SCGMA

Digital Humanities Conference

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 | Conferences, News

If the conference this past week at Barnard College (June 16-17, 2010) is any indication, medievalists are leading the way in the field of digital humanities.  Illustrating this phenomenon, John Unsworth (Dean of Library and Information Science at Illinois) gave a plenary entitled, “Why have medievalists been early adopters of digital technology, and what can others learn from them?

The conference brought together participants from all over the world– a quick glance shows papers from the US, Canada, Wales, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Switzerland.

Many of the papers focused on specific projects, like the Anglo-Norman online dictionary and the Global Chant Database project.  Others dealt with teaching topics such as using GIS in teaching and research.  Even work on very specific topics still managed to provoke ideas for use in other areas.  Some of the projects that I found most exciting for SCGMA included the Digital Mappaemundi Resource at Drew University, using GIS in research (also from Drew University), and an interactive platform to teach medieval language that is currently under development by Serina Patterson of the University of British Columbia.  The GIS project uses a tool called Simile from MIT (http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/), a tool that should prove useful for the Discoveries of the Americas project under the SCGMA umbrella.  Once the map is in place, users can add data and comment on specific spots.   The digital mappaemundi project (http://bob.drew.edu/mappaemundi/) is an ambitious plan to digitize many medieval maps, which should prove invaluable to understanding how some medieval people envisioned the world.  Finally, the language learning site, while very much at the beginning stages, is exciting for the social networking model that it employs.

Again, however, every session offered something valuable to the digital humanist, especially digital medievalists.  An excellent conference!

Tags: Conferences, Digital Humanities, maps

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