March 8, 2016, by Matt Davies

DHC Volunteer Projects 2016: The Digital Archivists.

Readers of this blog will know that besides working shifts in the Digital Humanities Centre helping out users, the DHC volunteers also work on projects over the course of the academic year. These tend to be themed around aspects of the DHC; digitisation, digital imaging, archiving and digital marketing. They provide the volunteers with work experience, essential digital and transferable skills and networking opportunities.  As we are now past the half way point for this academic year we thought it about time we updated you with a series of blogs on the projects that the volunteers have been working on and where they see them going next. This week we look at two volunteers who are each working on a digitisation project with a Classical theme.

The Independent Second Year Project (ISYP) Digital Archive.

History finalist Rhiannon Compton is in her second year of volunteering in DHC and has been working with long-time DHC collaborator Dr Lynn Fotheringham to build up a searchable digital archive of the student work produced over a number of years on the Classics department’s Independent Second Year Project  module (ISYP). This is a multi-faceted project providing Rhiannon with an all-round insight into the world of digital archiving. Besides digitising the work –using camera, copystand, and a variety of scanners– she has collated relevant information about the content and the technical details of its digitisation in the form of search terms and metadata. This has been associated and uploaded with the images to the DHC’s Portfolio software creating a searchable digital image database. Rhiannon’s hard work has ensured that course work from several recent years will be stored in the database by the time she graduates in the summer so that the project can be continued by future volunteers and the database updated, maintained and made available for Classics staff and students.

The Classical Theatre Memorabilia Digital Archive.

Dr Fotheringham is also the director of the University’s Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception (CADRE) and has been working with Culture, Film & Media finalist Kate Mendez to create a digital archive of theatre memorabilia from modern productions relating to ancient drama and the ancient world. This is a new project that began late 2015 and Kate’s main priority so far has been scanning and processing currently held material. The next stage will involve turning the scans into digital books, creating a digital archive, and researching the copyright ramifications of making them available online. It is hoped that the project will then be broadened to draw in members of the public, record their experiences of Classical theatre productions and capture the ephemera they may have collected. This fascinating project and resultant archive will generate research on the relationship between academic and public responses to the Ancient world.

If you interested in finding out more about these projects, getting involved or indeed you have a project that you would like to propose to the DHC please contact manager Matt Davies at digitalhumanities@nottingham.ac.uk

 

 

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