The Cultures of Knowledge 2014 Michaelmas seminar series begins Monday 20th October! In case you haven’t seen the posters or email announcements yet, we hereby invite you to join us for this term’s seminar series, The Digital Humanist: Open Resources, Shared Standards, Virtual Communities. The set of five talks will be held on Mondays at 5.15pm, at the History Faculty in Oxford, and all are welcome to come to the seminar and join us for a glass of wine in the common room afterwards.

The series aims to look at the digital humanities specifically in terms of the individual and the community. It will focus on shared knowledge and shared tools, and on the opportunities and challenges involved in providing collaborative platforms or resources – whether in terms of evolving technical standards or of negotiating shared work and shared accreditation. Attention is increasingly being directed towards DH projects and the importance of building open resources, linking objects, and sharing work, so where does the individual, intellectual property and traditional scholarly validation fit in? Does the machine threaten or assist the individual? How do shared standards work as a goal and in practical terms?

These issues are important for the field and for Cultures of Knowledge as a project; we are in the process of expanding and developing our union catalogue of early modern learned correspondence, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), moving from internal project-based data gathering to becoming a platform that other scholars, archives and groups can use to curate and publish their data. You can see our beta here, which will be refreshed and expanded towards the end of the year. Also of relevance in this discussion is a new four-year networking initiative that began this summer, Reassembling the Republic of Letters 1500-1800, funded by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST).

If you’re unable to attend this seminar series, fear not – we intend to podcast the papers so watch this space! Last year at CofK we were lucky enough to get some great speakers on network analysis and data visualization – if you missed them, catch up here.

Mon 20 Oct:

Melissa Terras (University College London)
Transcribe Bentham:Sharing Labour, Sharing Platforms, Sharing Data

Mon 27 Oct:

Kathryn Eccles (University of Oxford)
Looking into the Crowd: Understanding the Users of Digital Heritage Collections

Mon 10 Nov:

Sally Shuttleworth and Victoria Van Hyning (University of Oxford)
Constructing Scientific Communities in the 19th and 21st Centuries: Science Periodicals and the Zooniverse

Mon 17 Nov:

Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University)
Harmonising the Heterogenous: Shared Ontologies and Linked Data in Archives, Museums and Libraries

Mon 24 Nov:

Howard Hotson (University of Oxford)
Collaboration, Early Modern Letters Online, and Horizon 2020: The Creation of One Virtual Community to Reassemble Another

For abstracts for the talks and podcasts when they become available, see our seminar page. We hope to see you soon!