Photo by Bob Bronshoff
Abstract: A city’s cultural industries are a major factor in its economic durability and the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Successful urban agglomerations, such as the city of Amsterdam, are marked by the concentration of artists, performers, and knowledge workers – cultural production contributes to a city’s overall capacity for innovation and competition. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun to explore this dynamic. Thus far, however, they have struggled to explain the correlation between the micro level of cultural interaction and the macro level of a Creative City’s economic and social success. Many factors complicate any urban setting’s spatial and historical fabric. Where are the creative entrepreneurs located? How do they communicate, interact, collaborate, and compete? How do their products find their ways to the consumers? And how do they turn the city into a magnet for other innovators? In the research program Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective, located at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity, scholars from the humanities and computer science collaborate in using data on the various cultural sectors of Amsterdam with digital methods to investigate how cultural industries have shaped Amsterdam’s unique position in a European and global context, from the 17th century until the present day. A central focus of the CREATE program is the building of the Amsterdam Time Machine (ATM): a hub for navigating linked historical data on Amsterdam. This web of information on people, places, relationships, events, and objects will unfold in time and space through geographical and 3D representations. In this “Google Earth for the past”, users can go back and forth between the city as a whole, specific neighborhoods, streets, or houses, and even zoom in on the pictures that adorned the walls of for instance merchants and regents. The systematic linkage of datasets from heterogeneous sources allows users to ask new questions on, for instance, cultural events, everyday life, social relations, or the use of public space in the city of Amsterdam. As such, it allows scholars to connect specific objects, persons or places to the level of broader social processes in the city as a whole – functioning as a microscope and telescope in one. Such a research environment, in which space is chosen as the point of view, offers an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the relationship between the physical and social space in relation to how it was organized and experienced over time. In this lecture I present the design and architecture of the Amsterdam Time Machine, and illustrate its research potential by discussing examples of recent research projects on the history of Amsterdam as a creative city.

Biography : Julia Noordegraaf is professor of Digital Heritage in the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is director of the Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity (ACHI), one of the university’s research priority areas, where she leads the digital humanities research program Creative Amsterdam (CREATE) that studies the history of urban creativity using digital data and methods. Noordegraaf’s research focuses on the preservation and reuse of audiovisual and digital heritage. She has published, amongst others, the monograph Strategies of Display (2004/2012) and, as principal editor, Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art (2013) and acts as principal editor of the Cinema Context database on Dutch film culture. She currently leads research projects on the conservation of digital art (in the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie ITN project NACCA) and on the reuse of digital heritage in data-driven historical research (besides CREATE in the Amsterdam Data Science Research project Perspectives on Data Quality and the new, NWO funded project Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research). She is a former fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and acts as board member for Media Studies in CLARIAH, the national infrastructure for digital humanities research, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO. Noordegraaf currently coordinates the realization of the Amsterdam Time Machine and participates as Steering Committee member in the European Time Machine project that aims to build a simulator for 5.000 years of European history.

Related URLs:
http://www.uva.nl/profiel/n/o/j.j.noordegraaf/j.j.noordegraaf.html
https://twitter.com/jjnoordegraaf
http://achi.uva.nl/
http://www.create.humanities.uva.nl/
http://timemachineproject.eu/

Abstract: Digital Humanities, and by extension digital humanists, tend towards a culture of open access, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a maker ethos. These disciplinary values position the digital humanities for high impact reaching beyond disciplinary boundaries into more public fora. One might argue that this public-facing ethos is a natural extension of web-based scholarship. Yet, simply putting resources on the web does not necessarily engage the public or publics they wish to reach. The model still used by the majority of digital humanities projects is that a small team designs and creates the resource, and when it is ‘finished’ (or at least ready for others to view) it is made public.
This talk will focus on a different model, that of participatory design, which involves the public, that is, anybody who might benefit from our scholarship, in the research process. Participatory Engagement projects provide us with opportunities to rethink our roles as researchers and as educators, about our obligations to those in society who have not had the same opportunities as we have, and how to build meaningful, socially relevant, digital collections for our own and future generations. This talk will explore the philosophy, mechanics, and value of designing digital scholarship within a participatory model.

Biography: Susan Schreibman is Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Maynooth University, Ireland. Dr Schreibman has published and lectured widely in digital humanities and Irish poetic modernism. Her current digital projects include Letters 1916-1923 and Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge. Her publications include A New Companion to Digital Humanities (2015), Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal (2013), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008), and A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004). She is the founding Editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative and is a member of the Board of the National Library of Ireland.