Research Software Engineer James Misson writes...

On the 4^th and 5^th of September the Digital Humanities Congress was held in Sheffield, where the University of Sheffield continues to affirm its reputation as a hub for all things DH. The conference was a testament to the wide scope of DH methods, as well as researchers' abilities to adopt cutting edge technology to further our knowledge of human culture.

A common theme that emerged between papers was the application of machine learning to historical linguistics. Kate Wild, from the Oxford English Dictionary, shared the initial stages of the Oxford Corpus of Historical English, which will unite a vast amount of linguistic data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. The equally impressive Ansund project was presented by Mark Faulkner and Elisabetta Magnanti — a comprehensive corpus of Old English texts enriched from their manuscript sources by computer vision.

Keynote lectures were given by Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony, whose extensive experience gave them ideal vantage points from which to survey the Digital Humanities and the twists and turns it has taken since the beginnings of their careers. Likewise, Paola Marchionni and Peter Findlay (formerly of the British Library) presented the history of Jisc, elucidating its critical role within research institutes.

Conversations beyond the lecture hall were instructive for the Digital Scholarship team, especially for the BL’s recovery following the cyberattack last year. It was clear that the English Short Title Catalogue is a crucial resource for many scholars in attendance, not only as a finding aid but also as a dataset — encouraging to know, as the library works towards getting the ESTC back online. This is especially true of Fred Schurink’s research on the importation of early continental books to early modern England, which is an innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of Bibliographic Data Science. We look forward to learning more about this field at Dr Schurink’s upcoming workshop at the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester.