Tuesday 9 February 2021 – Postgraduate Panel II – Kelvin Beer-Jones (Birmingham), Jack Newman (Kent), Mark Liebenrood (Birkbeck)

This seminar is 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm, 9 February 2021, livestreamed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9RTLi4WscI

Session chair: TBC

The IHR Digital History Postgraduate Panels showcase historical research using digital methods that is taking place in the postgraduate community. A series of short papers will be followed by a question and answer session.

 

Kelvin Beer-Jones (Birmingham)

Title: The ’Digital Historical Database Toolkit’

Abstract: The ’Digital Historical Database Toolkit’ (DHDT) which I am building (and using) to analyse and visualise catalogues and indexes to large 19c manuscript collections, extracting social connectivity and group presence, exploring those over time. For my PhD I am using an archivist’s database at Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and own research in Quaker family history records covering the period 1830 to 1870, but the DHDT can be used by any digital researcher to survey large archives over the lifetime of the collection, through catalogue data. Marty Steer is on my support group and you can check out the project here: https://github.com/KelvinBeerJones/ceda-database

Bio: Kelvin Beer-Jones is a 5th year part time PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham and his PhD thesis is likely to be a hybrid of Digital Research Methods (DRM) and Social Network Analysis. It utilises DRM and the development of a digital toolkit for the examination of 19c manuscript catalogues to analyse the social connectivity within and between one social group (Quakers in Britain) and others committed to social action in the period 1830 – 1870.

 

Jack Newman (Kent)

Title: ‘Mining the Medieval: the challenges of digitising medieval administrative documents c. 1320-1341’.

Abstract: This paper will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of constructing datasets from a medieval court roll and bishops register. Each volume is a translation produced by Lincoln Records Society from the early fourteenth centuries. The paper will explore the methodologies of digitising these documents and the potential wide-ranging benefits of this approach for local history societies in an increasingly digital landscape.

Bio: Jack Newman is a CHASE funded doctoral candidate based at the Institute for Historical Research and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at the University of Kent. He was also the Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow 2019-20 at the IHR. His thesis examines corruption and anti-corruption process in 14th century English government institutions and for which he has created a database of 2000 cases to examine networks of officials and their patrons.

Twitter Handle: @NewJack7

Website: https://www.jack-newman.com/about/

 

Mark Liebenrood (Birkbeck)

Title: Analysing museum closures in the UK

Abstract: Hundreds of museums have closed in the UK, yet those closures have received little historical attention. The Mapping Museums database was published online in early 2020 and now makes it possible to analyse the scale and patterns of museum closures since 1960. In this paper I present some results of analysing the data and show how it serves as a foundation of my doctoral research, which is developing a better understanding of the circumstances of museum closure in the UK between 1960 and 2010.

Bio: Mark Liebenrood is a third-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department, Birkbeck, University of London. His thesis has the working title ‘Museum closure in the UK, 1960–2010’.

Twitter Handle: @markliebenrood

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