Record numbers at Oxford's Digital Humanities Summer School

Each year the Digital Humanities at Oxford Network, supported by the Department of Engineering Science, delivers the ‘DHOxSS’ summer school, the largest event of its type in Europe. This year saw 300 participants, speakers and convenors from all over the globe, coming together in Keble College for an intense – and quite warm – July week of Digital Humanities research training.

Established in 2011, and building on the established success of the Text Encoding Initiative Summer School, DHOxSS has grown from year to year. Participants now choose between nine workshops, ranging from “Introduction to Digital Humanities” to courses in Linked Data, the Text Encoding Initiative, “Text to Tech”, Crowdsourced Research, and Digital Musicology. This year welcomed two new workshops: “When Archives become digital” and “Applied Data Analysis”, while “Humanities Data” was delivered by a newly formed team from the Bodleian Libraries and IT Services.

Summer School Director David De Roure, Professor of e-Research in the Department of Engineering Science and Director of the TORCH Digital Humanities Programme, observed “Digital Humanities research is a huge strength in Oxford and core to the Humanities Division. Our DH programme engages with every academic division as well as the libraries and museums, and our projects enjoy many excellent external collaborations. The summer school brings this community together to deliver a hugely significant event in the international DH landscape, with new ideas and collaborations emerging year on year.”

Organised in collaboration with Humanities Division by the Oxford e-Research Centre and Engineering Science events team, this year’s summer school also welcomed the support of the Alan Turing Institute, with four workshop convenors also part of the Turing’s “Data Science and Digital Humanities” team. The summer school also celebrated the announcement of the new Sebastian “SPQR” Rahtz Fund which will provide scholarships, thanks to a generous gift from Dr Leonor Barroca.

Planning for the 2020 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School is underway.