Litcraft at SPARK Festival, Hong Kong

Jan. 27, 2019 | duncan | Events

In January, Sally Bushell was invited to demonstrate Litcraft at SPARK: The Science and Art of Creativity, a festival of ideas organised by the British Council in Hong Kong. Over the three days of the festival, Sally and Alex Whitfield, Learning and Digital Programmes Manager at project partner the British Library, ran a series of drop-in sessions for members of the public, allowing them to explore the worlds of Treasure Island and Kensuke's Kingdom.

The festival represented an exciting opportunity to explore how Litcraft might be used in educational contexts in Hong Kong and China, and was very well covered in the Hong Kong press - a selection of links are below.

https://hashtaglegend.com/events/sparks-hks-first-festival-ideas-launches-today-tai-kwun

https://thehoneycombers.com/hong-kong/event/spark-the-science-and-art-of-creativity/

https://www.britishcouncil.hk/en/spark

Photos: ATUM Images

American Name Society, Jan 3-5 2019 New York

Jan. 15, 2019 | james | Conferences

James was fortunate enough to attend the 2019 meeting of the American Name Society – which had a special focal panel on literary names – held in conjunction with the American Linguistic Society, at the Sheraton in Times Square, New York. The organisers, Sue Behrens and society president Dorothy Robbins, brought together a series of fascinating speakers and projects that showed just how versatile a field onomastics can be. From an opening address by Sue that demonstrated just how many works can be seen to engage with naming creativity (even when it is not a direct theme of a text) – adding to the ever-growing interest in the specialised field. From there, the programme went from strength to strength, spanning Pokemonastics (comparing translated names for the fictional creatures), through examining how names feature in online click-bait; and a keynote of aesthetic naming in Poe and Longfellow from Andrew Higgins completed the first day.

The role of names in Chronotropic Cartographies’ spatial schema was the focus of our talk (titled: The Intent, Content, and Context Narratives of Literary Namescapes) – along with a dedicated breakdown of how traditional NER techniques that treat all names equally are insufficient tools for literary markup and analysis. Rather, the case for our disambiguation between active and passive place referents (along with a few other means of denoting the role of place-based reference) formed the central argument – which was extremely well-received. The audience made it clear that our approach is unlike any other work being conducted in the field, and bringing innovative techniques to a domain that has (perhaps necessarily) not featured as strongly in DH work as others. It is our sincerest hope that our codification model for applied name roles will hopefully bring the field of literary onomastics to the forefront of DH work – particularly given its recent renewed surged in scholarly interest.

The paper was kindly complimented as ‘a conference highlight’ by a number of the international cohort in attendance, with many members keen to be updated on further innovations we have planned.

North Lancashire Business Expo

Nov. 19, 2018 | james

The team were invited to present on Litcraft at North Lancashire Business Expo by the Business Gateway team, as a wonderful opportunity to engage with the local community and demonstrate the sort of work we are doing that is accessable, interesting, and of direct (potential!) use for everyone. We were effectively representing the university – and thanks to the great organisation by Mark Bowen – the event was a huge success.

Dozens of people we chatted with had already heard about Litcraft – through various channels (Sally did an interview with BBC Radio Lancashire last month – I shall try and upload the audio when the site redevelopment is finalised); but better still, were the number of teachers who approached us, and asked if we could formally run sessions at their schools, from all around the region. We are delighted to be able to build on our network of affiliated schools – for which future resource developments undertaken by Lancaster University teams will have an immediate contact – and help further bridge the instituion into local communities.

This was the second year for the event – held at Lancaster Brewery – and was extremely well-attended (and filled with exhibitors handing out loot, so much sugar in one place!). We had a great day, which resulted in a good number of immediate contacts with Sally confirming a desire to run Litcraft, building our local contact-base significantly. We hope we did LU proud – just as we continue to be proud of the research and development opportunities the university is allowing us, thanks to its skilled and passionate outreach teams.

Litcraft in a Box – Libraries Initiative, 18 Sept 2018

Oct. 1, 2018 | james

After several months planning, the team is proud to announce that – thanks to Lancaster Universityy’s HEIF funding pot to support additional streams of research impact and especially in developing ties with external organisations – we have been able to expand Litcraft in a bold and exciting new way: Litcraft in a Box!

We have been working with two library authorities for a time, following our successful venture to the ASCEL digital training day back in March, with the idea of making our resource available in a ready-to-go, easy-to-transfer package to be gifted the central library so it could be passed around the individual libraries under their remit. Leeds (the hosts of that event) and Lancashire (our local authority) were the two initial partners, but Westminster and Tri-Borough contacted us after seeing our report in The Guardian, and we were able to include them in our initial foray. A few weeks later, Devon got in touch, and were able to attend the training day – which will hopefully lead to us being able to work with them closely with a (fingers crossed!) wave two release. And of course – the big handover (tempered somewhat by the fact two of them had to be carted cross-country by train, and we jam packed them with additional copies of the two books we used for this first wave – but no-one was complaining)

The day saw representatives from each authority come together for a run-down of Litcraft, future plans, the feedback we need to generate from the resource (closely aligned with their own requirements), and as a means of getting to know how they each plan to roll out the box across their services. We are very excited to be able to make Litcraft more widely available to the public – as well as spread awareness of the digital innovations being wrought here at Lancaster University – and believe this has been a fantastic means of doing so. https://chronotopiccartography.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/img_0253.jpg?w=1650 And it seems the resource is first being demonstrated at Garstang library:

Be the first to try @Chrono_Carto #Litcraft at #Garstang Take on the classic adventure of Treasure Island using #Minecraft at our @FunPalaces event on Saturday 6th October. Session starts at 10.30am, arrive early to guarantee a space. https://t.co/tCaEQqQej5 #GarstangLibrary pic.twitter.com/9fLB5L4ruz

— Lancashire libraries (@lancspublib) September 29, 2018

Work has already started on the next phase of Litcraft maps… watch this space!

First Project Symposium, Lancaster Uni – 06-07 Sept 2018

Sept. 10, 2018 | james

Has it really been a year already? Such was the incredulity of the project team and potential partners as we all met (several for the first time!) at Chronotopic Cartographies’ first annual project symposium.

Sally devised a fantastic schedule for the first day, breaking the event into 4 distinct section (the coding, the ontological breakdown, visualisation, and Litcraft) with each team member – which is now complete with the addition of our tech RA, who will hopefully write an introductory post soon – taking charge of their pertinent component. Within each session, the relevant Co-I’s introduced themselves, discussed their experienc,e and proposed aspects that they would like to see developed during the course of our work. There was lots of extremely stimulating discussion, but everyone was pleased at the progression we have made – even if Litcraft has dominated (far exceeding all our expectations).

One thing reiterated throughout the event was just how innovative (and nigh Herculean) our task is – we still have a lot to do, but as we are breaking entirely new ground in DH coding and literary analysis, the careful and considered approach we are taking is absolutely the right was to proceed.

The second day saw colleagues, friends, and people of great interest we have met during this first year brought together, to give them a greater sense of what exactly we hope to achieve with our work, and to try an establish just how we might develop professional partnerships (assuming we scared no-one off, of course!). We had the pleasure of inviting J. R. Carpenter, Gavin Inglis, Adam Clarke (thecommonpeople) to present, and over several courses of delicious flapjack worked out some great little side-projects that we hope we can explore throughout this next year.

Now the team is fully established, and Becca has been brought on full-time.moved up to Lancaster, it is time to roll up our sleeves and start producing great content – so please, watch this space!