Second annual HASTAC Conference, proposals due 15 February 2008

University of California, Irvine and University of California, Los Angeles

This year’s theme is “techno-travels” and explores the multiple ways in which place, movement, borders, and identities are being renegotiated and remapped by new locative technologies. Featured projects will delve into mobility as a modality of knowledge and stake out new spaces for humanistic inquiry. How are border-crossings being re-conceptualized, experienced, and narrated in a world permeated by technologies of mobility? How is the geo-spatial web remapping physical geographies, location, and borderlands? How are digital cities interfacing with physical space? How do we move between virtual worlds? And what has become of sites of dwelling and stasis in a world saturated by techno-travels?

This year’s conference literalizes and metaphorizes travel, as attendees will participate in sessions at Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, and on the connecting corridors of Southern California.

Susan Schriebman and Ann Hanlon have put together a survey that aims to redress the current lack of a "concerted effort to gather information about the perceived value of tool development, not only as a scholarly activity, but in relation to the tenure and promotion process, as well as for the advancement of the field of digital humanities itself."

This must be the meme of the month, as Bill Turkel just this week unveiled plans to co-author with Alan MacEachern a "book to teach practicing historians how to use programming to augment their ability to do research online."

Anyway, I'd encourage everybody who's ever built a digital tool for a humanities function (or who is thinking about it) to take the survey and pester Bill to finish the book.

It's come to my attention that some folks might not have noticed the announcement on the Pleiades News channel that I've posted slides from my AIA/APA presentation a couple of weeks ago in Chicago. The context was the very interesting AIA panel discussion "Web-based Research Tools for Mediterranean Archaeology" organized by Pedar Foss and Rebecca Schindler. Maybe other participants in that session will post their slides too ...

Noted by way of H-HISTGEOG:

Call for papers: RGS-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference, 27-29 August 2008

Uncertainty and Inference in Historical GIS

Organisers: Richard Healey and Humphrey Southall, Dept. of Geography, University of Portsmouth

Historical GIS is a developing sub-field at the interface between substantive quantitative work in historical geography and evolving theories of spatio-temporal GIS. However, a number of obstacles must be overcome before potential synergies between these two areas can be fully realised.

Among these are a range of theoretical, methodological and substantive questions that need to be explored more fully. Examples include dealing with imprecise or rapidly changing geographical units or locations for which data are available, data comparability over extended timespans, uncertainty in chronologies of events, sporadic spatio-temporal data coverage and the related problems of utilising GIS methods to make inferences about past economic or social processes, based on very limited or unreliable archival sources. This session aims to provide a forum to discuss both theoretical issues and substantive case studies, either from the UK or further afield.


Please send expressions of interest to: Richard.Healey@port.ac.uk or Humphrey.Southall@port.ac.uk

Deadline for title and abstracts (c. 200 words): 31 January 2008

For further details of the conference please see RGS-IBG website.

There's an interesting discussion on the Semantic Web in Archaeology unfolding on the Antiquist List.

Neel Smith has been blogging since October, and I've only now just noticed! Everything here is interesting -- it's well worth a scrollback.

This looks potentially useful:

• Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Institutional Repositories: Tout de Suite, 2008, http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf

Spotted via JISC-REPOSITORIES.

If you're interested, check out the full Call for Participants for the 1st Antiquist Workshop, slated for April 2008 in Southampton.

One of the several interesting announcements made yesterday in the annual business meeting of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy was the establishment of a Center of Digital Epigraphy at Brown University. John Bodel (who directs the U.S. Epigraphy Project) and Michael Satlow (who oversees the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine repertorium) have received startup funding for this co-directed center. As more details, and a web presence (I hope) emerge, I'll blog them over at Current Epigraphy.

Back in September, I blogged the call for participation in the December 2007 Santa Barbara Workshop on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Mike Goodchild now writes to point us to the workshop results pages, which include: a description of the workshop, copies of presentation slides, a participants list and the participants' position papers.