Professor Ray Siemens's First Leverhulme Lecture (London)

Abstract

This talk explores emerging and evolving possibilities for academic work in a public context mediated by new technologies and the approaches they facilitate, drawing on the foundational and conceptual impulses of the digital humanities and those of open social scholarship. Core examples are drawn from experience with A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492), its publication of record being on the public-facing Wikibooks platform, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript (2012-), with academic-oriented publication in book form by Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (2015). Discussion considers ways to situate academic work for engagement by academic specialists and interested members of the public, and to engage an audience that may be drawn to that work consisting of members of the public and academic specialists.

Speaker

Professor Ray Siemens has pioneered the field of Digital Humanities, showing the way towards collaborative, transformative, interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy. He is the architect of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada, where he is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities. Trained as an Early Modern English scholar, he has a cross appointment in Computer Science, and he held a Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004-15). In 2017-18, Siemens was Visiting Professor at Western Sydney University. He has previously held visiting positions at New York U (2013), at the Institute of English Studies in London (2005, 2008), in Japan (Ritsumeikan U Kyoto: 2010; U Tokyo: 2014) and in Germany (U Passau: 2014). Siemens directs the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at UVic, which hosts several groups: (1) DHSI; (2) Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), funded by a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative; (3) Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI), which actively promotes research and research technologies that are accessible and significant to a broad audience of specialists and non-specialists. C-SKI activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilisation, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national and international levels.