Simple engagement statistic: the affiliations of the people we have worked with this month e.g. through requests for advice and teaching support.
James C helped colleagues in the Bodleian think through their use of the Fihrist TEI ODD to analyse Hebrew and Sanskrit texts.
Martin helped MSt English Language students make decisions about dissertation options.
James C and Jill met colleagues in Public Health to discuss a global health distance learning course.
Howard met a Masters student who wanted advice on how to get started in creating an ABM of electricity supply and demand in rural India.
British National Corpus search results for "budge"
Martin taught two courses on research methods for working with electronic text collections. In Michaelmas Term, the course ‘Using Corpora to Investigate English Usage’ was taught to the students on the new M.St. English Language course in the English Faculty. In-depth consultations were also given to individual students to assist them with data gathering and analysis for their assignments. In Hilary term, the 6-week course in ‘Corpus Linguistics’ was offered for the fourth consecutive year as an ITLP course, with attendance from Masters students from the Faculty of Linguistics, Phonetics and Philology (FLPP), where it was listed as an optional course. There were also participants from OUP, English, the Language Centre, Education, Anthropology, and other faculties. Both courses were taught in collaboration with Ylva. Martin also assists with induction presentations on research methods to humanities students in the Faculty of English and FLPP, together with faculty and library staff.
Meriel taught a half-day Introduction to research data management course for a group of DPhil students and PostDocs in the MPLS division.
Meriel taught a half-day Introduction to research data management course for the Medical Sciences division.
Ken taught an Introduction to ABM course for 40 students at the Udayana University in Bali!
(Mark Johnson, Scott Wilson, Howard Noble, Sebastian Rahtz and colleagues at the SSI Unit in the University of Edinburgh). The Software Hub project started in November and will run for a year. The aim is to make a catalogue of software products that were funded, or part funded by the JISC, and to promote the most sustainable or mature products as solutions. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of this project is the work to make it easier for people to gain access to demo versions of web applications e.g. by making VMs available via hosting services such as the Microsoft Azure.
(Prof. David Zeitlyn (Anthropology), Ken Kahn and Howard Noble) This project started in January and will run for 10 months. We will pilot the use of agent-based computer models that have game-like elements built into them, to help communicate and discuss the risk that increased climate variability poses to rural farmers in Cameroon. Read more on the modelling4all Cameroon project blog thread.
Ken released a major update to the modelling4all software. It seems as though Java Applets are becoming ever more problematic with increasing numbers of security warnings. Modelling4All relies on Applets to display the NetLogo program compiled within a browser. This new release makes it possible to bypass applets by providing a convenient way to compile a model created within the behaviour composer inside of NetLogo itself. This has the additional benefit of improved debugging and likely faster simulation run times. It may also help in situations where Internet access is patchy or non-existent e.g. the modelling4all’s latest project in Cameroon.Read more about this new release and other developments to the modelling4all software.
James C and Sebastian R have been working on an XML conversion of a Polish Dictionary for the Oxford University Press.
Martin is working on secondment with The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH), a major new interdisciplinary centre based in the recently renovated Radcliffe Humanities building on the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter site. His duties involve project management of the development and launch of a new website for TORCH, together with the InfoDev team, integrating the Digital Humanities at Oxford website, and developing a strategy for the sustainability of TORCH’s web presence.