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Posts tagged ‘conference’

Oct 15

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Reflections on Making ‘Big Data’ Human

By Emily Ward @1066unicorn and Carys Brown @HistoryCarys

If there was one thing that the Making Big Data Human conference made clear, it was that ‘Big Data’, and indeed digital methodologies in general, provide some very exciting opportunities to advance historical research. From the ambitious and wide-ranging National Archives’ Traces Through Time project, which looks to create a generic method to look at historical individuals across enormous datasets, through to the more specific but equally exciting Casebooks Project, the conference participants were treated to a feast of ideas about how historical methods are adapting to the changing nature of data in a digital age.

But what exactly is ‘big data’, and what did the Doing History in Public team have in mind when we decided to explore how we could make it ‘human’? The basic definition of ‘big data’ is ‘extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally’.[1] For historians this might, as Jane Winters demonstrated in her keynote lecture, be a case of using the archived web as an historical source, or of exploring parliamentary proceedings from three different countries over a period of more than 200 years.

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Mar 17

To ask or not to ask: that is the question

By Emily Ward, @1066unicorn

Palms sweating, mouth dry, heart pounding in my chest, my thoughts racing. I realise that I’m going to do it. Tentatively I gather my courage, swallow down the fear and start to raise my hand. Hand up, there’s no going back; I’m spotted and heads turn my way. Eyes on me, I open my mouth. Barely formulated sentences tumble out. I wait. Then clearly I have made enough sense that the watching eyes turn forward again. I have just asked my first question at a history conference.* Read more

May 5

The Media in History and History in the Media, 20th-21st March 2014 (Part 2)

by Alex Campsie

Alex Campsie is a PhD student in modern British political and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge.

The first half of the conference (read Part 1 here), stylishly opened by Professor David Reynolds and the able presenters of panel one, raised a number of important questions for further discussion. What are the media processes which enable cultural formation and the diffusion of information? Who can claim to control the means of cultural production? In what ways have instruments of the media been used and abused throughout history? And how our modes of communicating with each other changed across the centuries?

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May 1

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The Media in History and History in the Media Conference, 20th-21st March 2014 (Part 1)

by Alex Campsie

Alex Campsie is a PhD student in modern British political and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge.

Last month saw Cambridge host an inaugural ‘European Graduate Conference’ on the broad theme of ‘History and the Media’. Like its sister event (entitled ‘History and the Law’), the project was generously funded by the History Faculty with the very worthy aim of bringing together young researchers from across Europe to discuss their work. Our natty palindromic title hoped to attract both discussions of the role the media has played within history, and meditations on how new medias may be impacting our contemporary practice of the discipline.

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Mar 20

Conference: ‘The Media in History and History in the Media’

by Janine Noack

On March 21/22 the conference “The Media in History and History in the Media” took place Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College. Around 20 participants from European Universities discussed their research in the area of Media History and possibilities for historians to interact with the in different panels. The conference report will be published soon! David Reynolds gave keynote speech. Follow the link for the program:

History and the Media Programme

We tweeted about the conference using #dohistory.

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Mar 17

Academic conferences – why do we go?

by Joan Redmond

A few weekends ago, I found myself in sunny Bristol, sitting in the back seat of a very gruff taxi-driver’s cab on my way to Trinity College. Why, you ask? I was bound for the Ecclesiastical History Society Postgraduate Colloquium, an annual event that brings together postgraduates working on all aspects of church history.

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