Monthly Archives: March 2015

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COST Digital Humanities Conference: Reassembling the Republic of Letters

UPDATE 16/03/2015: Registration now closed. Watch this space for news of the new COST website.

We are delighted to announce that limited spaces for members of the public have now been released for the forthcoming conference of the COST Action ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’! We’d love to see you there!

Conference: Reassembling the Republic of Letters, COST Action Digital Humanities Conference
Date: 12pm Sunday 22nd – Monday 23rd March 2015
Location: St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Registration fee: £16
Registration: http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=5&catid=425
Programme: COST_Conference-Programme_22-23March2015

In order for non-Action members to attend the conference, you must sign up via the link above by Friday 13th March 2015 and must pay the mandatory refreshments fee of £16 to cover lunches and refreshments. You are welcome to purchase the Sunday conference dinner or Monday buffet dinner, and limited accommodation at St Anne’s is also available – please purchase asap via the link above. Please indicate on the registration form if you are not intending to stay for both days, however, the refreshments fee is a subsided flat rate for all delegates, regardless of whether attending for the full 1 1/2 days. Additional accommodation options can be found at http://www.universityrooms.com/en/city/oxford/home.

As of March 2015, 30 countries have joined the COST Action, and over 70 representatives from the fields of history, literature, archival study, digital humanities, IT, librarianship, editing, and design will be gathering in Oxford for the network event. Come and join the conversation!

Further details on the COST network: Between 1500 and 1800, the evolution of postal communications enhanced the capacity of ordinary men and women to scatter correspondence across and beyond Europe. This epistolary exchange helped knit together an imagined community known to contemporaries as the ‘republic of letters’, an international, knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, and formative of many of modern Europe’s values and institutions. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. The key insight of this project is that the ongoing revolution in digital communications can provide a fresh solution to the scholarly problems created by the previous evolution of postal communications. This project is therefore dedicated to designing open-access and open-source digital infrastructure capable of facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly methods and research questions.

Further details on the event: This multi-faceted event combines Working Group meetings and a public-facing two-day conference, with the aim of providing all participants with a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of current developments relevant to the network. Running alongside these, a digital humanities Training School will induct newcomers into the current state of the field. The conference is composed of a series of brief ‘flash presentations’, which present problems or developing solutions relevant to some of the key items in each Working Group’s agenda. Please see the conference programme above.

Please note that members of the public can only attend the Conference (i.e. 12pm on Sunday 22nd to the end of Monday 23rd), and not the Training School or Action meetings.

Please direct any queries to cost[at]history.ox.ac.uk.

Update! We’re hiring a new Administrator and a Digital Project Manager

CofK and COST Administrator

UPDATE! 10.03.2015: We are delighted to announce that a post is now available for a part-time administrator (0.6 FTE), working on Cultures of Knowledge and the COST Action network ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters‘. Do you have administrative and finance experience? Would you like to work with a dedicated and friendly team on two major digital history projects? Then take a look at the further details and apply here!

Digital Project Manager

We are excited to announce that we are seeking a full-time project manager for Cultures of Knowledge, tenable from April 2015 to March 2017. Do you love early modern letters? Are you passionate about the possibilities of the digital humanities in our connected world? We’d love to hear from you!

This is a unique opportunity to help lead one of Oxford University’s largest and most exciting digital humanities projects. As Digital Project Manager of Cultures of Knowledge, you will coordinate the development of our flagship union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), liaising between our technical and editorial teams and helping to coordinate our expanding community of contributors.

EMLO collaborates with a growing range of individual scholars, projects, editions, publishers, and repositories in order to bring together many tens of thousands of records on early modern learned correspondence, allowing manuscript, print, and digital resources to be cross-searched in a single, central, open-access, online catalogue. Further, by standardising huge quantities of person, place, and letter records, we are opening up unprecedented opportunities for analysing, visualising, and exploring early modern letters and the international intellectual networks documented by them.

The Project Manager anchors a vital role at the very centre of this project. Reporting to Project Director Professor Howard Hotson, and supported by a part-time administrator, the successful candidate will ensure that all aspects of Cultures of Knowledge are delivered on time, on spec, and on budget. You will be an excellent communicator with superb organizational skills and a higher degree relating to the early modern period, the digital humanities, or project management. No specialist technical or coding skills are required, but you will have some understanding of, and a keen interest in, the use of digital technologies in humanistic research. You will be able to juggle competing priorities, and represent the project with enthusiasm and dedication.

As the current post holder I can tell you that this is a fascinating and stimulating position, working alongside fantastic people – if you are passionate about the digital, the historical, or the editorial (ideally all three!), and have excellent organizational and people skills, then please do apply!

Further particulars can be downloaded from the University website. Please address any queries to the current Project Manager, Dr Lizzy Williamson (elizabeth.williamson[at]history.ox.ac.uk). To apply, please submit a supporting statement and CV on the University website, to arrive not later than 12.00 noon (GMT) on 8th April 2015.