Trinity Long Room Hub Director – ‘Irish Government policy has nurtured the growth of Digital Humanities’
The 2nd edition of the Digital Humanities Austria Conference – dha2015 is taking place this week in Vienna at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Trinity Long Room Hub Director Jane Ohlmeyer delivered the keynote address on the opening day of the conference on Our Digital Journey: A Scholarly Perspective.
The DHA Conference which commenced on the 30 November, was initiated with a welcome by representatives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and the ACDH Institute. Professor Ohlmeyer’s talk took the audience through the development of Digital Humanities in Ireland over the past decade from a variety of perspectives. Professor Ohlmeyer emphasised the importance of DARIAH, the European research infrastructure for Digital Humanities, in establishing a pan European infrastructure to support individual humanities researchers across Europe.
Digital Humanities is one of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s priority themes and Trinity College has built up significant capabilities in Digital Humanities area over the past 10 years. Professor Ohlmeyer, during her talk, looked at how the Irish government policy and funding has nurtured the growth of Digital Humanities, particularly with the development of graduate programmes and interactions with SMEs and industry.
Professor Ohlmeyer draws on her extensive experience of working with EU policy makers, on programmes such as ESFRI and DARIAH and with the Irish government and funding agencies where she is currently the chair of the Irish Research Council. Professor Ohlmeyer has worked closely with the Universities - in Trinity she helped the establishment of Trinity’s Digital Humanities programme and she has been an active practitioner of Digital Humanities. Trinity College Dublin is project lead in a 4-year, European Commission funded project, the Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI) comprised of a partnership of 14 institutions across 8 countries. It brings together historians, computer scientists and information scientists to deliver a digital research infrastructure for historical researchers.
Professor Ohlmeyer spoke of how technology can prove transformative in humanities research from the perspective of the scholar. One of her major Digital Humanities projects is the 1641 depositions which is a fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials. The 1641 Depositions are witness testimonies mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion.
The Conference, which ends today also looked at social and technological Innovations towards traditional research methods, provided an insight into the work of the Digital Humanities Research Centre Innsbruck as well as a discussion and ‘hands on’ session of semantic web tools.
For more information on Digital Humanities at Trinity please click here
Contact: Aoife King, Communications Officer |Trinity Long Room Hub | aoife.king@tcd.ie | 01 896 3895