The monologue in a crowdsourced world: Have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?
Digital resources and social media have changed fundamentally the way that we create, share and disseminate information. Digital Humanities (DH) is a collaborative interdiscipline where most research is done in teams. Yet the traditional inaugural lecture emphases the work of an individual: it cannot celebrate the contribution of research groups, users, and the wider DH community, to scholarship. I shall therefore question whether the inaugural lecture remains meaningful in a crowdsourced, DH world and compare its affordances with those of digital resources which allow users, both within and beyond academia, to contribute to and engage with the scholarly process.
Professor Claire Warwick is Head of UCL Department of Information Studies, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities; and Vice-Dean: Research for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Her research is on the use of digital resources in the humanities and cultural heritage; social media; and reading behaviour in physical and digital spaces. She has led and co-investigated numerous DH research projects, including LAIRAH, UCIS, QRator, VERA, LinkSphere and INKE.
