Apocalypse in the stacks?
10 June 2009
A talk by Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University.

The Digitization of History
27 February 2009
Saltmarsh Room, King’s College, Cambridge
A meeting to welcome old and new participants and to discuss future directions for the Digitization project.

History and the Archives of the Future: How Digitization Changes Everything
20 February 2009
Leigh Denault presented a talk on 'History and the Archives of the Future: How Digitization Changes Everything' at the EHumanities workshop, The Archive in the Digital Age, on Friday 20 February at CRASSH (full programme).

Building a Virtual Humanities Collaboratory
6-7 January 2009
Robert Watson presented a position paper on the possibilities for collaboration among computer scientists, archivists and historians at the January 6-7 EHumanities workshop at CRASSH on 'Building a Virtual Humanities Collaboratory' (full programme available). The event highlighted the lack of consensus on current 'best practices' for digital humanities endeavours, and brought to light both fascinating reports on existing projects and some interesting avenues for future development and research. Speakers focussed on the potential benefits and the major obstacles to digital research and collaboration within the humanities at present, and addressed some of the intellectual and infrastructural issues at stake as humanities research begins to establish protocols for the digital age. Cambridge projects represented included CARET; the Digital Himalaya Project; the Scriptorium; and the Arctic Collections Project. Of particular interest to historians were presentations by Professor Alan Bowman from Oxford University on how new technologies, both for collaboration and for the textual analysis of the Vindolanda wax tablets, have transformed scholars' 'reading' of the past, and by Dr. Mark Turin on how digitization has made possible the preservation of ephemera and the return of 'cultural property'.

Click here to view the abstract for the Digitization of History paper.
Click here to view slides from the presentation.

Digital resources for historical research - 3
11 August 2008
The third in a series of meetings to discuss the opportunities, shortcomings, and future development of new digital resources. The meeting was set up in part to introduce the new steering group of the project on Digitization of History and took place in the Computer Laboratory.

Research in a digital age - experience from The National Archives
28 May 2008
Natalie Ceeney (Chief Executive, The National Archives) and David Thomas (Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer, The National Archives) presented a seminar on the challenges and opportunities of research in the digital age.

Digitization of the Robert Hart Collection at Queen's University Belfast
29 April 2008
Deirdre Wildy (Senior Subject Librarian, Arts and Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast) and Jennifer Regan (Visiting Research Fellow, 2007-08, Queen’s University Belfast) presented a seminar outlining their experience digitizing the Robert Hart Collection at Queen's University.

The Digitization of History
6 December 2007
There was a meeting with Ann Blair, Sugata Bose and Robert Darnton.

Digitization of History Project
3 December 2007
There was an informal discussion meeting on Monday December 3 about ways of using Google Books in historical research.

Minutes from a meeting with Google Books
19 July 2007
In July 2007, Robert Watson and Leigh Denault (Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge), and Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton) met with a member of the Google Book Search team at Google's London offices to discuss the implications of large-scale digitization projects on the practice of history. The wide-ranging conversation covered issues from the technology of scanning and the management of large digital archives to the social implications of information accessibility. We have reported on the conversation here as an introduction to some of the issues facing commercial and academic digitization projects today.

Digital resources for historical research - 2
8 June 2007
The second in a series of meetings to discuss the opportunities, shortcomings, and future development of new digital resources was held at King’s College on 8 June 2007. These conversations have been initiated and encouraged through the Centre’s work in connection with the Cambridge-Harvard Mellon programme on exchanges of economic and political ideas. Professor Anthony Grafton of Princeton University participated in the meeting.

Digital resources for historical research - 1
8 May 2007
The first in a series of meetings to discuss the opportunities, shortcomings, and future development of new digital resources took place in Trinity Hall on 8 May 2007. The object of the meeting was to begin a conversation about the role of electronic archives in historical research, to identify important issues for future consideration (for example, new possibilities, technical limitations, cost and inequality of access, ease of use, concerns about future availability, access to resources in languages other than English), and to reflect on how we might think about these challenges as a scholarly community.