applying it tomusic information retrieval. However MIREX differs fromTREC in that the test collections cannot be freelydistributed owing to copyright issues. The community istherefore experimenting with creating a service-orientedarchitecture to support the labour-intensive evaluationwork. The International Music Information RetrievalSystems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) at UIUCcollaborated with the Automated Learning Group in thedevelopment of a Music-to-Knowledge (M2K) musicmining and evaluation framework. M2K has now begunexperimenting with web services, so that submitters maydeal with their collections locally. Like the AHDSpreservation workflow, this approach could remove workpressure from the central institution, IMIRSEL. Whileservice orientation in the arts and humanities is still in itsinfancy, the workshop presented a strong case that suchan approach would help a highly-fragmentedcommunity such as the arts and humanities throughlinking digital resources and promoting their reuse.

Talking CGI

Paul Wells, Director, Animation Academy,Loughborough University, writes about the paneldiscussion he organized as part of The Art of BritishCGI: Contemporary, Independent and TelevisionAnimation conference, Animation Academy,Loughborough University (15 February 2007).

The Animation Academy Research Group in the School ofArt and Design at Loughborough University recentlystaged the John Grace Memorial Conference, The Art ofBritish CGI, at the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham.The conference addressed the history, achievements andinnovation of British computer animation from the early1970s to the present day.

different communities and may ultimately be useful in anumber of non-exclusive ways.

To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentaryAs reference documents that foreground links and references to other materialAs an introductory resource for researchers who arenew to digital developments in a particular subject areaAs a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organization and community-building activities

It is anticipated that on completion of the currentlyplanned series of papers, there will be an opportunity toconsider the use of tools across all subject areas and togenerate a summary report outlining trends and patternsacross the arts and humanities.

For information about forthcoming working papers,contact Neil Grindley ([email protected])

Illuminating advanced researchmethods: Methods Networkcase studies

Hazel Gardiner, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, highlights some of the researchprojects covered in Methods Network online casestudies.

The Methods Network website hosts a series of casestudies of research projects that employ advanced ICTmethods as an integral part of the research process.These short studies form part of the range of supportmaterials that the Methods Network provides for the artsand humanities community. Themes for case studiesextend across arts and humanities disciplines andincorporate a range of technologies from the Access Gridto Robotics. As well as providing a resource andreference point for the community, Methods Networkcase studies also provide materials for the AHDS ICTGuides and feed into Methods Network communitybuilding activities. A few examples are given below.

The potential of the AccessGrid features heavily inany advanced methodscontext and among thecase studies featured onthe Methods Networkwebsite is that of theproject EstablishingCollaborative

Postgraduate ResearchProgrammes and IntegratedTeaching Agendas using theAccess Grid (Universities ofBirmingham, Durham andManchester and theRutherford AppletonLaboratory). This projectexplores the application ofAccess Grid technologies inan educational context,aiming to investigate theirscope across a range ofissues from advancingdelivery of and access tomaterials and resources tocross-institutionalcollaboration in teaching,harmonizing curricula, andenhancing postgraduateresearch student interactionbetween different institutions.

Another area of particularconcern to the MethodsNetwork is the integration

and repurposing of existing digital resources in order toadvance scholarship. Plebeian Lives and the Making ofModern London, 1690-1800 is an exemplary model ofsuch processes. This project, jointly run by theHumanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield andthe University of Hertfordshire, aims to create a digitalarchive of manuscript and printed sources concerningthe lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-centuryLondon, focusing on poor relief, criminal justice, andmedical care. It incorporates a number of existingelectronic resources, making use of recent technicaladvances in the analysis of multiple digital sources inorder to construct individual life histories of eighteenthcentury Londoners. Collections of digitized resources arelinked together using shared XML mark-up schema andsophisticated search engines, making it possible toassemble large and complex bodies of data from avariety of sources and extract key information from them.

On another theme, a distinctive approach to integratingfinding aids may be seen in the experimental projectMultidimensional Visualization of Archival Finding Aidsbased at the Humanities Advanced Technology andInformation Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow.The project aims to create a ZigZagTM(http://xanadu.com/zigzag) implementation of twofinding aids: the Gateway to Archives of Scottish HigherEducation (GASHE) and Navigational Aids for the Historyof Science, Technology and the Environment (NAHSTE). Italso aims to provide a multidimensional user interfacewhich should prove a simple and intuitive means tonavigate archival finding aids. Users will be able to view

The Plebian Lives project shows

the lives of ordinary people in

eighteenth-century London.

Marcellus Laroon the London

Quaker (1688) reproduced

courtesy of Tim Hitchcock

“A service-orientedapproach in the artsand humanitieswould help link-up afragmentedcommunity.”

The conference commemorated the work of British animator John Grace who

was Research Fellow in Animation Studies at Loughborough University

“Case studiesincorporatetechnologies from theAccess Grid toRobotics.”


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The centrepiece of the daywas the AHRC ICTMethods Networksponsored ‘Talking CGI’panel, featuring DaveMousley, ManagingDirector of leading visualeffects company, RedVision; Andy McNamara,

CG Supervisor at Condor Digital; Marc Craste, animationdirector at studio AKA, and Johnny Hardstaff, leadingartist and film-maker and chaired by Paul Wells. TheTalking CGI panel addressed the impact, influence andeffect of digital technologies on ‘animation’ as a form,aesthetically, technically, and ethically.

Dave Mousley demonstrated ‘Red Legion’, the ‘crowd’generation and simulation software for 3D live actiondrama and reconstruction. He showed how theanimated characters were created as a group with‘uniform’ movement dynamics before variations ofspeed, size, action, imperative and terrain were added tofacilitate collective activity that was pertinent tophotorealistic settings. These settings included battlescenes, collective labour and large gatherings incommunal spaces as well as more fantastical or unusualcontexts: thousands of cats occupying an everyday streetor rarely seen ants in a jungle environment.

Andy McNamara’s work, like that of many animatorsembracing complex briefs in the commercial sector, hasbeen necessarily underpinned by an approach toproblem solving that couples creative improvisation withspecific applications of pertinent software. He describedhow design work for BBC2 proved particularlyproblematic because the iconic ‘2’, the channel’s brandidentity, could in no way be altered or distorted.

Marc Craste spoke about his work on the BAFTA award-winning short, ‘Jojo in the Stars’, as well as commercialsfor the National Lottery and Lloyds TSB. Craste stressedthat he wanted to challenge the dominant ‘Pixar’aesthetic in CGI, and indeed in photorealistic animation,by ‘dirtying up’ the look of ‘JoJo’, using visual sourcesfrom German Expressionism to the Surrealist tendenciesin the work of Georges Melies, Tod Browning and DavidLynch.

Johnny Hardstaff, who is also committed to re-definingthe CGI ‘palette’, noted some of the potentialcontradictions and ethical dilemmas in using computersoftware and hardware. His own work – often a re-contextualization of established visual idioms – seeks tooffer subversive imagery as a model of underminingwhat he suggests is the ‘corporatization’ of contemporarydigital culture. These views acted as a suitableprovocateur for the panel/audience exchange thatfollowed the presentations.

A key area of concern at the panel proved to be howcomputer animation could so easily facilitate‘photorealist’ representation and therefore challenge theapparent ‘integrity’ of documentary or factualprogramming. The audience was also highly engagedwith issues concerning authorship and representation.The panel and the audience response did much toreinforce the view that it is not the computer that makesart, but artists.

The work shown by the panellists was apt demonstrationof the high quality and varied outcomes enabled by theprogressive use of computer-generated imagery.

Video and audio files of the panel will be available on theMethods Network website.

Forthcoming ActivitiesThe Methods Network welcomes applications fromindividuals who would like to attend Methods Networkworkshops and seminars, but we must emphasize thatregistration is essential for these activities. Occasionally aMethods Network event will be by invitation only, but allresulting materials, including (where appropriate)podcasts, wikis, training workbooks, reports andpublications will be made freely available to thecommunity via the Methods Network website. Allenquiries about registration for the Methods Networkactivities listed below should be sent by email [email protected]. For further information aboutforthcoming activities see the Methods Network website.

Data Sans Frontiers: Web Portals and the HistoricEnvironment - A workgroup organized by Stuart Jeffrey,ADS/AHDS Archaeology, University of York (25 May 2007)

Developing an International Framework for Audit andCertification of Trusted Digital Repositories - A seminarorganized by Joy Davidson, HATII, University of Glasgow(June 2007)

New Protocols for Electroacoustic Music Analysis - Aworkshop organized by Leigh Landy, De MontfortUniversity (12 June 2007)

From Abstract Data Mapping to 3D Photorealism:Understanding Emerging Intersections in VisualisationPractices and Techniques – A workshop organized byJulie Tolmie, 3DVisA, Kings College, University of London(19 June 2007)

Real-time Collaborative Art Making - A workshoporganized by Gregory Sporton, University of CentralEngland (20 July 2007)

Space/Time: Methods in geospatial computing formapping the past – A workgroup organized by StuartDunn, AHESSC, Kings College, University of London (23 -24 July 2007)

Text Mining for Historians - A workshop organized byZoe Bliss, AHDS History, University of Essex. (17 – 18 July2007)

Opening the Creative Studio – a hybrid activitycomprising presentations and workshops, organized byDavid Gorton, Royal Academy of Music (10 September -30 November 2007)

Annotating Image Archives To Support LiteraryResearch – A workshop organized by Omer Rana,University of Cardiff (October 2007)

INTIMACY: Performing the Intimate in Proximal andHybrid Environments - a hybrid workshop/seminaractivity, organized by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (22 - 24November 2007)

Resources

What digital tools can do for thearts and humanities

Neil Grindley, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, discusses the process oftransforming Methods Network working papers intocommunity resources

The idea for creating a series of ‘working papers’followed on from the preparation of a paper for the 2006DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts)conference held at Dartington College of Arts. This initialpaper, entitled What’s in the Art Historian’s Toolkit?(http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/resources/workingpapers.html), gives an overview of some of the toolsand approaches available to those involved with art-historical research and purposefully introduces

techniques more oftenassociated with othersubject areas such ascorpus linguistics,computer science andliterary studies.

The Methods Network has been set up, in part, topromote the benefits of adopting cross-disciplinaryapproaches and it is with this remit in mind that thisseries of working papers was conceived, the purpose ofwhich is to tackle the broad theme of tools usage from avariety of different subject-specific standpoints.

At the time of writing, several papers are available on theMethods Network website, and a number of others areimminent, following the incorporation of valuable andinsightful comments from expert readers who have beeninvited to respond to first drafts of the documents. Thisiterative process of draft and response is intrinsic to thedefinition of these documents as ‘working papers’ andthere is an expectation that those involved with thesubjects referenced by the papers may wish to suggestamendments or contribute additional material.

In the case of the History Working Paper, Tools andMethods for Historical Research, it is currently possible tocomment on the text (and indeed on any other aspectpertaining to ‘Digital History’) by registering andcontributing to a new Methods Network forum that hasbeen set up for the purpose (http://www.digital-historian.net). The expectation is that by opening outdiscussion about these documents to anyone with aninterest in the topic, the original paper will be significantlyenhanced by further commentary and may subsequentlyconstitute a value-added resource that can be archivedalongside other documentation that will be permanentlyavailable on the Methods Network website.

In the course of researching and writing the series, it hasbecome apparent that although the theme of the papersis consistently broadly focused on the use of ‘tools’, it isnot possible to apply a meaningful standard template toact as a framework for each of these documents.Although there is, inevitably, duplication across paperswhere techniques including text mining, massdigitization, geographical information systems, etc. arecontextualized and briefly explained, the uptake and useof tools and techniques demonstrate different trajectoriesfrom discipline to discipline. As such, it is anticipated thatthe working papers may fulfil different functions for

Methods for musicology: tools such as Spectogram 14 visualization software

have advanced research in the area.

“Digital technologiesinfluence and effectanimationaesthetically,technically andethically.”

“Working paperstackle tools usagefrom subject-specificstandpoints.”


76

The centrepiece of the daywas the AHRC ICTMethods Networksponsored ‘Talking CGI’panel, featuring DaveMousley, ManagingDirector of leading visualeffects company, RedVision; Andy McNamara,

CG Supervisor at Condor Digital; Marc Craste, animationdirector at studio AKA, and Johnny Hardstaff, leadingartist and film-maker and chaired by Paul Wells. TheTalking CGI panel addressed the impact, influence andeffect of digital technologies on ‘animation’ as a form,aesthetically, technically, and ethically.

Dave Mousley demonstrated ‘Red Legion’, the ‘crowd’generation and simulation software for 3D live actiondrama and reconstruction. He showed how theanimated characters were created as a group with‘uniform’ movement dynamics before variations ofspeed, size, action, imperative and terrain were added tofacilitate collective activity that was pertinent tophotorealistic settings. These settings included battlescenes, collective labour and large gatherings incommunal spaces as well as more fantastical or unusualcontexts: thousands of cats occupying an everyday streetor rarely seen ants in a jungle environment.

Andy McNamara’s work, like that of many animatorsembracing complex briefs in the commercial sector, hasbeen necessarily underpinned by an approach toproblem solving that couples creative improvisation withspecific applications of pertinent software. He describedhow design work for BBC2 proved particularlyproblematic because the iconic ‘2’, the channel’s brandidentity, could in no way be altered or distorted.

Marc Craste spoke about his work on the BAFTA award-winning short, ‘Jojo in the Stars’, as well as commercialsfor the National Lottery and Lloyds TSB. Craste stressedthat he wanted to challenge the dominant ‘Pixar’aesthetic in CGI, and indeed in photorealistic animation,by ‘dirtying up’ the look of ‘JoJo’, using visual sourcesfrom German Expressionism to the Surrealist tendenciesin the work of Georges Melies, Tod Browning and DavidLynch.

Johnny Hardstaff, who is also committed to re-definingthe CGI ‘palette’, noted some of the potentialcontradictions and ethical dilemmas in using computersoftware and hardware. His own work – often a re-contextualization of established visual idioms – seeks tooffer subversive imagery as a model of underminingwhat he suggests is the ‘corporatization’ of contemporarydigital culture. These views acted as a suitableprovocateur for the panel/audience exchange thatfollowed the presentations.

A key area of concern at the panel proved to be howcomputer animation could so easily facilitate‘photorealist’ representation and therefore challenge theapparent ‘integrity’ of documentary or factualprogramming. The audience was also highly engagedwith issues concerning authorship and representation.The panel and the audience response did much toreinforce the view that it is not the computer that makesart, but artists.

The work shown by the panellists was apt demonstrationof the high quality and varied outcomes enabled by theprogressive use of computer-generated imagery.

Video and audio files of the panel will be available on theMethods Network website.

Forthcoming ActivitiesThe Methods Network welcomes applications fromindividuals who would like to attend Methods Networkworkshops and seminars, but we must emphasize thatregistration is essential for these activities. Occasionally aMethods Network event will be by invitation only, but allresulting materials, including (where appropriate)podcasts, wikis, training workbooks, reports andpublications will be made freely available to thecommunity via the Methods Network website. Allenquiries about registration for the Methods Networkactivities listed below should be sent by email [email protected]. For further information aboutforthcoming activities see the Methods Network website.

Data Sans Frontiers: Web Portals and the HistoricEnvironment - A workgroup organized by Stuart Jeffrey,ADS/AHDS Archaeology, University of York (25 May 2007)

Developing an International Framework for Audit andCertification of Trusted Digital Repositories - A seminarorganized by Joy Davidson, HATII, University of Glasgow(June 2007)

New Protocols for Electroacoustic Music Analysis - Aworkshop organized by Leigh Landy, De MontfortUniversity (12 June 2007)

From Abstract Data Mapping to 3D Photorealism:Understanding Emerging Intersections in VisualisationPractices and Techniques – A workshop organized byJulie Tolmie, 3DVisA, Kings College, University of London(19 June 2007)

Real-time Collaborative Art Making - A workshoporganized by Gregory Sporton, University of CentralEngland (20 July 2007)

Space/Time: Methods in geospatial computing formapping the past – A workgroup organized by StuartDunn, AHESSC, Kings College, University of London (23 -24 July 2007)

Text Mining for Historians - A workshop organized byZoe Bliss, AHDS History, University of Essex. (17 – 18 July2007)

Opening the Creative Studio – a hybrid activitycomprising presentations and workshops, organized byDavid Gorton, Royal Academy of Music (10 September -30 November 2007)

Annotating Image Archives To Support LiteraryResearch – A workshop organized by Omer Rana,University of Cardiff (October 2007)

INTIMACY: Performing the Intimate in Proximal andHybrid Environments - a hybrid workshop/seminaractivity, organized by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (22 - 24November 2007)

Resources

What digital tools can do for thearts and humanities

Neil Grindley, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, discusses the process oftransforming Methods Network working papers intocommunity resources

The idea for creating a series of ‘working papers’followed on from the preparation of a paper for the 2006DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts)conference held at Dartington College of Arts. This initialpaper, entitled What’s in the Art Historian’s Toolkit?(http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/resources/workingpapers.html), gives an overview of some of the toolsand approaches available to those involved with art-historical research and purposefully introduces

techniques more oftenassociated with othersubject areas such ascorpus linguistics,computer science andliterary studies.

The Methods Network has been set up, in part, topromote the benefits of adopting cross-disciplinaryapproaches and it is with this remit in mind that thisseries of working papers was conceived, the purpose ofwhich is to tackle the broad theme of tools usage from avariety of different subject-specific standpoints.

At the time of writing, several papers are available on theMethods Network website, and a number of others areimminent, following the incorporation of valuable andinsightful comments from expert readers who have beeninvited to respond to first drafts of the documents. Thisiterative process of draft and response is intrinsic to thedefinition of these documents as ‘working papers’ andthere is an expectation that those involved with thesubjects referenced by the papers may wish to suggestamendments or contribute additional material.

In the case of the History Working Paper, Tools andMethods for Historical Research, it is currently possible tocomment on the text (and indeed on any other aspectpertaining to ‘Digital History’) by registering andcontributing to a new Methods Network forum that hasbeen set up for the purpose (http://www.digital-historian.net). The expectation is that by opening outdiscussion about these documents to anyone with aninterest in the topic, the original paper will be significantlyenhanced by further commentary and may subsequentlyconstitute a value-added resource that can be archivedalongside other documentation that will be permanentlyavailable on the Methods Network website.

In the course of researching and writing the series, it hasbecome apparent that although the theme of the papersis consistently broadly focused on the use of ‘tools’, it isnot possible to apply a meaningful standard template toact as a framework for each of these documents.Although there is, inevitably, duplication across paperswhere techniques including text mining, massdigitization, geographical information systems, etc. arecontextualized and briefly explained, the uptake and useof tools and techniques demonstrate different trajectoriesfrom discipline to discipline. As such, it is anticipated thatthe working papers may fulfil different functions for

Methods for musicology: tools such as Spectogram 14 visualization software

have advanced research in the area.

“Digital technologiesinfluence and effectanimationaesthetically,technically andethically.”

“Working paperstackle tools usagefrom subject-specificstandpoints.”


58

practitioners. SOSoRNetjoined up with theMethods Network toorganize a workshop atKing’s College London inDecember 2006 toexamine the use of aservice-oriented approachin humanities computing.Service-orientation allows

the underlying platform implementation to be hiddenmaking resources on the Internet available asindependent services. The workshop brought togetherapplication designers, researchers, and serviceproviders from the arts and humanities community. Thepresentations offered case studies demonstrating howcomputing based on loosely-coupled services alreadybenefits the arts and humanities research communities,from archaeology to musicology. What follows is aselection from the case studies presented at theworkshop.

Stuart Dunn, Research Associate for the MethodsNetwork and AHeSSC, demonstrated how the workflowin archaeology might be enhanced by a networked andservice-based approach. Workflow in archaeology iswell-defined: an artefact is discovered and thenconnected to a corpus of previous work in the form ofexcavated artefacts, published interpretations andtheories as well as survey data and researchmethodologies. Most of this information is availableonline. A service-oriented architecture that maps thearchaeological research lifecycle can help make thisinformation more accessible. This can be achieved bycreating self-refreshing metadata repositories capturinginformation provided by linking past queries andanswers. This approach would make standardarchaeological collections more readily available and atthe same time integrate searching functionality beyondsimple keywords.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has beensuccessful in preserving digital data from the UK’s artsand humanities disciplines for more than 10 years. It isresponsible for collecting, preserving, cataloguing, anddistributing the most relevant digital resources in eachsubject area. Andreas Mavrides presented a project thataimed to embed the AHDS preservation process into aset of services that may be distributed and looselycoupled to serve an organization like the AHDS.Furthermore, the AHDS is looking at ways of automatingthe ingestion of materials and of generating associatedmetadata. They are reviewing the complete workflowfrom the moment of deposit by the creators to the finalabsorption into the repository held at the AHDS Executive.The challenges are to minimise human intervention whileat the same time upholding the quality of preservation.

J. Stephen Downie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), gave a presentation on the MusicInformation Retrieval Evaluation Exchange (MIREX). Thisseeks to repeat the success of the Text RetrievalConferences (TREC) evaluation approach by applying it tomusic information retrieval. However MIREX differs fromTREC in that the test collections cannot be freelydistributed owing to copyright issues. The community istherefore experimenting with creating a service-orientedarchitecture to support the labour-intensive evaluationwork. The International Music Information RetrievalSystems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) at UIUCcollaborated with the Automated Learning Group in thedevelopment of a Music-to-Knowledge (M2K) musicmining and evaluation framework. M2K has now begunexperimenting with web services, so that submitters maydeal with their collections locally. Like the AHDSpreservation workflow, this approach could remove workpressure from the central institution, IMIRSEL. Whileservice orientation in the arts and humanities is still in itsinfancy, the workshop presented a strong case that suchan approach would help a highly-fragmentedcommunity such as the arts and humanities throughlinking digital resources and promoting their reuse.

Talking CGI

Paul Wells, Director, Animation Academy,Loughborough University, writes about the paneldiscussion he organized as part of The Art of BritishCGI: Contemporary, Independent and TelevisionAnimation conference, Animation Academy,Loughborough University (15 February 2007).

The Animation Academy Research Group in the School ofArt and Design at Loughborough University recentlystaged the John Grace Memorial Conference, The Art ofBritish CGI, at the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham.The conference addressed the history, achievements andinnovation of British computer animation from the early1970s to the present day.

different communities and may ultimately be useful in anumber of non-exclusive ways.

To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentaryAs reference documents that foreground links and references to other materialAs an introductory resource for researchers who arenew to digital developments in a particular subject areaAs a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organization and community-building activities

It is anticipated that on completion of the currentlyplanned series of papers, there will be an opportunity toconsider the use of tools across all subject areas and togenerate a summary report outlining trends and patternsacross the arts and humanities.

For information about forthcoming working papers,contact Neil Grindley ([email protected])

Illuminating advanced researchmethods: Methods Networkcase studies

Hazel Gardiner, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, highlights some of the researchprojects covered in Methods Network online casestudies.

The Methods Network website hosts a series of casestudies of research projects that employ advanced ICTmethods as an integral part of the research process.These short studies form part of the range of supportmaterials that the Methods Network provides for the artsand humanities community. Themes for case studiesextend across arts and humanities disciplines andincorporate a range of technologies from the Access Gridto Robotics. As well as providing a resource andreference point for the community, Methods Networkcase studies also provide materials for the AHDS ICTGuides and feed into Methods Network communitybuilding activities. A few examples are given below.

The potential of the AccessGrid features heavily inany advanced methodscontext and among thecase studies featured onthe Methods Networkwebsite is that of theproject EstablishingCollaborative

Postgraduate ResearchProgrammes and IntegratedTeaching Agendas using theAccess Grid (Universities ofBirmingham, Durham andManchester and theRutherford AppletonLaboratory). This projectexplores the application ofAccess Grid technologies inan educational context,aiming to investigate theirscope across a range ofissues from advancingdelivery of and access tomaterials and resources tocross-institutionalcollaboration in teaching,harmonizing curricula, andenhancing postgraduateresearch student interactionbetween different institutions.

Another area of particularconcern to the MethodsNetwork is the integration

and repurposing of existing digital resources in order toadvance scholarship. Plebeian Lives and the Making ofModern London, 1690-1800 is an exemplary model ofsuch processes. This project, jointly run by theHumanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield andthe University of Hertfordshire, aims to create a digitalarchive of manuscript and printed sources concerningthe lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-centuryLondon, focusing on poor relief, criminal justice, andmedical care. It incorporates a number of existingelectronic resources, making use of recent technicaladvances in the analysis of multiple digital sources inorder to construct individual life histories of eighteenthcentury Londoners. Collections of digitized resources arelinked together using shared XML mark-up schema andsophisticated search engines, making it possible toassemble large and complex bodies of data from avariety of sources and extract key information from them.

On another theme, a distinctive approach to integratingfinding aids may be seen in the experimental projectMultidimensional Visualization of Archival Finding Aidsbased at the Humanities Advanced Technology andInformation Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow.The project aims to create a ZigZagTM(http://xanadu.com/zigzag) implementation of twofinding aids: the Gateway to Archives of Scottish HigherEducation (GASHE) and Navigational Aids for the Historyof Science, Technology and the Environment (NAHSTE). Italso aims to provide a multidimensional user interfacewhich should prove a simple and intuitive means tonavigate archival finding aids. Users will be able to view

The Plebian Lives project shows

the lives of ordinary people in

eighteenth-century London.

Marcellus Laroon the London

Quaker (1688) reproduced

courtesy of Tim Hitchcock

“A service-orientedapproach in the artsand humanitieswould help link-up afragmentedcommunity.”

The conference commemorated the work of British animator John Grace who

was Research Fellow in Animation Studies at Loughborough University

“Case studiesincorporatetechnologies from theAccess Grid toRobotics.”


between different sectors of the creative industries andthe research base.

This seminar was animportant opportunity forthe two communities tomeet and discuss futurechallenges, strategies andcollaborations in exploringthe advanced use of gridand network technologiesfor new forms of research,innovation and productionin the area of arts andhumanities.

The morning session examined the innovative ways inwhich UK small media arts organizations and creativeproducers have been using network technologies. ArtistsKelli Dipple, Ruth Catlow, Paul Sermon and ThorMagnusson each presented papers about a range ofprojects that have made use of high-speed networks andassociated technologies based on their own experienceas artists, curators and researchers.

Kelli Dipple considered remote and collaborative workingmethods, research and development processes,narrative, archiving and access. Her paper looked at herpersonal artistic practice alongside curatorial andinstitutional perspectives.http://www.macster.plus.com/gravelrash

Ruth Catlow, co-director of Furtherfield.org, talked abouther interest in developing 'artware' (software platformsfor generating art) that relies on the creative andcollaborative engagement of its users as co-producers ina network, rather than ‘audience’. She described thedevelopment of Furtherfield’s FurtherStudio with real-time, online residencies and VisitorsStudio, a platform foronline, multi-user, audiovisual-jamming.http://www.furtherfield.org

Paul Sermon's presentation focused on his work in thefield of telematic arts. His work explores the emergenceof a user-determined narrative by bringing remoteparticipants together in a shared telepresentenvironment through the use of live chroma-keying andvideoconferencing technology.http://www.paulsermon.org

Lastly, Thor Magnusson, co-founder of the ixi softwarecollective, spoke about his experience of musicalcollaboration over high-speed network and of softwaredevelopment. He highlighted the strong culture of usingopen source software to create unique musicalinstruments for the computer and demonstrated someexamples from his own work. http://www.ixi-software.net

The afternoon session revolved around an opendiscussion that addressed current working methods andresearch and access to high-speed networks in the UK.Delegates discussed problems and questions related tothe creative process and creative practice that they hadencountered in the pursuit of new forms of creativeactivities and productions. The session identified manymutual benefits that a closer working relationshipbetween the UK Universities and the independent mediaarts organizations could facilitate. It was agreed thathigh-speed internet technology allows a more"seamless" connection between theartist/researcher/curator/archivist and the student andprovides a crucial link to a wider audience for their work.Access to ‘SuperJanet’ brings structural and financialissues for small and medium arts organizations anddelegates considered what strategies need to bepursued in order to achieve that. A possible initiativesuggested during the day was the creation of a MARCELworking group to facilitate access to 'SuperJanet' for theUK independent Media Arts organizations. Theforthcoming seminar report will summarize thesediscussions and make recommendations for ways inwhich this issue can be taken forward.

Service-Oriented Computing inthe Humanities

Tobias Blanke, Research Associate, AHeSSC,considers this workshop jointly organized by theEPSRC Service-Oriented Software Research Network.(SOSoRNet) and the Methods Network, held at KingsCollege London. (18 - 19 December 2006).

SOSoRNet (Service-Oriented Software Research Network)is an EPSRC-funded network to share best practice andresearch in service-oriented software systems and tobring together academic researchers and industrial

94

A still from Paul Sermon’s telematic site-specific installation ‘Headroom’ produced

at Taipei Artist’s Village in April 2006

multiple connections within and between archivalcollections that are currently difficult, if not impossible, tosee.

For information about forthcoming case studies, contactHazel Gardiner ([email protected])

Outreach andCommunity

Connecting the Nodes: NewApproaches to MethodsNetwork community building

Torsten Reimer, Senior Research Coordinator,AHRC ICT Methods Network, introduces expansions toMethods Network outreach activities.

Over the last two years, the Methods Network hassupported the arts and humanities community byfunding activities and making available a wide range ofresources on the use of advanced ICT tools and methodswithin a research context. The variety of outputs andfollow-ups resulting from our activities and the continuedinterest in our programme demonstrate the need for aforum to discuss and explore these comparatively newapproaches. While being committed to continue thisprogramme over the next year, we are also thinkingabout new ways to further enrich our activities, expandthe outreach of the Methods Network and facilitatenetworking and collaboration between researchers andpractitioners in the arts and humanities community –ideally beyond the existence of the Methods Network.

An important step in this direction will be the expansionof the 'Get Involved!' section of the Methods Networkwebsite over the next few months. As part of this, aMethods Network blog will be set up to encouragediscussion by inviting guest authors from differentbackgrounds to comment on recent developments intheir fields and the use of ICT in arts and humanitiesresearch in general. This blog will also focus on specificthemes related to publications or events organized bythe Methods Network or partner organizations such asthe Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre(AHESSC), and ICT Guides, a database comprising ICTmethods, tools and projects hosted by the Arts andHumanities Data Service.

The wider communityplatform will eventuallyincorporate a variety oftools for online discussionand dissemination ofinformation. It will allowcomments on MethodsNetwork resources andwill point interested partiesto other relevantresources. A forum todiscuss the MethodsNetwork working paper Tools and Methods for HistoricalResearch has already been set up: (http://www.digital-historian.net). Fora such as the ‘Digital Historian’ aim topromote and encourage debate with experts andpractitioners in their respective fields as well as to provideadditional resources and support to those who have justbegun exploring the benefits of incorporating ICTmethods in their research. By integrating this feedbackinto revised versions of the working papers or by directlyfeeding sections of the papers into other onlinecommunities (such as subject- or method-related wikis ormailing lists) we intend to turn these work-in-progressdocuments into community-driven resources that willideally be kept up to date by their respectivecommunities.

The Methods Network community platform will also haveseparate sections for our activities, giving the participantsa space to discuss their interests and share information –before and after the respective event. This will facilitatethe organization of follow-ups and the dissemination ofselected materials and ideas to the community –allowing those not present at the activity to follow thediscussion and take part in it. We also hope to encouragenew ways of interaction between our users, for instanceby exploring the integration of ‘folksonomies’ into thesystem: this would allow users to tag resources or evencomments in a discussion forum and thereby create theirown taxonomy that would react to new developmentswithin a very dynamic area of research. Users will alsobe able to share their profiles, which will facilitate themaking of new contacts, particularly as communityactivities initiated by our partner projects AHeSSC and ICTGuides will also take place on the same platform.

For all questions or suggestions please contact TorstenReimer ([email protected])

“It was anopportunity forresearchers andrepresentatives fromthe cultural industriesto meet and discussfuture challenges,strategies andcollaborations.”

“The communityplatform is anopportunity tocontinue MethodsNetwork activitiesbeyond the existenceof the project.”

Speakers and participants at the workshop included application designers,

researchers and service providers.


Advanced Technologies forCollaborative Performance

Alan Blackwell, CRASSH, University of Cambridge,reports on this workshop organized by Alan Blackwelland Ian Cross, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, andJulio d'Escrivan and Richard Hoadley, Anglia RuskinUniversity. (20 - 21 December 2006).

The aim of this workshop was to train practice-basedresearchers in the performing arts to make better use ofICT technologies that support live collaboration inperformance situations. The workshop leaders were JulioD'Escrivan and Richard Hoadley of Anglia RuskinUniversity; Ian Cross of the Cambridge University Centrefor Music and Science; and Alan Blackwell of the Cruciblenetwork for research in interdisciplinary design.

The workshop was based in the recently upgraded musictechnology teaching facility at Anglia Ruskin University,which contained two group studios each equipped withnine G5 dual-processor Macintoshes. Collaborativefacilities included networked sound processing withstudio monitors, local MIDI keyboards and audioprocessors on each workstation, shared headphones forpair work, and central video projection facilities.

Workshop delegates represented cultures and musicacross the globe. Everyone brought a fresh perspectiveon musical collaboration and technology and a wealth ofexperience in many composition and performancetechniques and technologies. Delegates includedtechnical specialists in the use of SuperCollider andMax/MSP; professional exponents of mixed genreperformance and a small selection of practitioners fromother performance genres such as poetry, live video artand others. The workshop was divided into mixeddiscipline teams for hands-on development andinstruction, ensuring that programmers did not raceahead of performing collaborators. Participants wereprovided with a broad range of inexpensive sensors anda short hands-on introduction to the process of

interfacing these toperformance softwaresuch as SuperCollider.

The whole group sharedexperiences duringunstructured breaks with astructured sharing ofexperiences in the finalsession. Work in progresswas captured and sharedby facilitators moving from team to team. The overallambition was to emulate a ‘collaboration masterclass’ asthe most appropriate model for practice-based researchworkshops applying technology in the performing arts.

At the end of the day, all of the participants met overcoffee to talk about the workshop: what they hadachieved, whether it met their expectations and whetherit was a good model for future events. The response wasoverwhelmingly positive - everyone had found the eventboth educational and enjoyable. Many had madecontacts that they looked forward to exploring in thefuture; others had a taste of technologies that could taketheir work and art in new directions.

This is an extract from the full report of the workshopwhich is available at:http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/act13.html

The Potential of High SpeedNetworks as a New Space forCultural Research, Innovationand Production

Graziano Milano, Freelance Artist on the seminarhe developed in partnership with King's CollegeLondon and the MARCEL Network, supported byUniversity of London Computer Centre, held at Centrefor Computing in the Humanities, King’s College,London. (19 March 2007).

This one-day seminar incorporated researchers fromcomputing, arts and humanities disciplines, arts andmedia practitioners, cultural producers andrepresentatives from UK independent media artsorganizations. The scope of the event was to explore thepotential of the high speed UK educational internetnetwork ‘SuperJanet’ as a space for creative productionsand to identify the opportunities for new types of researchthat innovative networked ICT tools may facilitate

310

Apply for Funding from theAHRC ICT Methods Networkdeadline 30 June 2007

Hazel Gardiner, Senior Project Officer, AHRC ICTMethods Network, reports on the call for proposals foractivities.

The Methods Network invites the arts and humanitiesHigher Education community in the UK to submitproposals for Methods Network activities. Activities mayinclude workshops, seminars, focused workgroups,postgraduate training events and publications.

The Methods Network is keen to support both single- andcross-disciplinary proposals and those that encouragenew collaborative frameworks between technicalspecialists and arts and humanities researchers. Theprimary emphasis is on the use and reuse of digitalresources.

Proposals for hybrid activities such as workshop /seminar / workgroup combinations are also welcomed,as are proposals for any other activity which falls withinthe Methods Network remit to support and promote theuses of advanced ICT methods in academic research.

Funding of up to £5000 is available for workshops andhybrid activities. Workshops provide training inadvanced ICT methods for community members withinacademic institutions. They engage with issues such as:formal methods in analysis of source data and thecreation of technical models; working with multipletechnologies; and other matters of vital practical interestto the community.

Funding of up to £2000 is available for seminars. Thesemay concentrate on highly-defined topics of interest andalso problem areas within the community or may have amore general focus.

For information on eligibility and how to apply for fundingsee the Methods Network website. Please be aware thatall applicants are expected to submit fully-formedproposals with full programme, budget and projectedoutcome details and with particular emphasis on theresearch significance of the proposed activity.Applications that fail to provide all required details willnot be considered for funding. For further informationabout submitting a proposal contact Hazel Gardiner([email protected]).

Bursaries for PostgraduateStudentsThe Methods Network is committed to building acommunity of scholars who use advanced ICT methodsin research in the arts and humanities, and hasdeveloped a bursary initiative to support postgraduatestudents. The scheme is intended to support studentswho wish to present papers at the Digital Resources forthe Humanities and Arts (DRHA) Conference or to attendthe Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) Conference.

Bursary winners in 2005 and 2006 felt that they hadgained tremendously from being able to attendconferences which they otherwise could not afford. Mostimportantly, attending conferences such as CHArt andDRHA provides students with the opportunity to makecontact with academics and practitioners in a focusedenvironment where developing ideas might bediscussed and advanced.

To be eligible to apply for a Methods Network bursary,you must be a postgraduate student engaged in full orpart-time study at a British academic institution. Furtherinformation and an online application form are availableon the Methods Network website.

3DVisA Student Award 2007Deadline 1 October 2007

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Research Fellow,3DVisA, outlines a newstudent award scheme.

The JISC 3D Visualization in the Arts Network (3DVisA)invites submissions to the 3DVisA Student Award 2007.The award will be for an essay on an innovativeapplication of 3D computer graphics to any area of studyin the arts and humanities. The winning essay will bepublished by 3DVisA and the author will receive abursary of up to £300, sponsored by the AHRC MethodsNetwork, to attend a UK conference of his or her choice.The 3DVisA Student Award is also sponsored by Intellectand Prestel publishers.

This award will be made to an undergraduate,postgraduate or Ph.D. student currently registered in theUK. The completed essay and application form must besubmitted by 1 October 2007. The winner will beannounced by 14 December 2007 and the winning essaypublished in the 3DVisA Bulletin in March 2008. Furtherdetails are available at http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/community/3dvisaaward.html.

Participants at the workshop used sensors and performance software for

collaborative performances

“The overall ambitionwas to find the mostappropriate model forpractice-basedresearch workshopsapplying technologyin the performingarts.”


Activities

Sustainability and evidence ofvalue for ICT in the arts andhumanities

David Robey, Director, AHRC ICT Programme,writes about two Expert Seminars: Sustainability ofDigital Resources in the Arts and Humanities (29November 2006) and Evidence of Value: ICT in the Artsand Humanities. (11-12 January 2007)

With the current uncertainty about the future funding ofArts and Humanities ICT support in the UK, the topics ofthese two Methods Network Expert Seminars havebecome particularly urgent. Until now the UK has had amodel system for ensuring the sustainability, through theArts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), of thesubstantial body of arts and humanities digital datafunded by public bodies. At the time of writing, however,there is considerable doubt that this system will bemaintained. The need to collect evidence of the value ofICT in the arts and humanities is all the more pressing iffunders are to be persuaded of the need for the kind ofsupport system that the AHDS has provided.

Sustainability of DigitalResources in the Arts andHumanities was held atKing’s College London on 29November 2006. Theexperts gathered togetherincluded data creators,funders, and strategicagencies. The key issuesaddressed were the need for

a set of high-level principles to govern the productionand preservation of data resources (Michael Jubb of theResearch Information Network), the range of issues to betaken into account at a more practical level in the artsand humanities (David Robey of the AHRC ICTProgramme), a model system of quality assurance fordata resources (David Bates and Jane Winters of theInstitute of Historical Research), and the need to sustainnot just the data produced but the centres of expertisethat produce it (David Shepherd of the HumanitiesResearch Institute, University of Sheffield). Participantswere especially impressed by the detailed andsystematic attention that the Andrew Mellon Foundationgives to the entire life-cycle of the data resources that itfunds (Suzanne Lodato) - far more than public funders inthe UK are able to afford.

The Expert Seminar report and papers given on the dayare available from

http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/es7mainpage.html.

Evidence of Value: ICT in the Arts and Humanities washeld in Cambridge on 11 and 12 January 2007, jointly withthe Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences andHumanities (CRASSH). This gathered together a goodnumber of mostly local participants representing anunusually wide variety of disciplines and types ofexpertise in the arts and humanities. The seminar wasparticularly helpful and stimulating for teasing out therange of issues that arguing the value of ICT involves andthe different kinds of value that we need to think about.There is value for the producer and for the consumer,quantitative and qualitative value, value in the short andin the longer term, direct value and mediated value. Thevalue of ICT can consist in: the convenience that it affordsresearchers; opening up new questions and creatingnew knowledge; confirming existing knowledge; creatingnew forms of output and dissemination; enablingcollaboration, interaction, networking, communitybuilding; facilitating access and the aggregation andintegration of resources; guaranteeing preservation.

John Knell of the Intelligence Agency made a suggestivedistinction, in his paper ‘Whose Art is it Anyway?’,between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ personalization in the use of ICTfor art communication: the latter involves its role infacilitating and enhancing the consumption of art objects,the former involves the consumer as producer, activelycontributing to the artistic process. There are interestingand potentially radical implications here for scholarlyresearch as well, though the academic world may not beready for all of them. More cautiously, the point was alsomade that value is often multivalent and unforeseen, apoint that shouldn’t need too much arguing in an artsand humanities context but, as was observed by MaryJacobus, the CRASSH Director, ‘We don’t use the tools weourselves develop to show the value of what we do.’

More information about the seminar and copies ofspeakers’ papers are available from:http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/evidencevalue.html

2 11

ICT GuidesAn introduction to ICT Guides

Craig Bellamy, Research Associate, ICT Guides,writes about new developments for this initiative.

ICT Guides is a JISC-funded initiative housed at the AHDS,King’s College London.

The purpose of ICT Guides is to provide a focal point fornew and established digital arts and humanitiesresearchers to find out about projects, the technicalmethods and tools they employ, and the individuals andcentres involved in their realization.

The first iteration of ICT Guides was launched in late 2006at De Montfort University. During this first stage ofdevelopment, projects constructed within a UK fundingcouncil context were listed. In this next stage, projectscreated within specific subject communities, andemploying specialized methods, are being emphasizedwhich gives scope to include projects from all corners ofthe globe. This may include communities around say,nineteenth-century history and electronic textual studies,or the history of reading and the methods employed ingathering and presenting evidence. Recent additions toICT Guides have included the PARADESIC (the Pacific andRegional Archive for Digital Sources in EndangeredCultures) project from Australia, and an e-Sciencedemonstrator project, Virtual Vellum. This projectinvestigates technologies that facilitate the retrieval,manipulation and annotation (‘hotspotting’) of very high-resolution image datasets using the UK’s high capacityResearch Grid.

ICT Guides also intends to explore the development of aVirtual Research Environment (VRE), using open-sourcetechnologies such as SAKAI and encompassing bulletinboards, Wikis, and other such applications. It is hopedthat this facility will give project developers an onlinespace for discussion of their technical methodologies.

eSCIENCE

eScience arts and humanitiestheme begins

Stuart Dunn, Research Associate, AHeSSC, outlinesthe first phase of theme activities.

AHeSSC is undertaking a major series of activities incollaboration with the e-Science Institute (eSI), part of theNational e-Science Centre in Edinburgh. Funding hasbeen won for a ‘theme’ on arts and humanities e-Science. eSI themes aim to ‘achieve new insights into aspecific topic by investigating it in depth over a sustainedperiod’. The AHeSSC theme will commence on 30 April2007 and finish on 31 March 2008.

The first phase of activitieswill comprise seven publiclectures. Sheila Anderson,director of the AHDS andco-director of AHeSSC, willprovide an openinglecture on 30 April, whichwill set out the theme’saims and its context asdefined by the AHDS e-Science Scoping Study. David Robey, Director of the AHRCICT Programme, will follow Sheila Anderson’s lecture witha presentation on the AHRC-JISC-EPSRC e-ScienceInitiative, its impact and likely outcomes.

The remaining lectures will comprise two or morespeakers. A leading arts or humanities e-Science earlyadopter will give a presentation on the cutting-edge workthey are engaged in, followed by a paper from ascientific expert giving a technical perspective on theissues raised.

18 June - David Shepherd and colleagues from theuniversities of Sheffield and Lancaster will discuss Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities, an overview of how artistsand humanists can employ advanced methods andtechnologies in collaboration. 19 June - Mark Greengrass (University of Sheffield,and an Associate Director of the Methods Network)and Oscar Corcho from Manchester University, willlecture on Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability for Humanities Data. This is a critical topic in particular for historical and textual studies. 20 June - Gabriel Bodard (King’s College London), Juan Garces (The British Library) and Jean Carletta

“Evidence of valuefor ICT in the artsand humanities isvital to persuadefunders to ensurethe sustainability ofthis digital data.”

“The theme willinvestigate arts andhumanities e-Sciencein depth.”


EditorialThe past few months have been busy for the MethodsNetwork. We are especially pleased with the numberand scope of activities that we have been able to fund,ranging from service-oriented computing to CGIanimation. Read more about the outcomes of theseactivities and plans for future events inside. If you wouldlike to apply for funding to support an activity, see ourlatest call for proposals for activities on page 9 Thedeadline is 30 June.

Two concerns of vital interest to the Methods Networkcommunity are the sustainability of digital resources andthe need to demonstrate evidence of value of suchresources. On page 2 David Robey, Director of the AHRCICT Programme, reports on two Methods Network ExpertSeminars that focused on these important areas.

In January, Torsten Reimer joined the Methods Networkteam as Senior Research Project Co-ordinator. Torstenwas previously web co-ordinator for the University ofMunich and project co-ordinator for the historydepartment there. Torsten is working to expand theMethods Network outreach programme and buildinglinks within and between arts and humanitiescommunities. He writes about progress so far anddeveloping plans on page 9.

Lorna Hughes, the Methods Network Manager, iscurrently on maternity leave and I have been delightedto work with and supervise the Methods Network teamduring her absence. We look forward to welcomingLorna back in May.

Sheila AndersonDirector, AHDSCo-Director AHeSSC

Summer 2007 - Issue 4

The Methods Network staff

Lorna HughesManageremail: [email protected]

Hazel GardinerSenior Project OfficerActivities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Neil GrindleySenior Project OfficerActivities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Torsten ReimerSenior Research Project Co-ordinator email: [email protected]

Lydia HorstmanPublications and Administrative Officeremail: [email protected]

Stuart DunnResearch Associate in e-Science Methods email: [email protected]

AHRC ICT Methods NetworkCentre for Computing in the Humanities King’s College LondonKay House7 Arundel StreetLondonWC2R 3DX

Tel 020 7848 2689Fax 020 7848 2980

Email [email protected]


Inside this issue:

Outreach and community: Read about theMethods Network’s new approaches tocommunity building on page 9

Recent activities: Simulation softwaredemonstrated by Red Legion at the Talking CGIpanel at the Art of British CGI conference. Areport on the panel is on page 5


(Edinburgh University) will elaborate on last year’s Methods Network workshop on Collaborative Text Editing. 2 July - Mark Hedges (AHDS), Melissa Terras(University College London), Shirley Crompton(Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils) will discuss Grid Enabling Humanities Datasets, an issue that will become increasingly important as grid scientists and arts and humanities scholars engage ever more closely. 6 July - e-Science and Performance will be addressed by Gregory Sporton (University of CentralEngland), Russell Beale (University of Birmingham) and Angela Piccini (Bristol University). 23 July – The final lecture will be given by Stuart Jeffrey (AHDS Archaeology) and Femke Reistma(University of Edinburgh) on Aspects of Space and Time in Humanities e-Science.

The final lecture will be followed immediately by theMethods Network workshop Space and Time: Methodsin Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past,convened by Stuart Dunn (AHeSSC) and Leif Isaksen(Oxford Archaeology). This direct collaboration betweenthe AHeSSC theme and the Methods Network will seek toprovide a discipline-wide overview of geospatialmethodologies in the key areas of Scale, Heterogeneityand Standards and Metadata. Vince Gaffney (Universityof Birmingham), William Kilbride (Glasgow Museums)and Tom Elliott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)are confirmed as keynote speakers, and each session willbe rapporteured by a distinguished scholar.

More information is available on the AHeSSC website(http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/theme). Further details mayalso be obtained from Stuart Dunn([email protected]) or Tobias Blanke([email protected]).


Documents

The Methods Network staff · Neil Grindley Senior Project Officer Activities and Publications Co-ordinator email: [email protected] Torsten Reimer Senior Research Project Co-ordinator