Presented by Professor Ray Siemens and Dr Lynne Siemens, University of Victoria, Canada
- Date: Fri 26 April 2013
- Time: 12.00-2.00 (sandwich lunch provided!)
- Location: Room 5.G.24 Bankstown
- (UWS Bankstown Campus, Building 5, School of Humanities and Communication Arts)
- RSVP Sue Bell
Digital Humanities is a field of research and teaching that has been growing dramatically around the world, especially over the past 5 years. There is and has been considerable activity of this kind at UWS across a number of Schools and Institutes, and 2013 sees the formal establishment of a Research Group in Digital Humanities at UWS, based in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. The field has a long tradition in Australia and New Zealand, but recent growth across the region led to the founding in 2011 of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, with the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
This seminar takes advantage of the presence in Sydney of two distinguished visitors from Canada, and marks the first formal event of the new Research Group.
Professor Ray Siemens and Dr Lynne Siemens will each make a presentation, followed by questions and discussion. Both speakers have a wealth of experience of digital humanities both in Canada and internationally, so it is anticipated that the discussion will be wide-ranging.
Presentations and Biographies
Ray Siemens: Education and Training in the Digital Humanities: Converging local initiatives and their international context.
This talk considers digital humanities education and training in its many contexts — from local informal interactions to formal, dedicated doctoral programmes. It assesses the developing programmes that range from basic understanding of key concepts to emerging trends in content- and process-modelling, social and public engagement, and large-scale problem-based research.
Lynne Siemens: Collaborative Research Projects in the Digital Humanities : Building and sustaining from the local to the international.
Researchers are taking increasing advantage of digital resources, tools, and methods to explore new and different kinds of research questions. One result is the emergence of larger and more complex projects requiring different work practices that include collaboration with colleagues locally, nationally and increasingly internationally. This raises questions around the type of processes needed to build and sustain teams and their projects while meeting the many challenges that come with working across disciplines, distance, time and culture/language groups. This talk addresses these questions and suggests best practices for Digital Humanities teams to consider in their collaborations.
Ray Siemens is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science. He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, and Literary Studies in the Digital Age (MLA, with Price). He directs the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, and serves as Vice President of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences for Research Dissemination, recently serving also as Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations’ Steering Committee. In this latter role he gave considerable support to those involved in establishing the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities. (http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens)
Lynne Siemens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria. Her interests include academic entrepreneurship, collaboration and team work with a focus on understanding methods and processes to facilitate collaborative research across distances, disciplines and organizational boundaries. She has taught workshops in Project Management at University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute and University of Leipzig’s European Summer School for Culture and Technology. Dr. Siemens is Principle Investigator of a research team funded by the Canadian Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council to examine the impact of representation from multiple countries, languages and culture groups on research teams with the objective of outlining types of supports and research preparation to ensure effective research results. She also serves as a management advisor for Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), a Major Collaborative Research Initiative project. Dr. Siemens’s role includes supporting the development of governance documents, organizational structure and project management. (http://www.uvic.ca/hsd/publicadmin/aboutUs/home/facultystaff/siemens.php)
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to s.bell@uws.edu.au
(This seminar will be also be recorded and made available at a later date)
