Blogging the Truth about Research

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

Listen to Peter Gill’s talk for “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas” on the University of Oxford podcasts website.

Peter Gill, DPhil candidate at the Centre for Evidence-based Medical Research at the Department of Primary Care, is a regular contributor to the blog trusttheevidence.net. This site was set up by Carl Heneghan and Ami Banerjee, who met as PhD students in the OXVASC research programme at the University of Oxford. The blog aims to ensure dissemination of the truth behind medical research to the wider community and to broader lay audience. Peter Gill began contributing a few years ago.

Challenge

The blog is an excellent forum for explaining glossed over findings and debunking commonly published myths. Normally response to articles would have to be through the very slow academic formalised process. Through the blog response can be almost instantaneous. But it can be challenging to track these myths in the first place as they are propagated in papers and articles. It is also vital to ensure that the blog’s response is accessible to a wide audience. For this that the trusttheevidence team find social media invaluable.

Innovation

Whilst blogging is a core part of communication strategy at the Centre for Evidence-based Medical Research, social media is also a vital tool, particularly Twitter. Peter defines social media as a decentralised, non-hierarchical community rather an audience. It can therefore be used both as a vast amplifying forum for dissemination and as a fertile source of information. Hours of reading can be saved by using Twitter, as other scientifically-engaged users go beyond press releases to post and retweet links to original findings, or conduct their own analysis of articles and tweet the results. This wide-scale remote participation increases open access to medical research worldwide, and also allows Peter and the other trusttheevidence bloggers to source their materials quickly.

Feedback

This blog has had meaningful impact in the way that some medical findings have been presented in the media. Carl’s twitter-disseminated critique of a recent Wellcome Trust autism diagnosis study led to an invitation to write a Guardian article on the topic. The Wellcome Trust responded by reissuing a clarified press release and emending misleading material. This process took a matter of days; a sharp contrast to the time-scale for more traditional academic publishing.

Top Tips for Success

  1. Be consistent with your message and divide your different social media accounts to use for different audiences.
  2. Be aware of the importance of timing for tweeting. An American study recently suggested between noon and 5pm is an optimal time. Nonetheless, sometimes it is about luck.
  3. Use as many avenues as possible, taking advantage of different forums to reach different audiences.
  4. Think about who you can help to distribute their message and build a helpful network for yourself.
  5. Use tools like Tweetdeck, which will you to create unique lists feeds for you to sort your twitter feed to prevent information overload. Pocket (formerly Read It Later) is also a useful tool to archive tweets, particularly now the MLA has confirmed that Tweets are now citable.

Further Information

Listen to Peter Gill’s talk for “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas”  on the University of Oxford podcasts website. Listen to other “Engage” talks Visit the trusttheevidence blog Follow trusttheevidence on Twitter  Sign Up for IT Services courses: Security and Privacy Online: Social Media Twitter for Academia

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Rethinking Impact: Social Media

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

Listen to Nando Sigona’s recent talk for “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas” on the University of Oxford podcasts website.

Researcher Nando Sigona is based at the Oxford University Refugee Studies Centre. He started his blog “Postcards from…” in 2008. Since then his use of social media has expanded into Twitter and Podcasting to engage wider communities in his research on migration, asylum and minority issues. He uses social media and multimedia to disseminate his work and maximise the effects of his research on social policy and public debate.

Challenge

Academics like Nando are working in a rapidly shifting, highly-connected environment. He outlines the key domains for his work as:

  1. the academic world;
  2. the world of policy, both statutory/governmental and NGOs/activists;
  3. the public, which for Nando means his relationship with the Media.

Nando’s social media strategy needs to maximise outreach to the various audiences that he targets.

Innovation

Nando’s tools for digital engagement, in order of relevance, are: Twitter, his personal and academic blog, Academia.edu, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as the more traditional use of email. He describes his approach to these multimedia as “like an ecosystem”, using many or all of these tools to spread a message, and understanding the connections between them. Nando also carefully matches his expression to his audience, translating his research findings appropriately for traditional academic outlets; podcasts and film shorts; talks, for example, for TEDx; as well as tweets and blogposts.

Nando’s online engagement is two-way. Through Twitter and Facebook he engages with and questions key figures in his field and gathers social information for his research. He uses the research interests on Academia.edu to keep abreast of new research. But he also uses social media to disseminate his own blogposts through links. He is often retweeted by his followers, extending his reach further. Nando’s “outreach potential”, or the maximum number of users he can reach through being retweeted is 1,240,000 in the policy domain, 170,000 in media and 160,000 in academia. He often targets his messages in order to secure retweets. Nando particularly highlights the importance of online relationships with institutions and organisations as well as individuals, like research centres and publishers, to maximise dissemination.

Feedback

 Nando’s blog has on average 15000 unique visits per month, which is particularly high for an academic blog. His audience is global, and mainly from the UK, US, Italy, Canada, Belgium and Australia.

His Twitter following, at 1100, is also very good for an academic individual. Most of those followers have themselves between 100 and 500, and are active users.Of these, approximately 374 are in the political domain, 103 in media, 234 academics and 243 other.

Top Tips for Success

  1. For Twitter a key thing to get right is the profile description. This used as a primary tool by others for measuring reliability and a Twitter-user’s field.
  2. You will become a slave to your public profile: all your tweets must be on message. If you start to divert you will lose credibility. If necessary, create a separate account to talk about things other than your work.
  3. Use the Twitter hashtags relevant to your field both to disseminate your ideas effectively and to see what’s going on in your area. Use this information to be topically timely and retweet your work  appropriately for better exposure.
  4. Remember that the point of twitter is that it’s a flow of information. It is an ongoing conversation from which you can tap in and out, but you should also make sure to maintain ongoing contribution to the general discussion.
  5. Remember that Google is first port of call for journalists looking for an expert. They will also assess your online presence for signals of a “media-friendly”, such as the use of vodcasts or podcasts.

Further Information

Listen to Nando Sigona’s recent talk for “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas”

Listen to other “Engage” talks

Visit the “Postcards from…” blog

Follow Nando on Twitter 

Sign Up for IT Services courses:

Security and Privacy Online: Social Media
Twitter for Academia

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Digital story-telling: the @Arras95 live-tweeting project

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings is a project creating a suite of learning and teaching resources that provide an international, cross-disciplinary reappraisal of this historic event. It  brings digital content together to be presented as OERs. The idea behind the project is to surface lesser known aspects of the Great War and provide resources to make these perspectives freely available for teaching and learning. As part of the project, between the 9th April and 16th May 2012, the @Arras95 social media experiment was launched. Through @Arras95 the events of the Battle of Arras were tweeted in real time, from the perspective of a neutral reporter on the field. What makes this Twitter event different from other real time tweeting initiatives was that @Arras95 engaged online communities, crowdsourcing facts about the battle and the individuals who played a part, asking for reappraisals and additions to the action as it happens.

After the event a searchable archive of the Twitter conversation was made available, open content was be added to the Resource Library  of the web site, and the event maps and geotags were analysed and refined to produce OpenLayers of data for overlay on 2D maps and 3D Earth browsers. This project in total produced 2545 Tweets, 9 new articles and 132 OERs.

The Challenge

The purpose of @Arras95 was to surface a key, but lesser taught, turning point of the War. By asking online communities to contribute their own knowledge and materials, @Arras95 aimed to increase open content around this one focal point, providing a wealth of resources for free use and adaptation.

Fionnuala Barrett, Student Ambassador and Social Media Co-ordinator for @Arras95, oversaw the live-tweeting project. Her challenge was to convert a Battle of Arras factsheet, prepared by Everett Sharp, Subject Expert on the project, into 120-character tweets to facilitate easy retweeting. She was also responsible for managing responses to and retweeting of the messages of others. The group interaction made this part of the process most interesting, even including a few other users tweeting in character.

The Innovation

The @Arras95 project used Twitter client called Tweetdeck, which allows tweets to be scheduled ahead of time for publication at a specified time and date, as well as to add geotag information which we would later use to create a map of the tweets.

The innovation of using Twitter for a historical project is that it takes full advantage of the potential for engagement through this new technology. Whilst the brevity of the medium means that only a few details can be surfaced, this project can supplement traditional education, and the resources available through ww1centenary, by generating interest and exchange of ideas around the Battle of Arras, as well as linking out to more in-depth resources.

Feedback

As with all crowdsourcing projects, especially those based in social media like Twitter, feedback has been abundant and various. A select few of these comments and responses are recorded here:

“This shows the future use of collaborative digital technology in historical studies has huge potential.”

“It is now cluttered and confused, not helped by tweets commemorating the fallen; not I feel the purpose of the exercise.”

“This medium is only as good as its contributors (I might be wrong but I don’t think @Arras95 was supposed to be providing all the content – that is down to us, I think)”

“[A] possible advantage of the brevity imposed by the 140 char[acter] limit, and the disjointed nature of things that some people have mentioned: is that it gives some impression of the fragmentary, and sometimes incorrect, nature of the reports being received on the way up the chain of command.”

Top Tips for Success

  1. Use tools to schedule tweets in advance, like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.
  2. Check that material is open licenced. Acceptable licences include various Creative Commons licenses [hyperlink]; Open Government Licence; Open Parliament Licence; other Open Content Licences; and items in the public domain with no copyright restrictions.
  3. Make contributors aware of ways to make their content openly available online, such as uploading images to Wikimedia Commons; to photosharing sites like Flickr, specifying a creative commons licences; or to their own website, with a clear statement of a specified open licence.

Further Information

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Improving Public Understanding of Science: Social Media and Digital Technologies

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In his launch talk for engage: Social Media Michaelmas he talked about how he uses digital media to fulfil this role. For Marcus, engaging the public digitally is about converting passive audiences to active participants. He advocates creative thinking to find various simple effective ways to open up two-way communication with the viewing public.
Marcus’s mathematical programme The Code is now held up by the BBC as exemplary digital engagement practice because of its inventive and successful online partner project. This programme had a very real off-screen life in its puzzle-solving initiative. Marcus explained how thousands of viewers followed the series closely in order to find the clues to solve The Code Challenge. Furthermore, the programme also produced a complicated 82 page online puzzle book. Around this challenge an enthusiastic community of amateur puzzle-solvers grew. They set up their own wikis (see, for example “crack the BBC code” and “the code group”) and collaborated to work out the trickiest puzzles. The final of the competition was held in Bletchley Park and televised. This project shows how, given the opportunity, a dynamic community of active, collaborative and driven people can be mobilised and engaged in scientific ideas.
Similarly, Marcus also experimented with crowd-sourcing in an online partner project to the programme Numbers. He asked viewers to upload photographs of numbers from 1 to 2011 to an online portal and again was delighted with the community that sprung up around building this collection.

Marcus also works on the level of smaller scale broadcasts, writing articles and engaging through Twitter. He likens the strategy for managing the Twitter in-tray to personalising a newspaper.

In his talk Marcus showed the great potential of public engagement projects as well as describing his earliest steps down this path, in simply writing articles and getting his work circulating. Marcus advises tenacity and variety in the pursuit of public engagement through digital media. He challenged listeners not to be afraid to share their ideas, and advocated willingness to talk about areas of lesser expertise. The launch of “Engage” could not have been led by a more inspiring or appropriate speaker to illustrate the academic potential of the kinds of tools that engage: Social Media Michaelmas is offering to members of Oxford University.

Get involved with the exciting social media events at the IT Services this term through engage: Social Media Michaelmas

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Navigating Open Oxford: the new OpenSpires Mind Map

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Try the brand new interactive OpenSpires Mind Map, freely available online. The new map is intended as a gateway into Open Educational practice at Oxford. It is designed to:

  • explain the story and showcase the achievements of OpenSpires,
  • show how the openness initiative can benefit academic practice,
  • and promote ways to get involved at the University of Oxford.

OpenSpires, like similar projects worldwide, aims to share educational resources for the benefit of humanity globally. Based in the University of Oxford IT Services, the project makes inspirational content from the University available as Open Educational Resources (OER). OER content is available for reuse and redistribution by third parties globally, provided that it is used in a non-commercial way and is attributed to its creator.

As a part of the OER revolution OpenSpires has now overseen a number of major OER projects to date at the University of Oxford, and is still growing. This map helps explain and celebrate its many aspects.

For more information explore the Mind Map or the OpenSpires homepage.

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Open Educational Resources: A contributor’s case-study

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Dr. Marianne Talbot, lecturer in philosophy at the Department for Continuing Education,  University of Oxford, has published a case study on OER (Open Educational Resources) and public engagement following the release of her extremely successful podcast series through the University of Oxford OpenSpires project.  Available on iTunesU, ‘A Romp Through the History of Philosophy’  made global number one in October 2009 with 18,000 downloads a week, and has now been downloaded nearly a million times. Marianne has since released several more podcasts through OpenSpires, achieving a second global number one in 2010 with ‘The Nature of Argument’, which has had nearly three million downloads.

In this JISC-sponsored case study she analyses the public response to her podcasts and draws some useful conclusions about OER-release and  public engagement.

The 2012 case study is available to download as PDF (and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.)

Marianne’s podcasts are all availablethrough the University of Oxford podcast portal.

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Social media engagement: UNIQ Summer School and Facebook

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

UNIQ Summer School was established in 2009 to enable academically-able UK state school students to experience a typical undergraduate week at the University of Oxford free of charge. It is an extremely competitive process with over 3000 applications each year, and expanded from 500 places to a planned 1000 places by 2014. UNIQ originally began using Facebook not only to reach a more general audience but to also have a central place where like-minded students could ask questions or discuss UNIQ with each other. In 2010 the School adopted Twitter and also launched a Google+ account. It is important that the School presents an approachable and engaging public face, for which social media is a perfect platform. Tools such as Twitter and Facebook are also useful for administration, as they can be used to send automatic updates to participants.

The Challenge

The UNIQ summer schools are the only official summer schools for the University of Oxford, but must compete for applicants with the many other unofficial summer schools in Oxford. The high popularity and level of competition for places at the school is sustained by the effective dissemination of the School’s message to its target audience. Whilst social media has the capacity to communicate on a mass level, online presence must be managed carefully. The use of social media as an administrative tool is only possible through sufficient engagement from students. It is essential that whilst they are made aware of UNIQ’s online presence they are not deterred by spamming or over-posting.

The Innovation

The UNIQ strategy spreads its online presence across three main social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The UNIQ website uses embedded link buttons to the School on Facebook, Twitter and  Google+ as well as email and an inbuilt forum

Social media is very useful for sharing photos and videos with potential applicants to emphasise approachability and inform students about the experience. During the summer school months UNIQ centres weekly posts on photos documenting the events of the summer schools. As Martin Handley, UNIQ Summer School, explains:

“We find this helps students be more motivated to post or Like. It also gives students looking to apply for future years a taster of what to expect outside of more official imagery. Certainly the Facebook statistics seem to reflect this, with our last photo alone generating a reach of nearly 10,000.”

Outside of the summer months UNIQ limit tweets and Facebook posts to important updates. These tools are generally used to answer any concerns that students may have during this time.

Feedback

The figures from the UNIQ online presence to date are:

On Twitter @OxfordUNIQ has posted a total of 185 tweets and has 307 followers

On Facebook, the UNIQ Summer Schools page has 871 likes and 187 ‘talking about this’.

On Google+, a less globally established tool, UNIQ is in the circles of 5 other users.

Martin Handley affirms that:

“We get a lot more attention post-UNIQ [Summer School] on Facebook than we do on our own site, as students who have met that week often add each other and then Like us at the same time and post on our wall messages of thanks. This in turn gains the attention of their friends who may be eligible for future summer schools and shows those coming to our page for the first time that attending UNIQ is a positive experience.”

Top Tips for Success

  1. UNIQ recommend that anyone interested in Facebook starts with a page to take advantage of the tracking–facility for user statistics.
  2. Social media sites are becoming more photographic and it is well worth exploring this option. Users are for more likely to notice a post within their wall feed if it contains imagery.
  3. Post regularly but never spam. One post per week should be the limit unless something important is happening.

Further Information

Go to the UNIQ Summer School website

View the School’s Facebook page

Follow UNIQ on Twitter

Read news about the admissions success of UNIQ Summer School 2010 participants

Sign up to IT Services courses:
Twitter for academia
Online Presence: A workshop 
Online Presence: An overview
Online Presence: Tools, skills and resources

For those with an already well-established presence, IT Services will be running an Advanced Online Presence course in Michaelmas Term 2012.

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Student Innovation: The LHSee App

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

See the video case study on Oxford Podcasts or the LTG YouTube Channel.

As of May 2011 there are over 100 million activated Android devices worldwide, with numbers growing daily. Each individual user has access to a handheld computer with a constant internet connection: presenting an exceptional channel for mass-communication through technology. Increasingly students and academics are taking advantage of this potential and creating apps to solve problems and capture markets that they discover in the course of their research. Chris Boddy, DPhil student at the Department of Physics, in collaboration with Dr Alan Barr, Fellow of Merton College and Lecturer in Particle Physics, has written just such an app. LHSee is a smart-phone app which allows the user to view collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. The app can be used to:

  • find out about more about the Large Hadron Collider,
  • learn how the ATLAS experiment works,
  • view live 3D displays of collisions direct from CERN (released for the first time through this app)
  • play the ‘Hunt the Higgs’ game.

The Challenge

The complexity of projects like the LHC can often be a barrier to wide-spread understanding of the science behind them. The app was designed as an outreach tool to a wider, non-expert audience for particle physics. Its creator, Chris, affirms:

“There seems to be a real appetite for this kind of science outreach app”.

The idea was to make the awe-inspiring processes of the LHC understandable for everyone.

The Innovation

Chris built the app using Google Android and OpenGL-ES APIs. When Alan and Chris showed the app to their colleagues at CERN it was agreed that, for the very first time, live streams of LHC collision events could be released to the public. The app grabs live collision events from the underground detectors in Geneva to beam directly to the smart-phone or tablet. The application allows interaction with the collision events in full 3D graphics, with support from educational resources. The collision data can be accessed in real time, and even individual proton-proton collisions can be identified. The app has been updated to include streams of the discovery events for the Higgs-Boson particle, which became available just after the CERN press conference about their findings.
Through collaboration with colleagues at ATLAS, the app also offers language support in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Additionally, in response to user feedback, after the initial release of the app Chris asked Eamonn Maguire of Antartic Design for a re-design of the user interface. The user-base responded warmly to this consideration of their suggestions.

Feedback

By the end of its first day the app had received 3000 downloads, which had more than tripled to 10,000 downloads by the end of its second. These figures soared following the Science and Technologies Facilities Council press release. Media coverage went viral online and offline, including stories in the Guardian, Times and Daily Mail, as well as an ‘app-of-the-day’ commendation from Gizmodo.
The app has an average user rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars, and has been enthusiastically received by a user-community of teachers, students and the general public.

Top Tips For Success

  1. Talk to people about your idea. You may be amazed at the progress this can bring about.
  2. Read the software development kit (SDK) for your platform to see what’s possible. The SDK for Android is downloadable online.
  3. Speak to your department: they may be able to help arrange support, time and funding to achieve your project.

Further Information

The project was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council through its Small Awards grant scheme.
The app was released on Friday 7th October 2011 and is free to download from the Google Android Marketplace.

The LHSee project website

The IT Learning Programme at IT Services provides a number of programming courses, including Programming Concepts, C++, Java and PHP as well as offering a forthcoming mobile apps course, taught by Chris Body, the first instance of which is scheduled for Hilary Term.

Winner of OxTalent 2012 award for “Student IT innovation”

Posted in Innovative Practice, Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences, OxTALENT Winner | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaching Web 2.0 Skills: 23 Things Oxford

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

See the video case study on Oxford Podcasts or the LTG YouTube Channel.

Inspired by the 23 Things Oxford team, IT Services will be running a 23 Things for Research course as part of the forthcoming “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas“ programme. Sign up here, or follow the programme on Facebook.

Web 2.0 skills are becoming essential in any organisation, but providing effective training for members of busy academic systems can be difficult. Blogging can be a perfect medium for time-efficient training programmes. 23 Things Oxford  used a blog to deliver skill-development in Web 2.0 technologies for Oxford librarians. The programme ran for 12 weeks from 18th January to 9th April, 2010 and was open to all staff in Oxford libraries. For each of the 12 weeks there were 12 themes and 23 Things to complete. These themes included: wikis, widgets, Office 2.0, Twitter, social networking, podcasting and YouTube, RSS feeds and blogs. 23 Things Oxford is based on the original 23 Things program at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, USA in 2006. The 23 Things Oxford team are: Laura Wilkinson, St Hugh’s College Library, who led the innovation; Penny Schenk, Bodleian Law Library; Jane Rawson, Vere Harmsworth Library; Emma Cragg, University of Warwick; and Angela Carritt, Bodleian Libraries.

The Challenge

With such a range of tools introduced in a comparatively short amount of time, a balance needed to be struck in order to allow participants to focus on a different area each week without feeling overwhelmed.

Furthermore, an environment that encouraged participants to work together and share with each other their discoveries, techniques and tips was required. 23 Things Oxford was based the principle of encouraging self-directed learning and co-operative sharing, in order to use the large group of simultaneous participants as a learning resource.

The Innovation

The aim was that, by having an average of 2 Things to do per week, this challenge would be wide-ranging but at the same time realistic for the time available. The 23 Things itinerary appeared on the 23 Things Oxford blog, but the release of exercises was staggered.  Each week the blog was updated with full details about the discovery exercises for that week. There were also 3 drop-in sessions offered to support this programme.

An incentive was provided for both the prompt completion of the programme. Each participant was required to keep a blog to track their progress. Staff who completed and blogged about all 23 Things by the 9th April received a completion certificate and a prize.  They were also entered into a draw to win an iPod Nano.

The 23 Things Oxford blog was Creative Commons-licensed, so the programme could provide an ongoing teaching resource after its finish.

Feedback

138 members of library staff at Oxford registered to take part in the programme and set up blogs to record their progress. Of these, 82 participants successfully completed the programme.  Since the programme at Oxford, 23 Things has been run by other UK universities including Cambridge and Warwick, and 23 Things for Continuing Professional Development is now underway.

In the post-programme survey, 93% of respondents said they would recommend the programme to their colleagues. The majority of respondents felt the ratio of tasks to time was appropriate, but for the 23% of respondents who did not complete the programme, the main reason given was a lack of time. There were also concerns over privacy and controlling online presence.

In addition to the majority of survey responses, feedback from the e-mails and blog posts of the participants was positive.

Top Tips for Success

  1. Use a blog as the teaching platform so that timing is flexible and inclusive and the program is not tied to a specific location.
  2. Have clear instructions and specific outcomes for each task. Use reflective weeks and open-ended topics sparingly.
  3. Differentiate tasks for novice, intermediate and advanced level for each topic, so that all participants increase their knowledge, but the outcomes are slightly different.
  4. Encourage people to comment on each other’s blogs, to develop conversations and build a sense of community.

Further Information

Go to the 23 Things Blog

You can read more about 23 Things Oxford in this paper.

And in Laura Wilkinson’s blogposts

If you have any questions, contact the Web 2.0 team via 23things@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or through the team’s Twitter pages.

Sign up to IT Services courses:

23 Things for Research course as part of the forthcoming “Engage: Social Media Michaelmas“ programme. Sign up here, or follow the programme on Facebook.

Twitter for academia
Online Presence: A workshop 
Online Presence: An overview
Online Presence: Tools, skills and resources
Copyright in the digital world 

Poster used with kind permission of Laura Wilkinson.

Posted in Innovative Practice, OxTALENT Winner, University Administration | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Digital humanities: The William Godwin’s Diary project

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Alexandra Paddock

Introduction

The William Godwin‘s Diary project has transcribed, edited, and annotated 48 years of William Godwin’s diary from 1788-1836, and made this resource freely available online.  This project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust Major Research Grant, John Fell Fund and British Academy. It was directed by Dr David O’Shaughnessy, Faculty of English , Oxford and Dr Mark Philp, Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford, in collaboration with Dr Victoria Myers in Pepperdine University, California, and assisted by the Bodleian Library. The website was designed and implemented by the project’s technical support officer, James Cummings at the Oxford University IT Services.

The diary itself is a resource of immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies. It maps the radical intellectual and political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic circles and theatrical production over the same period. The diary also traces the developing relationships of one of the most important families in British literature. This resource, which includes complete images and detailed full-text transcriptions, is freely licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.

The Challenge

The practical work of digitising the handwritten material required some planning, and technical expertise. Whilst the page originals are presented on the site as images, a searchable text requires encoding, for which the project sought the advice of the Research Support Service at University of Oxford IT Services.

A project of this size, furthermore, requires a significant research-force to complete it. Inevitably this means multiple editions and simultaneous access, also requiring technological innovation.

Finally, an ongoing problem with digitising manuscripts is the question of how long-lasting this solution can be in an environment of rapid technological change. Careful planning is required to ensure sustainability of the resource.

The Innovation

The project uses a standard technology for the encoding of digital text; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The University of Oxford has become an International leader in the support and development of TEI P5 XML.

The use of the version control system Subversion also allowed the project to collaboratively and simultaneously edit files whilst also storing previous revisions.

The IT Services installed and customised the eXist native XML database that powers the site, the construction of a wide range of queries to extract data, building a zooming image browser, creation of analytical tools, and implementation of the website itself. Sustainable methods were used for the construction of the digital edition. Preservation copies of the materials were also provided for long-term storage in the Oxford Text Archive.

Feedback

In 2012 the William Godwin’s Diary Project received the annual prize for “best digital resource”, awarded by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Top Tips for Success

  1. Seek advice from the Research Support Service at the University of Oxford’s IT Services in order to benefit from freely available advice and support.
  2. Use open source software for the development of the project outputs to ensure full control of the process.
  3. Engage with the development of open international standards. By using TEI XML the William Godwin Diary project encoded their texts in a format suitable for long-term preservation and also contributed in turn by submitting feature requests for future developments of the standard.

Further Information

The Research Support Service at the University of Oxford is happy to advise any research projects with significant technological aspects that are preparing funding applications.  Where appropriate, the Research Support Service may be able to partner with the project to provide technical support and resources.

To get in touch email: researchsupport@it.ox.ac.uk

Go to the Digital Humanities homepage

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