My name is Torsten and I am a historian by training (specifically early modern English history). I have been working with digital humanities projects for over a decade, initially focussing on electronic publications, databases and websites for historians. Currently, I am responsible for the www.arts-humanities.net project hosted at the Centre for e-Research at King's College London.

I will be giving a paper with Dot Porter on The Development of a Shared Taxonomy for the Digital Arts and Humanities. Through this project we are building a way to classify activities in the digital arts and humanities - to make it easier to feature activities and resources and to help the community to keep up-to-date and learn from the experiences of others.

Another project I am involved in will also be feature at the conference: The UK Network of Expert Centres. The Network is a collaboration of centres with expertise in digital arts and humanities research and scholarship. Its aims are to: advocate, promote and raise awareness and understanding of the use of ICT in research and scholarship in arts and humanities (broadly defined); take the lead in the use of digital methods and resources for arts and humanities; research and scholarship; develop and exchange expertise, knowledge, standards and best practices; identify and represent the needs of the research community; conduct dialogue with relevant stakeholders.

While this is a long sentence, the Network is really about finding ways to support the community, i.e. you! We are also thinking about infrastructure and the taxonomy of methods mentioned above may very well play a role in the Network's activities too. So as you can see, infrastructure for learning and research is getting more important for me. I am currently also involved in a JISC-funded study to scope out the international landscape of Virtual Research Environments - http://www.vrelandscape.net/

I'll be attending my first DRHA in Belfast. I've recently started working in the Centre for e-Research (CeRCH) at King's College, London. I'm a librarian by background, and have specialised in digital libraries for most of my career, particularly in the area of metadata, which is my primary area of responsibility here at CeRCH. I've been working since I started at King's on the Historical Hansards project, for which I'm currently devising a generic XML schema for the encoding of parliamentary proceedings. I've also been doing some work on the East London Theatre Archive which is very much like the digital collections I used to manage at Oxford (I used to work for the Oxford Digital Library). I'm looking forward to hearing about your projects, and to catching up with some old friends, in Belfast.

I'm Dot Porter, and I'm the Metadata Manager at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin. I provide recommendations on metadata for DHO-internal projects (such as our DRAPIer database and Fedora repository), and also consult on projects across Ireland. Prior to coming to Ireland (in October 2008) I was for six years Program Coordinator at the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky. I'm trained as a medievalist (Anglo-Saxon studies) and a librarian, and have worked on many projects in digital medieval studies and digital classics. My research interests focus on issues of contextualization and collaboration in the digitization of text-bearing cultural heritage objects, and in their editing, publication, and use by both scholarly and general audiences. This will be my first DRHA and I'm looking forward to it!

I am James Gerard Raphael Cronin from University College Cork. I am on this year’s DRHA programme committee. In Cork, I am a programme co-ordinator in Adult Continuing Education and I have also been a member of History of Art since it began in University College Cork in 2001. I have written on a range of diverse topics from Medieval art and iconography to the roles learning technologies play in higher education. Most recently, I contributed to Carla R. Payne (Ed.). (2009). Information technology and constructivism in higher education: Progressive learning frameworks. Hershey and New York: Information Science Reference. ISBN 978-1-60566-654-9. I believe that the challenge we face as educators (be we academics, librarians, administrators or technicians) is how best to equip our students for an increasingly complex information society precisely at a time when critically evaluating information is seen as a central mark of being educated. Clearly, the speed and availability of information technology means that students have greater access to information than ever before, but can educators assume that students know how to pick their way through the mass of content in a discerning, critical, and ethical manner? These are issues I will be discussing in my paper: Too much information: why facilitate media literacy?

I'm Daisy Abbott and I've got a background in the digital arts, specifically performing arts and the creation and use of digital data. I've fairly recently moved to a new position at teh Digital Design Studio at Glasgow School of Art (http://www.gsa.ac.uk/researchandpostgraduate/content/default...) where we're doing lots of digital projects involving 3d visualisation such as the virtual patient http://www.medicalvisualisation.co.uk/ and capturing digital documentation of world heritage sites: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/23/mount-rush...

So I'm interested in developing my knowledge of data creation and management in the 3d visualisation field, and finding out more about innovative uses of 3d data for conservation/research/creative purposes.

Hi all.

I am coming from Trinity College Dublin.
More precisely, my academic home is the School of Computer Science and Statistics.
I am (originally) mathematician (of sorts).
But my (other) passion is humanities in all its manifestations.

The subject of my recent work is something I am calling
the "Digital re-Discovery of Culture" with specific focus on
the idea of a "Game of Inquiry"
by which one gets to know oneself, the other, through medium of "culture".

It took a while to think up the title of our paper/presentation:
"Culture seen, Culture experienced, Culture rediscovered"

Mihal Orela

post scriptum: I tried to use pic above for my "personal picture"
conforming to size 85x85 and in my case 24KB.
Tried several times...

Hi, I'm Paul Ell, director of the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen's Belfast. I'm one of the three main organisers of this year's DRHA Conference with Susan Schreibman (DHO) and Kirsti Bohata (Swansea University). Queen's is delighted to host the first DRHA conference to be held outside Britain. We've got an exceptionally strong and vibrant programme that I'm sure all will find rewarding. As you will know selected papers drawn from the conference will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing which I co-edit. We've based, and will be basing, several issues of the Journal around key national and international conferences and, reviewing the programme, the DRHA issue will be particularly strong.

In terms of my own research interests and background, I joined Queen's in 1993 after completing post-doc work at Leicester University. I became founding director of the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis in 1999. I've a first degree in History and Geography, an MA in English Local History and a PhD in historical geography. My Centre's activities closely match my own research interested. These are:

The development of strategic e-resources in Britain, Ireland and North America. I've been involved in many digitisation projects focussing on work that forms the foundation of scholars' research.

The use of new methodologies in digital humanities. In particular I'm interested in Geographical Information Systems and have increasingly worked on 'Humanities GIS' with an emphasis on geographies of non-quantitative sources. I also think that Grid Computing and e-Science have a vital role in the Humanities and Arts in terms of managing and drawing upon the large body of disparate resources that already exist.

The use of e-resources developed in scholarship, so much of my published work draws on our own datasets. This work largely falls within historical geography, visualisation, and census sources.

I look forward to meeting with you in a couple of weeks at the conference.

Hi, I am Francesca Benatti. I am a Research Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. This is my first DRHA and I will be presenting a paper based on my experience of teaching a Digital Humanities course to the students of a structured PhD programme. I hope to meet other digital humanities educators with whom to discuss how to teach digital humanities, what to teach and why.
I am also working with the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive in UCD http://www.ucd.ie/ivrla/ to promote the use of their collections in teaching and research.
My background is mostly in book history, specifically 19th-century periodicals. I also still work with the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive, NUI Galway, for whom I am (slowly) editing some of Moore's prose writings.

Hi, I'm Michal Měchura. I'm an IT consultant and I work mostly for Fiontar, an Irish-language teaching and research unit in Dublin City University. My background is in computational linguistics, in software localization and generally in anything where IT and languages overlap. For the last couple of years I've been working as a technical director (and now an external consultant) on focal.ie (the Irish National Terminology Database) and logainm.ie (the Placenames Database of Ireland). One of the cool things I'm working on at the moment is a new mapping interface for the placenames database.

Most of my work involves building databases and websites. I guess there's nothing special about that except that the data I work with is mostly from the humanities. I just think that building a database of placenames is more fun than building a database of, say, financial data or something like that.

I like to think that we in Fiontar have been working in digital humanities long before the term became popular in Ireland, and before we even heard of the term ourselves. But since the DHO has been founded I have come to realize that we are not alone! I'm looking forward to meeting people with similar interests in Belfast, to learning what other people have done and to sharing my own experience. See you next week!

Hello all,
I'm working for UHI Millenium Institute (University of the Highlands & Islands) developing a networked drama degree which will be delivered through a mix of blended and online working, in which the cohort spread across the miles functions as one creative community. This is my first DRHA conference and this will probably be the UK's first networked drama degree.

I started out in TIE as an actor/teacher and then became a theatre historian, in the course of which, in 1987, I started my Ph.D. at Glasgow University as one of only two Arts researchers then using the University's mainframe computer (ICL 3980 - it looked like a laundrette). I was using a basic programme (Famulus77) to sort information taken from 5,000 nineteenth century playbills, which allowed me to deconstruct the repertoire, reveal hidden patterns and even build basic 3-d statistical models from the results.

It was huge fun, but being a generalist in employment terms other things then intervened. Over twenty years later, in July I found myself at 4am, sitting in my fluffy slippers in Invergordon, taking a beginner's movement workshop in the 'Theatron' SecondLife Piran Round site, for a group of Australasian drama lecturers at ADSA09 in Perth, Australia. This was also fun and intriguing and technically challenging in about equal measure.

I'll try to carry on working with students from anywhere who want to explore performance in SL, because I have a particular interest in the relationship between the student performer and their avatar/s; however, my immediate challenge is the BA Drama degree and designing a way of working that both supports and challenges students, and tutors, and enhances their creativity as well as their employability.

I'm looking forward to exchanging ideas with folk at DRHA and hope to be able to convey something of what we're intending to achieve across the Highlands & Islands.

good wishes,
Barbara Bell.