Digital Humanities at Oxford
Oxford University has played a major national and international role in the development and use of digital tools and resources for research in the humanities.
Starting in the 1970s with the Oxford Concordance Program and the Oxford Text Archive, the various parts of the Humanities Division, the libraries, museums and computing service, and now the Oxford e-Research Centre, have been host to a wide and important range of research or development projects using advanced ICT methods for the humanities. The number of such projects is probably the largest, certainly one of the largest, in the UK.
In collaboration with all these parties, the Oxford e-Research Centre is currrently developing a suite of web-pages that will collect together systematic information about facilities and activities in the digital humanities at Oxford. These will be divided into projects, people, support services and events (including training). Projects and people will be connected by links, and will be searchable by ICT methodologies and subject areas.
The purpose of these web-pages is to support researchers, promote collaboration and exchange, provide a detailed basis for planning, and raise the internal and external profile of digital humanities activities. We will also now be able to develop these pages into a full virtual support system for Oxford humanities researchers using ICT, as a result of an extension of the JISC-funded Virtual Research Environment project for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts, hosted at Oxford e-Research Centre (VRE-SDM): see
http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM
The pages will be made available as the information is collected and checked. Oxford e-Research Centre will then use them as the basis for planning further ICT-related activties and events in the humanities, in collaboration as appropriate with other parts of the university.
We have also started a Digital Humanities mailing list for humanities researchers at the University of Oxford who are interested in the use of ICT. To subscribe, send a blank email to digitalhumanities-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Oxford e-Research Centre has other major humanities interests: in addition to VRE-SDM, it hosts the e-Science and Ancient Documents project funded by the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC e-Science Initiative, and the Oxford end of the EC-funded CLARIN and DARIAH humanities research infrastructure projects.