John Walsh (SLIS faculty member and Director of the SLIS Digital Libraries Specializations) co-presented a talk in Belfast, Ireland. The Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts Conference was held at Queens University, Belfast from September 7-9, 2009.

Walsh is a Co-Principal Investigator for a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. TILE: Text-Image Linking Environment is the project title. Walsh is Co-PI along with Dorothy Carr Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin, Ireland and Doug Reside of the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities at the University of Maryland.

Walsh, Porter and Reside jointly presented research on the TILE Project - see abstract:
Text Image Linking Environment (TILE)

To create the next generation of the technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives of humanities content, we are developing a new web-based image markup tool, the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE), through a collaboration of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Indiana University Bloomington, the Royal Irish Academy, the University of Oregon, and Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. Despite the proliferation of image-based editions and archives, the linking of images and textual information remains a slow and frustrating process for editors and curators. TILE, built on the existing code of the AXE image tagger, will dramatically increase the ease and efficiency of this work. TILE will be developed and thoroughly tested with the assistance of our project partners, who represent some of today's most exciting image-based editions projects, in order to create a tool generated by the community, for the community, with the expectation that, unlike so many other tools, it will be used by the community.

About the Conference:
"The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference this year aims to promote discussion around dynamic networks of knowledge and practice, new digital communities of knowledge and practice, engaging users and digitisation of cultural heritage.

The conference is hosted by Queen's University Belfast, the Royal Irish Academy and Swansea University in partnership with the National Library of Wales.

The conference will:

• Establish new digital communities of knowledge exchange
• Promote discussion around the impact of data on scholarship and wider society
• Enquire into how innovations become mainstream through mutation, imitation, and the 're-invention of the wheel'
• Advance discussion around digitisation of scholarly editions and cultural heritage
• Evolve new approaches to the digital representation of time, space and locality
• Debate burning issues in digital preservation and sustainability
• Investigate user engagement and social participation
• Explore the impact of narrative and design in the Arts and Humanities on ICT and vice versa
• Promote discussion around education and the digital humanities and arts
• Share the theory and practice of creating and documenting digital arts

Posted September 16, 2009