#CUArchive

Registration is now open for our Archive Unbound Symposium. Please register on Eventbrite: https://the-archive-unbound.eventbrite.co.uk.

Registration is free for delegates but places are limited. The deadline for registration is midday, 2 May 2017.

Final Programme

10.00	Registration and coffee
10.50	Welcome and Introduction to the Cardiff Digital Cultures Network
11.00	Panel 1 Sara Huws (National Museum of Wales), Outside the Archive Stephen H. Gregg (Bath Spa University), Handiwork: Metadata & Genre in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) Judith Dray (Cardiff University), TBC
12.30	Lunch
13.30	Panel 2 Danica Maier (Nottingham Trent University) and Andrew Bracey (University of Lincoln), Rummage to Bypass: Alternative Ways of Accessing the Archive Sara Sylvester (Cardiff University), Close Encounters of the Parafictive Kind – Bringing the Archives to Life as Fictive Art Bethan Stevens and Georgina Mind (University of Sussex), Diabolical Collaboration: Dismantling and Re-assembling the Archive
15.00	Coffee
15.30	Panel 3 Jenny Kidd (Cardiff University), Citizen Humanities and Digital Labour Keir Waddington (Cardiff University), The UK Medical Heritage Archive Lara Taffer (VCS Cymru), Collaboration & Community: Creative Reuse of Archival Material for Community Arts
17.00	Tea
17.30	Keynote Andrew Prescott (University of Glasgow), The Cathedral and the Bazaar: What Lessons for Humanities Scholarship?

Organisers: Hanna Diamond, Jenny Kidd, Anthony Mandal.

Research Associate: Michael Goodman.

Creativity in the Digital Age: Remixes, Remediations, Realignments

Cardiff University
Tuesday, 23 May 2017

Keynote Speakers: Jonathan Dovey (University of the West of England);
Ruth McElroy (University of South Wales)

Download the PDF here: Creativity in the Digital Age CFP

Cardiff University’s Digital Cultures Network is delighted to announce its third Symposium, which focuses on the creative arts in the digital age. The creative industries are a major contributor to the cultural and economic capital of the UK, constituting a field of rapid expansion and innovation. In this context, we might also consider how digital practices such as remixing and remediation are themselves realigning what we understand ‘creativity’ to mean, resulting in fruitful but also challenging collisions. While academic research is engaging with emergent practices in equally exciting and revealing ways, much remains to be done. Of interest are the intersections between the two fields, which are stimulating creative/critical approaches to collaborative practice, suggesting new roles that universities can play.

We invite proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers that explore any aspect of creativity in the digital age, including demonstrations of current projects. We are especially keen to feature presentations from creative practitioners, arts organisations and the heritage sector, alongside more traditional academic papers. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, 5 May 2017. Please send proposals or enquiries to Michael Goodman (GoodmanMJ@cardiff.ac.uk). Attendance at the Symposium is free and limited to no more than 40 delegates. While non-speaking delegates are welcome, priority will be given to speakers.

Organisers: Kate Griffiths; Anthony Mandal; Michael Goodman.

Investigating (with) Big Data a one-day symposium

Cardiff University
Wednesday, 24 May 2017

Keynote Speakers: Linda Naughton, JISC and Dawn Knight, Cardiff University

Download the PDF here: Big Data CFP

Big Data has provided new ways of empirical research, theorizing, and interpreting a wide range of artefacts and processes in both the humanities and social sciences. Yet these new ways have also affected approaches to, and understandings of, research. The questions (and concerns) raised by scholars have consequences for the collection, interpretation, and use of Big Data. What are the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical problems of working with and critiquing Big Data, its collection, investigation and use? What can the social sciences and the humanities teach each other about Big Data and its analysis?

Sponsored by Cardiff University’s Digital Humanities Network, this one-day symposium seeks to bring both humanities and social science perspectives to the field of Big Data to think about critical uses and useful critiques of ‘datafication’ in humanities and social sciences research. It explores Big Data-based research and investigations, questions surrounding the generation, use and interpretation of Big Data, and the risks and challenges of Big Data.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers that examine the theoretical, the practical, and the pedagogical dimensions of creating, using, and critiquing Big Data, including but not restricted to:

·         New research objects for analysis such as digital music, film
·         Constructing big data for research
·         Text- and data-mining of historical and archival material
·         Curation and preservation of big data
·         Big data and archival practice
·         Linked data and Big Data
·         The myths of data-based objectivity and impartiality
·         Characteristics and gaps of data-based epistemologies
·         Discrimination in data analysis
·         Investigating algorithms

The sympoium will be held on 24 May 2017 at Cardiff University

Proposals for should include a brief two-page C.V. and a 300-word abstract of the proposed paper, and are due by 24 April 2017 and we will inform speakers by 2^nd May. Submissions and all inquiries should be directed to Michael Goodman GoodmanMJ@cardiff.ac.uk

 For more information about Cardiff Digital Network, please see cardiffdigitalnetwork.org

 Symposium organisers:  Arne Hintz, Anthony Mandal and Keir Waddington

The Archive Unbound a one-day symposium

Cardiff University
Friday, 5 May 2017

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow 

Download the PDF here: The Archive_Unbound CFP

We invite proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers that explore any aspect of the curation, build, (re)mediation and creative re-use of archives, including demonstrations of current projects. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 20^th April 2017. Please send proposals or enquiries to Michael Goodman (GoodmanMJ@cardiff.ac.uk). Attendance at the Symposium is free and limited to no more than 30 delegates. While non-speaking delegates are welcome, priority will be given to speakers.

Formed in December 2015, and funded by Cardiff University’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, the Cardiff Digital Cultures Network is an interdisciplinary grouping that aims to bring together researchers, creative practitioners and library/museum professionals involved with digital work to share expertise and best practice. As part of our programme of activities, we are hosting four Symposia on various aspects of digital culture, focusing on: Word, Image, Digital (November 2016); The Archive Unbound (May 2017); Creative Economy (April 2017); and Big Data (May 2017). More information about the Network and its events can be found on our website (cardiffdigitalnetwork.org) and by following us on Twitter (@CUdigitalnet).

Symposium organisers: Hanna Diamond, Jenny Kidd and Anthony Mandal.

1 November 2016, Cardiff University

The interplay between word, image and the digital is one of the most pertinent and topical areas for research and discussion in the humanities. Whilst important work has been done previously theorising word and image (see, for example, W.J.T Mitchell’s Picture Theory), the addition of the digital to this already complex relationship problematises, amplifies and disrupts our understanding of what it means to be human and consequently challenges us to re-think how we understand visual culture. On 1^st November, Cardiff Digital Culture’s Network held its first symposium that interrogated this very subject and in the process acted as kind of prelude for the discussions that the rest of the world would be having a week later when, as result of Donald Trump winning the American Presidential election, concerns were raised over the way the digital allows for the widespread dissemination of words juxtaposed with images in the form of memes to denigrate, abuse and often tell outright lies about political opponents.
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Cardiff University, 17th November

On the 17th November 2016, Cardiff University hosted its first postgraduate conference on Gender and Digital Cultures. Conceived by members of the University’s Gender and Sexualities Research Group and Digital Cultures Network, the conference aimed to provide space for postgraduate researchers to share and debate emerging interdisciplinary scholarship on Gender and Digital Culture as well as build capacity amongst postgraduate students in digital research practice.
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In this blog piece, Joachim Buur, who has just completed his MA in English Literature at Cardiff University discusses his work on Andrew Hussie’s webcomic Homestuck and the implications it has for fans in the digital world. 

I’m honoured to be here as a rookie scholar and a fan to tell you a bit about the paper I gave at the Word. Image. Digital. Symposium, whose full title is ‘The Symbionic Cybertext Machine: Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck and its Fans as a Cyborg Collective’. Unfortunately I don’t have nearly enough room here to make the title make sense, so instead I hope to give you some idea of the general thrust of my paper. Shortly put, it’s about the webcomic Homestuck and the ways in which its author Andrew Hussie and his fans have gone through a co-evolution process, together working to create a narrative experience which could only have arisen (and only makes sense) in an online social context.
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The Royal Shakespeare Company have been working with Intel and Imaginarium Studios on a new production of The Tempest that uses technology to blur the line between reality and the digital. This piece briefly explores why The Tempest has been so attractive to film-makers over the past century.

On 28^th December 1895 Georges Méliès, a Parisian magician, sat in amazement at what he was witnessing.^[1] He was attending a demonstration of the Lumière brother’s new invention: the cinématographe. It was a machine that allowed both the recording and the projection of moving images. In a darkened room at the Salon des Indien, the audience were transfixed, especially Méliès, who instantly saw the potential of this new machine: ‘We were positively stupefied. I immediately said “That’s the thing for me…an extraordinary trick!”’ The films that were projected onto a makeshift screen can only be described as short documentaries – workers leaving a factory, a locomotive arriving at a station – but Méliès recognised the creative and imaginative potential of this new medium.^[2] He would eventually go on to use cinema he said ‘not for the servile reproduction of nature, but for its spectacular expression of artistic and creative ideas of all kinds.’^[3] Soon after, Méliès built his own camera and the world’s first film studio and set about making his own idiosyncratic films which would incorporate special effects with traditional theatre techniques that evoked a ‘dreamlike atmosphere’[4] and an ‘unreal world wholly obedient to the whims of the imagination’.^[5] Through cinema Méliès had, like Shakespeare’s Prospero three hundred years earlier, created and discovered his own ‘rough magic’.[6]

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In this fascinating post, Jannat Ahmed, an MA student in English Literature at Cardiff University, asks us to think about a new kind of poetry… 

In our digital age, are tweets a new form of poetry? This is a question I have asked myself after seeing how people engage with specific types of posts on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. While tweets themselves have their own restrictions (their 140 characters, interestingly, can remind us of the restrictive 14 lines in a sonnet, for example), it is not the straightforward 140 character restriction of a tweet that I correspond with an idea of poetry, but another kind of post prevalent on social platforms that offers poetic engagement: Having gathered force for several years as MSN Messenger statuses, the phenomena of inspirational quotes and narrative posts has found its way onto all kinds of social media channels.

From stories about real people on the “Humans of New York” page on Facebook to @PoemsPorn on Twitter, today the poetry and stories consumed by the world are comprised of short quotations and screenshots that evidently speak to, and resonate with, people. Comparing the personal impact and function of modern day quotation/narrative posts with the social importance and function of poetry from poets like Pope, Montagu and Shelley, I ask whether it is possible to start thinking seriously about these new genres of writing (or rewriting?) produced through the new medium of the digital.
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