Digitising Natural History & Medical Manuscripts 27 – 28 April
From Cabinet to Internet: Digitising Natural History & Medical Manuscripts
The Linnean Society of London will hold a day meeting entitled ‘From Cabinet to Internet: Digitising Natural History and Medical Manuscripts’ on 27 – 28 April 2015.
For more information and registration form, please go to http://www.linnean.org/Meetings-and-Events/Events/From+Cabinet+to+Internet
Organisers: Isabelle Charmantier and Andrea Deneau, The Linnean Society of London and Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Exeter
Date: From 1pm Monday 27 April to 5pm Tuesday 28 April 2015
Place: The Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BF
Cost: Registration: £30/£20 students (includes 3 refreshments, lunch and reception)
Meeting remit:
In order to understand past scientific networks and practices, scholars are increasingly turning to the tools of digital humanities. Using resources from information technologies, numerous existing projects are cataloguing, editing, indexing and digitising letters and manuscripts, and making them available to a wide community of researchers and collaborators from the public.
The field of digital humanities has transformed the ways in which researchers look at manuscripts and letters: online editions are now accompanied by rich metadata, which facilitates research; digitised images mean that users can zoom in on details that previously needed good eyesight and a magnifying glass; and crowdsourcing ensures that collaborative work not only involves academics working amongst themselves, but that it also inclusively embraces the knowledge and the enthusiasm of members of the general public.
The workshop brings together academics and cultural sector professionals who work on projects specifically involving digitisation of correspondence and manuscripts related to natural history and medicine, from the 16th to the 19th century. They will present these projects and discuss ideas and practices, such as technological issues, collaboration and coordination between related projects, as well as developing areas of digital humanities, such as crowdsourcing.