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Google funds project investigating the geography of the ancient world
A joint OU-led project exploring how people of antiquity viewed the geography of the ancient world has been backed by $50,000 of funding from Google, Inc. via its Digital Humanities Awards Program.
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is developing a Web application which allows users to choose a classical text or book (500BC - 500AD) and then search for references to ancient places within it, presenting the results in a user-friendly interface.
GAP uses specialist software to identify where and how often places are mentioned within a text, displaying references to the locations and plotting results on a map using an independent digital gazetteer (Pleiades).
Digital Humanities specialist Dr Leif Isaksen of Southampton explains, “A GAP user can not only see how an author’s narrative moves from place-to-place, but also how a town or city’s relative importance varies throughout a historical text. We hope it will interest scholars and users with a general interest in antiquity alike.”
Google Ancient Places is an international collaborative research project between The Open University (Dr Elton Barker), the University of Southampton (Dr Leif Isaksen), the University of Edinburgh (Dr Kate Byrne), University of California, Berkeley (Dr Eric Kansa) and independent developer Nick Rabinowitz. This Digital Humanities Research Grant is the second round of funding GAP has received from the Google Research Awards Program, and will allow the team to expand their project to a wider variety of books and texts.
In addition, GAP is part of a larger network of open data on antiquity called Pelagios, which is made up of several similar online projects. By integrating GAP with this network, the researchers hope to give users access to more varied types of data, such as archaeological artefacts or historical documents.
Open University classicist Dr Elton Barker of GAP and Pelagios says: “Previous projects have tended to result in closed silos of information which have reinforced barriers between disciplines. By developing a common way of refering to data, whether they are archaeological or literary or visual, it becomes possible to navigate directly between them. These projects will make it easier for online users to explore ancient texts and artefacts in their spatial, cultural and literary context.”
To explore Google Ancient Places, please visit: http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/gapvis/.
‘The Arts and Their Audiences’ AHRC Block Grant Partnership funded studentships
The Faculty of Arts (in partnership with the British Library, and the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland) has been awarded a Block Grant Partnership: Capacity Building (BGP:CB) award by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with the overarching theme of ‘The Arts and Their Audiences’.
Seeking to interrogate the place and purpose of the arts in contemporary society, the grant will result in five externally-funded doctoral studentships allocated to the departments of History, Music and Literature, starting over the next three years from September 2011. The award is equivalent to c.£150,000, and augmented by additional funds from the University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Enterprise).
The awards are granted under the AHRC’s key principle of funding high quality students across the full range of arts and humanities subjects, in institutions and departments that offer high quality postgraduate training in relevant disciplines, a critical mass of excellent postgraduate and post-doctoral work in relevant disciplines, and a strong and supportive research and training environment.
DIALOG
Classical studies’ Elton Barker is to lead a new project called DIALOG (Document and Integrate Ancient Linked Open Geodata). The 45K JISC funded project will employ Linked Open Data principles to connect textual, visual and tabular documents that reference places in Ancient world research. Other partners include the University of Southampton, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University), Tufts University, University of Cologne, King’s College and the Austrian Institute of Technology.
Elton Barker wins Google Digital Humanities Award
Dr Elton Barker (Lecturer in Classical Studies) has been awarded one of only 12 of Google’s inaugural Digital Humanities Research Awards for Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.
Google Ancient Places will let users search for books related to specific geographic location during a particular time period, which are then visualised on Google Earth or Google Maps. Academics will be able to access data compiled from a broad swathe of literature, including many out of print and rare material often kept just a small number of institutions. The project will open up interest in history, classics and archaeology, and help develop new tools and research methods as well as expertise in using data in this way. The team also includes Eric C. Kansa (University of California-Berkeley) and Leif Isaksen (Southampton University). See the project website for more information, including regular quarterly updates.
AHRC DEDEFI award for the Reading Experience Database (RED)
We are delighted to announce that the RED team, led by Prof Bob Owens (English Dept) have been successful in securing additional external funding for the project. ‘Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading: collaboration between the UK Reading Experience Database and invited partners’ was awarded £100,778 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (ARHC) DEDEFI (Digital Equipment and Databases for Impact) scheme in February 2010. This 12-month funded project started on 1 March 2010, and will help to interlink reading experience database projects in Australia (Griffith University, Brisbane), Canada (Dalhousie University, Halifax), the Netherlands (Universiteit Utrecht) and New Zealand (Victoria University of Wellington) with the UK RED, housed at the Open University. Further news about this project will be available here on the RED project website, and through our new blog, Reading Experiences, Reading Technologies, which is available at www.open.ac.uk/blogs/RED/.
AHRC award for military music project
Trevor Herbert (Music Dept and Associate Dean for External Affairs and Partnerships) has been awarded c £250,000 by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a three-year research project on Military Sponsorship of Music in Britain in the Nineteenth Century and its Relationship with the Musical Mainstream. The project will establish an authoritative history of British military-sponsored music in the nineteenth century and relate the findings of that study to the broader picture of British music history in that period. The outputs of this project will not only be a coauthored book and conference papers, but also Knowledge Transfer activity including a service to museums and archives providing brief, didactic, contextual texts for the organisations’ use.
Leverhulme Trust grant to explore South African performance and memory
Dennis Walder (Director of the Ferguson Centre for African & Asian Studies) has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant of over £140, 000 for a three-year joint project with Dr Yvette Hutchison of the University of Warwick, entitled ‘Performing Memory: theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa’. The grant is to fund two full-time PhD students, as well as travel and archival work. The aim of the new project is to explore how formal processes of remembering and recording the contested histories of South Africa – such as the Truth and Reconciliation hearings – are related to popular performative representations including plays, installations, memorials, film and TV. Read more about this project.
Elton Barker, who has recently joined the Faculty as a lecturer in Classics, has brought the AHRC-supported HESTIA project to the Faculty. HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) provides a new approach towards conceptions of space in the ancient world. The project examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus’ History, in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described. It develops visual tools to capture the ‘deep’ topological structures of the text, extending beyond the usual two-dimensional Cartesian maps of the ancient world. Find out more by visiting the project’s website.
Thursday 23rd February 2012
1730 for 1800
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Academic Building
This event launches CHASE, which brings together academics and doctoral students at The Open University; The Courtauld Institute of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; and The Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex to deliver outstanding postgraduate training in arts and humanities across the south-east of England.
This Consortium has a distinctive intellectual ethos and a commitment to putting human creativity and critical thought at the heart of public life. From the archive to the studio, from the classical to the contemporary, we offer an intellectual environment able to foster problem-driven research. This is vital to the understanding of a world shaped by the speed of technological innovation and unprecedented global change. Offering PhD scholars the opportunity to study alongside faculty with established international reputations across the range of disciplines sponsored by the AHRC, we also stress the challenge of imagining new modes of scholarship and new forms of knowledge for the arts and humanities today. Find out more about this event from Arts Matters.