DigitalHumanities: Perspectives on Past, Present and Future

[Video of this event]

In our first installment of The Susan Hockey Lecture series, Professor Susan Hockey discusses the trajectory of digital humanities from its many years on the fringes to its current position at the centre of the humanities scholarly arena, and its future challenges.

Today, conferences, courses and publications in digital humanities abound, and jobs are advertised almost every week. The advent of the World Wide Web shifted emphasis from analytical software to communication and publication tools bringing humanities resources to a much wider audience in classrooms and in the home. The groundwork for many of these new ways of working is in place now.

Some time in the future, humanities information sources will be mainly digital. What are the implications of a much broader user community for these resources, and for libraries and archives, the traditional custodians of humanities information sources? How can research in digital humanities contribute to future developments? And what should our students learn in order to build successfully on what has already been achieved?

Speaker's biography

Susan Hockey is Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at UCL. She was Director of what was then the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies from 2001 to 2004. Before coming to UCL, she held positions at Oxford University, where she is an Emeritus Fellow of St Cross College, at Rutgers University and at the University of Alberta. As chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing from 1984 to 1997 she founded the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing, now the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. She has published widely on text analysis applications, markup, teaching computing in the humanities and the role of libraries in managing digital resources. In 2004 she became the third holder of the Busa Award, a lifetime achievement award for the application of information and communications technologies to humanities research.