November 21, 2019, by Erin Snyder

DTH Director’s Update: Autumn 2019

The start of term for 2019 has flown by, and I’m writing this welcome to the semester rather later than I meant to be—but my tardiness doesn’t reflect the swift start the DTH has had.

We’ve had a lovely intake of student volunteers this year, including some returning faces, and in the first weeks of term everybody got signed up to work on projects, introduced to the equipment and software in the DTH, and our digitisation teams have participated in a workshop with Manuscripts and Special Collections.

We’re running a grand total of six student projects at the moment, ranging from digitising newspaper and slide archives, to digital marketing, to developing 360 video exhibitions and working on a Virtual Reality project with our current Leonardo Fellow, Ryan Heath. All our volunteers also get invited to two specially-tailored workshops with the Careers service, and our marketing team will be having a workshop in December with our very own Faculty of Arts marketing gurus.

I’m very proud of the skills and expertise that our volunteers gain in their time with us, and also of the support we can give them in turning these into opportunities for their future. However, the DTH is also looking more broadly across the Faculty, and considering how we can best support innovative use of digital methods throughout Arts. We’re working with various colleagues in the University on ongoing initiatives (more as these come to fruition), and also held a workshop on “Student-Made Videos”, where colleagues who’ve assigned video assessments met and shared their experiences over tea and biscuits. It’s generated some exciting ideas, and we’ll continue to explore in this space.

Finally, the DTH is supporting the University of Nottingham in an ongoing trial of Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab. We’re developing workshops to introduce the analytical tools of the Scholar Lab to our academic community, and we look forward to seeing the ways in which our colleagues make use of these in research and teaching! These workshops will sit alongside our long-standing and wide-ranging series of workshops on Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities for academic staff and research students.

As ever, there’s lots of exciting stuff going on at the Hub. Anyone in the Faculty of Arts can drop by A24 in Humanities 10-4 during term time to have a chat about what we’re up to, and how we can support teaching, learning, and research using our equipment and expertise.

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