Professor Melissa Terras, Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Great Parchment Book project partner has been visiting Australia and was one of the featured speakers at eResearch Australasia 2014. She also gave a talk about the Great Parchment Book project at The University of Melbourne on 31 October.

Her lecture at eResearch Australasia 2014 – entitled Across the Humanities and Science Divide: Advanced Digital Projects in Cultural Heritage – examined the ever increasing need for the development and appropriation of advanced computational methods within the Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Although the Arts, Humanities and Heritage sectors have often been early adopters of available computational technology, the use of such methods to answer novel research questions often depends on close relationships with those in the computational sciences to ensure that technologies can be applied with enough specificity to be useful to a certain case or domain. How can we best build such interdisciplinary research projects to ensure success? How can the field commonly called Digital Humanities help us to explore and push against disciplinary boundaries?

In the lecture, Professor Terras demonstrated some of the leading-edge work that has been carried out at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and its related partner institutions including the Great Parchment Book project. She used specific case studies to illustrate the benefits, and common pitfalls, encountered, whilst working in large scale, interdisciplinary teams, and explore how a centre such as UCL Centre for Digital Humanities could work as a catalyst within a research institution to encourage people to undertake such activities. She also addressed the issue of how universities and external partners support such resource intensive experimentation.

Professor Terras’s talk at Melbourne University looked at issues involving using advanced imaging methods within cultural heritage, particularly regarding the relationship the resulting model has to the primary historical text. Using the Great Parchment Book as a focus, she asked how we can best integrate multi-modal imaging into our humanities research practices? What issues are there for both research and practice? More details are available here.

Professor Terras is also speaking at the University of Western Australia in Sydney at a Digital Life Seminar.