I’m co-chairing this event at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities next month with Sian Bayne:  it sounds like it will be fascinating. Do come along if you are interested and able.

A Digital Humanities Workshop in Four Keys: Medicine, Law, Bibliography, and Crime

Date: Monday 11 November
Time: 2-5pm
Venue: The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square
Booking: email iash@ed.ac.uk to book a place – and please book early as places are limited.

Alison Crockford
Digital articulations: writing medicine in Edinburgh

The distinct character of the double meaning behind the word ‘articulation’ allows it to take on particular significance in the crossover between literature and medicine; articulation both refers to the action of translating an idea or emotion into words and, in a more specifically medical context, the state of being flexibly joined together. This presentation, and the IASH research project from which it is derived, is inspired by this resonant duality. The Digital Articulations project seeks in part to illuminate the relationship between literature and medicine in Edinburgh through the development of a digital reader. However, at the same time it aims to join together not only the literary and medical spheres, but also the rapidly expanding field of the digital and the medical humanities.

This talk will consider the impact that digital and multi-media initiatives has had and might yet have not only  on research in the medical humanities, but also on dissemination and public engagement. Tracing the project’s development from a series of public events through to an exploration on the dynamic between the medical and digital humanities, it will consider the impact of similar online readers, and explore the possibilities for expansion beyond this format into a more dynamic research tool. The significance that such development might have for the study of the medical humanities, and its potential influence on public perceptions of medicine and the history of medicine will be explored before the presentation considers the application of such a model to other fields of research.

Chen Wei Zhu
Rethinking property: copyright law and digital humanities research

Modern copyright law, which owes its origin to the Statute of Anne as promulgated in 1709, is an institution constantly facing challenges and changes. This three-century old legal regime, which has largely co-evolved with print culture, is again called into question by the latest development in digital humanities (DH). I argue that the entrenched idea of copyright as an exclusive property regime is ill-suited for understanding the hugely interconnected DH research activities. It calls for a rethink of copyright as a relational platform that is capable of accommodating a more decentralised and distributive mode of “ownership” and authorship prevalent in DH research activities.

Gregory Adam Scott
The digital bibliography of Chinese Buddhism as a research and reference tool

Assembled as part of a doctoral research thesis, the Digital Catalogue of Chinese Buddhism is a collection of data on over 2,300 published items with a web-based, online interface for searching and filtering its content. It served as a map to the terrain of publishing and print culture during the development of the thesis, and has since continued to be developed as a comprehensive guide to material published by Buddhists in modern China. While the DCCB was originally compiled to fulfil a specific research goal for a particular field of scholarship, this presentation will explore how the methods and implications of working with a large number of itemized records, whether bibliographic or otherwise, can be applied to a wide variety of projects. It will outline how the raw data was processed from various sources and formats, how the system of organizing the digital data was developed, how the user-visible web-based interface was designed, and finally what the editor envisions for the future of this and similar types of resources.

Louise Settle
Digitally mapping Crime in Edinburgh, 1900-1939

This paper will explore how digital mapping technology can be used to map historical data. My recent research on the historical geography of prostitution in Edinburgh will be used as an example to demonstrate some of the practical uses that this technology can offer historians, but also the implications it has for anyone interested in combining qualitative research methods with textual and spatial analysis. The paper will conclude with an outline of how I intend to use this technology to map female street offences in Edinburgh during the early twentieth century.