Marilyn Deegan

Bald's Leechbook and the Physica Plinii.

The study of the sources of the Anglo-Saxon medical texts began more than a hundred years ago with T.O. Cockaynes monumental edition of most of the medical, magical and herbal material extant in Old English. Cockayne demonstrated that the most significant text in this corpus, the late ninth-century compilation known as Balds Leechbook , drew on an impressive range of Latin source materials. Recent work by C.H. Talbot and M.L. Cameron has further extended our knowledge of the classical texts which underlie the Leechbook . Among the significant sources is the text known as the Physica Plinii . Although the Physica survives in several recensions, there has as yet been no systematic study of the relationship between these recensions and the version of the Latin text used by the Old English compiler. The present article investigates Balds Leechbook as a witness to the history of the Physica Plinii , and demonstrates the complexity of the transmission of the latter work.

Measuring the impact of digitized resources: The Balanced Value Model

This paper introduces an innovative new model for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources - the Balanced Value Impact Model. The Balanced Value Impact Model (BVI Model) brings together into a holistic framework aspects from disparate Impact Assessment (IA) disciplines into a cohesive and logical process. This model balances vital tangible gains from economic, social and innovation perspectives with harder to measure cultural values. The model has found wide acceptance in the targeted communities, and is being adopted and implemented in a number of organizations, in particular, the Europeana Impact Task Force, which Simon Tanner chairs. Recent research into the value and impact of digitized collections has shown that there are clear benefits and value in the activity, but there is also a lack of measures to back up assertions about Impact with significant evidence beyond the anecdotal. The approach we took was to look outside the heritage community and see how Impact is measured in other sectors, where there are well-understood methods and substantial results. We consulted expert practitioners within and outside the cultural sector, including professionals in the health, environment and transport fields. Our focus was upon unifying knowledge from disparate perspectives. The outcome of this cross-disciplinary approach is a new and targeted model of IA for the cultural and heritage sector. The research that led to the BVI Model was funded by the Arcadia Fund in 2012 and developed by Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan at the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College London.

‘This ever more amorphous thing called Digital Humanities’: Whither the Humanities Project?

In 2012, Digital Humanities became one of the most talked-about topics in the humanities and was suggested as a movement that could possibly help halt the decline in the traditional humanities. A flurry of books appeared, and AHHE produced two special issues, Digital humanities, digital futures and The necessity of the humanities, in which scholars discuss the value and practice of the humanities in a world that is increasingly digital. This current piece muses on some aspects of the humanities and the digital humanities against a background of the world financial decline, emerging media and new attitudes in society to art, culture, humanities and education.

Preserving the cultural heritage of Sudan through digitization: Developing Digital Sudan

Cultural heritage is one of the most significant goods that a country and a culture possesses. The Sudan is a country rich in artefacts that go back to the dawn of history: archaeological remains, art, manuscripts that date back to beginning of Islam, books, archival documents, documentary film, hundreds of thousands of hours of video, television and radio, millions of photographs. The National Archives alone hold 76 million photographic negatives. This rich heritage is at risk. At risk from the heat, dust and humidity, from obsolescence of media: the documentary film in the film archive, for instance, can only be accessed on ancient and deteriorating equipment, for which no spare parts for repair can be found. These materials record history and culture of the country that is fast disappearing in the modern world. If these artefacts themselves are lost, so too will be the knowledge of a way of life. Digital Sudan will transform Sudanese intellectual productions to modern electronic and digital media, which will be safer to preserve and easier to retrieve. There are a number of digitization projects being carried out in Sudan, and spurred on to action by the news of the loss of vital parts of the cultural heritage in Timbuktu in Mali with the destruction of libraries, the Ministry of Information, the Sudanese Association for the Archiving of Knowledge (SUDAAK), and museums, libraries, archives throughout the country are collaborating to form the National Cultural Heritage Digitization Team (NCHDT) to raise the level of activity significantly. Working with teams in Durham University and Kings College London in the UK, and with other organizations throughout the world, the NCHDT is creating a collaborative infrastructure to integrate resources and facilitate usage. The partners have diverging needs but common purposes i

Digital Art and Technical Convergence: A Review of Silicon Remembers Carbon, an Exhibition

Silicon Remembers Carbon, Artist: David Rokeby, 20 April to 10 June 2007, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology), 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ. Telephone: þ44-151-7074444; Email: info@fact.co.uk. Exhibition web site: www.rokebyshow.org.uk David Rokeby in Conversation, FACT, 7.00 pm, 30 April 2007. David Rokeby interviewed by Marilyn Deegan, 30 April 2007. The computer and the internet are media of sharing, boundary crossing, and convergence par excellence and can permit the transcendence of boundaries of all kinds, between countries, institutions, societies, and disciplines. And yet, despite the possibilities offered to us by the technologies, we so rarely do reach out across the disciplines. Digital humanities and arts are of course areas of convergence in themselves, and some practitioners are polymaths who, in integrating technology into their creative space, make inspired and original works of art, and conceptual leaps in our understanding of machine, humanity, and the relationship between them. Just such a practitioner is David Rokeby. David Rokeby is a well-known Canadian new media artist who has been creating prize-winning installations for the last twenty-five years. Rokeby’s recent awards include the first BAFTA for Interactive Art in 2000. Silicon Remembers Carbon is a major retrospective of his work, curated by Peter Ride, Artistic Director of DA2, Digital Arts Development Agency; Director & Senior Research Fellow Centre for Arts Research Technology and Education (CARTE). The FACT exhibition has been curated by Marta Rupérez. Silicon Remembers Carbon is the first major presentation of Rokeby’s work in the UK, though he has previously shown individual installations; after Liverpool, the exhibition moves to the CCA in Glasgow (mid August to late September 2007); the Science Museum in London will later show a reduced version, probably opening in January 2008; and from February 2008 it will be on show at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario. See the exhibition web site for further information about dates. Silicon Remembers Carbon has six major installations: Very Nervous System; Watch; Seen; Taken; Giver of Names; and n-Cha(n)t. All explore the interfaces between the human and the computer in innovative and startling ways, engaging in dialogue about where machine intelligence is ‘like’ human intelligence, and where machine intelligence can, and cannot, mimic or approximate to human experience. Rokeby integrates AI techniques, image analysis, text analysis, text processing to produce a series of profoundly unsettling experiences for the visitor/user/participant, which both celebrate the achievements of technology and simultaneously show its limitations, and which reinforce our sense of what it is to be human in a world Correspondence: Marilyn Deegan, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, UK. E-mail: marilyn.deegan@kcl.ac.uk

The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. Bill Cope and Angus Phillips (eds).

tication technologies and particular kinds of standoff markup, like JITM (Just-In-Time Markup). Patrick Durusau emphasizes the enormous importance of documenting the markup choices that are being made while encoding, Sebastian Rahtz illustrates some transformations one might need to do to publish TEI XML files on the Web or in print, and Mary Case and David Green review the law on rights and permissions and its implications for scholarly editing. John Lavagnino’s short essay on ‘When Not to Use TEI’ is also rather interesting, and actually daring as well, because to some scholars even considering not to choose the TEI approach is like swearing in a church. Quite a large number of the essays in this book refer to earlier debates in the field of scholarly editing. Yet, these days there seems to have arisen an overall consensus on most of the topics that are discussed in Electronic Textual Editing. However still a challenging subject of debate, one of the issues scholars seem to agree on, is that printed and electronic renderings are ontologically not different. As Thomas Tanselle states in his foreword: ‘they may be made of different physical materials, but the conceptual status of the texts in each case is identical.’ (p. 6) In other words: ‘The use of the computer in editing does not change the questions, and the varying temperaments of editors will continue to result in editions of differing character.’ (p. 3) Also remarkable is that, however still optimistic and fairly excited about all the new possibilities and interesting features that electronic editing offers, almost all contributors to this collection of essays are well aware of the fact that digital textual editing has a few disadvantages to editing in print as well. Clearly the experiences gained in the last decade of electronic editing has been an eye-opener to some editors (and funders). Electronic textual editing still offers thrilling opportunities, but after the euphoria of the first decade of TEI text encoding—the TEI was established in 1987—the second decade brought back a fair amount of realism amongst textual editors. Not only do editors know better than ever that an electronic textual enterprise is still a timeconsuming and expensive undertaking, they also realize that however straightforward the encoding may be, it will always be a subjective interpretation of text. In the introduction to this book, the editors acknowledge that a book dealing with information technology cannot avoid obsolescence. Some parts of Electronic Textual Editing may indeed already become somewhat outdated soon. Nonetheless, thanks to its numerous useful hints and the helpful practical advice, this book is a must-have for all scholarly editors in the digital environment, whether they are experienced in electronic editing or total novices.

The Death of the Book

Technological developments over recent years, coupled with the arrival of the new millennium, seem to have generated a spate of apocalyptic predictions about the death of the book and the birth of entirely new modes of communication and interaction. For humanistic scholarship and teaching, especially in Britain but elsewhere too, other forces, such as massively increased participation rates in higher education without concomitant increases in funding, mean that new technologies are being looked at closely to supplement (or even supplant) more traditional methods of teaching and research. Though often proposed by politicians and other policy makers for financial reasons, educationalists are seeing and seizing upon new opportunities for quality enhancement and resource expansion in humanistic study. This chapter examines and assesses some of the factors, forces, and problems in the adoption of new technologies in humanities higher education.