Day 1: Introduction and Pimms
Today marks the beginning of the 2013 Pratt in London E-Publishing course. At 8:45 Pratt and UTK assembled, a little bleary-eyed and chilly, and made the journey to Kings College. We registered, got ID badges printed (I rate my picture “Not Awful”) and went through the course programme. We also took the time to introduce ourselves and give a little background. I am really glad we all went around the room, it’s always so exciting to hear what people are doing in the ever-increasing, ever-changing world of information science. The UTK students have backgrounds in science and scientific research, while Pratt seems to have its main strengths in the arts and humanities. It felt a little intimidating to me, as someone who managed to get through college with only an astronomy course for her “science” requirement, but they are a very friendly bunch of people and I am looking forward to hearing more of their ideas.
In the afternoon, Stuart gave a lecture on digital humanities/digital scholarship and archaeology. The first method he discussed was virtual reconstruction, using motion capture technology to try and figure out how people moved and lived in archaeological sites. The second method was persistent geography, using consistent geospace URIs to connect locations like on the Pleiades project. I really appreciated this lecture – as Stuart acknowledged, terms like “digital humanities” or “digital scholarship” do not have truly set definitions so it can be difficult to understand what the discipline encompasses. What is the point of digital humanities? What makes it different? With these examples, I understood how digital tools can be used to enhance and propel scholarship in new directions. After that, Anthony gave us an overview of the issues involved with scholarly publishing and the disruption caused by new technologies to traditional publishing models. It looks like this will be a big part of our coursework in the next few days. British Library tomorrow!
By a complete accident, we found the Pimms Pop-Up Summer Garden on the way back to the dorm. The creative minds at Pimms had transformed this little shop into a lovely English garden where you could drink Pimms and chat about tennis (this is apparently a thing for English people). If you booked in advance, you could reserve a blanket on the “lawn” and have a picnic lunch while you watched the matches Wimbledon. London, don’t ever stop doing what you doing.
