Posts tagged: trip-report

These are some rough notes from what I thought was an interesting keynote from Melissa Terras, Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, at this year's BL Labs Symposium. Melissa has a blog: Adventures in Digital Cultural Heritage and a recommended book: Defining Digital Humanities Melissa started by asserting that reuse of digital cultural heritage data is still rare, and that preservation of such data is problematic. Of the content digitised in the National Lottery Fund's New Opportunities programme around the turn of the Millennium, ~60% of the content digitised then is no longer available now. [continues...]

I attended EDINA's Geoforum 2014, described as: ... a free all day event aimed at lecturers, researchers and support staff who promote and support the use of geo-services at their institution. I came along primarily to learn more about the services that my own organisation, EDINA, provides in this space. These are my notes from the day - I had to dip in and out of parts of the day to deal with other things so my notes are quite selective - my aim is to give a flavour of the day. [continues...]

Last week I attended an event, organised by BL Labs working with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the British Library's Centre for Conservation. The event, described as a showcase event for British Library Labs and AHRC Digital Transformations, consisted of a packed series of presentations - I won't describe them all (and I missed Bill Thompson's talk anyway) but will, instead, pull out some snippets which interested me in particular. [continues...]

I've been at the excellent JISC CNI Meeting in Edinburgh these last two days. Lots of interesting work being described and met some great new people. Some people have asked me to post my slides, so here they are: JISC CNI Meeting, Edinburgh 2010 from Paul Walk

I have just spent an interesting and inspiring 24 hours at the JISC Rapid Innovation Programme meeting, which was organised by UKOLN (disclaimer: I work for UKOLN), and funded through the JISC-funded IE Demonstrator project. The venue chosen for the event was certainly an unusual one - the City of Manchester Stadium, home of Manchester City Football Club. I thought the venue worked very well for this event and would recommend it. [continues...]

Since I joined UKOLN two years ago, I have frequently claimed that we ( JISC, the sector, our community) don't do enough to support and listen to developers. Well, I'm just back from The Developers Happiness Days (dev8D) in London and I can certainly no longer say this. A solid week of developer happiness! A week of ideas generated, geeks networking with users, competitive and yet collaborative development, knowledge being exchanged. [continues...]

Yesterday I went along to Mashed Library UK 2008 in London. Quickly abbreviated to 'mashlib', the event was the brain-child of Owen Stephens. Owen did most of the organising, aided by David Flanders who provided the space at BirkBeck college, and our excellent events team at UKOLN. The event was sponsored by UKOLN, using funding from the JISC. I thought the balance of activities on the day was excellent - a healthy mixture of short presentations, demonstrations and a good amount of hands-on hacking. [continues...]

I was invited to my first JISC Innovation Forum which took place over Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and was held in Keele University. Apart from a smattering of light duties - a couple of meetings, helping to 'referee' a session (more later) and taking turns to staff the joint UKOLN / CETIS / OSS Watch / TechWatch stand, I was free to get stuck into the real business of this event which was, for me at least, learning & networking. [continues...]

I was pleased to be invited by Brian Fuchs to a 'Million Books Workshop' at Imperial College, London last Friday. A fascinating day, in the company of what was, for me, an unusual group of 20-30 linguists, classical scholars and computer scientists. The morning session consisted of three presentations (following an introduction from Gregory Crane which I missed thanks to the increasingly awful transport system between London and the South West) which brought us up to speed with some advances in OCR, computer aided text analysis and translation, and classification. [continues...]

I very much enjoyed the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007 last week. Being new to many of the disciplines covered there, I went with an open mind. I learned a bewildering amount, and realised that there are all kinds of opportunities for aligning my professional interests with those of many from the e-science communities. Some small, specific points: Being more used to conferences in the e-Learning an web-development worlds, I was struck by the ratio of women to men. [continues...]

Day 3 kicked off with a really impressive keynote on 'Medical Visualisation between 2D Images' from Professor Anders Ynnerman. CT scanning is developing to the point where the volume of data returned from a scan of a human body is difficult to manage and process. Various strategies are being developed to reduce the amount of data which must be analysed from a typical scan before the analysis and visualisation processes are invoked. [continues...]

I've travelled to Nottingham, to the East Midlands Conference Centre, to attend the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007. With my academic background being rooted predominately in the humanities, I'm looking forward to immersing myself for the next 4 days in a very different set of disciplines. I'm also wondering what chance I have of getting the conference dinner, scheduled for Wednesday evening, moved to a bar showing the England v Russia match. [continues...]

A night spent in a fairly modern but spartan student university hall - all aluminium staircases and orange walls (Frederique of JISC described it as the 'EasyJet' of student acommodation). I kept waking up wondering why I hadn't been woken up by Harvey.... And so to the main auditorium, for the first plenary session. The auditorium had been dressed up in a way that reminded me of the launch venue for some new corporate venture - complete with a background of cheesy, dated rock music. [continues...]

(Note - For the purposes of this post, I'll be using the quasi-conventional shorthand of RL to mean 'real life', as opposed to SL meaning 'Second Life'.) Just got back from the Eduserv Symposium 2007 in London. An interesting event which, however you cut it, became essentially a review of the relevance or otherwise of Second Life to education, despite the title of the conference suggesting virtual worlds in general. Andy Powell (host, and Director of Development, Eduserv Foundation), quite reasonably cited the 'Hoover' example, where a generic product becomes labeled by its most successful or well-known brand. [continues...]

Just got back from the Sun 'Tech Day' in London. I thought the line up of sponsors was interesting - aside from Sun, the sponsors were: Oracle, Nokia, Motorola, Macromedia and Novell. Oracle and Novell's presence is no surprise - they bought into Java wholesale some time ago and Macromedia have made a strong foray into J2EE, describe their 'MX' product-line as 'accelerating Java development'. The interesting thing to me was that out of five sponsors, two were 'phone' manufacturers, demonstrating new wireless devices and the tools and specifications needed to write applications for them. [continues...]