DHOXSS 2025 - attending online

Maheen Zia was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School online in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Maheen's experience at the summer school here:

It was somewhere in March that I received an email about my bursary application being accepted again this year. Though I was a bit surprised that I was placed in an online strand which was less advanced in level than the one I physically attended last year. However, being a DH enthusiast and always the first one to sign up for anything closely or distantly DH-related, I happily accepted it without thinking twice, and honestly, it was worth it. DHOxSS never disappoints and I can now vouch for it after attending for the second time.

Though an introductory one, the quality of the content of this particular strand cannot be underestimated. It exposed me to a broad range of humanities and social sciences areas that DH covers and contributes to in terms of research and data-driven discoveries.

DHOxSS 2025 felt like reliving DHOxSS 2024 but from the comfort of my home. Due to the time difference between UK and Pakistan, I would schedule my lunch during their morning coffee break and the sessions would end right before my dinner time in Pakistan.

I still missed attending on-spot, struggling with coding, raising my hand, communicating face-to-face with instructors, meeting people during tea and lunch breaks, and exploring Oxford mostly on foot in the evening.

However, online attendance offered me the ease of note-taking, capturing and saving screenshots, and having more in-depth (textual) conversations with fellow attendees from around the world in the chat box. My LinkedIn network grew with an addition of like-minded people working on the same field in their home countries. Moreover, the online participants as well as the organizers were quite active on the summer school Canvas platform where they shared insights and exchanged ideas even after class hours. It also served as the go-to place for networking with fellow online participants.

Last year, the module I attended was specific in terms of content whereas this year, it was broader and covered more subject areas falling under the umbrella of digital humanities. Most importantly, the knowledge I gained from this year’s attendance will help me take digital humanities to colleagues and students beyond my home department (linguistics).

The opening keynote speaker talked about creativity with reference to AI. It was a thought-provoking lecture where interesting questions were floated that had no absolute answer. Think for a moment about the literary pieces produced - or co-produced - by AI. Is it (AI) able to exercise human-like creativity and freedom? Are we witnessing a post-literary era, and what does the future of literature look like? The in-depth analysis of those co-created literary products can help us reach the answer(s).

The series of sessions followed, with interesting lectures on archiving projects and 10-minute activities ensuring attendee engagement. A line up of practice sessions on SketchUp modelling software and other online tools further helped clarify the purpose behind humanists going digital with text – be it coding or decoding. DH helps solve problems such as reading an archeological floor plan – for instance, marble map of the city of Rome, as well as creating 3D models of ancient buildings and sites. Also, the participants enjoyed creating 3D building structures on Sketchup under the guidance of the resource person.

Another session dropped a fun fact that LLMs were initially created as universal semantic translators, and the other emergent abilities came up later. A session on TEI (text encoding initiative) talked about standardizing the practices of encoding texts and digitizing old documents. Seeing pictures of actual stone inscriptions dating back hundreds of years and Jane Austen’s manuscript was the most insightful part of the lecture. In addition, labelling an old text document on a collaborative digital whiteboard with hundred plus participants was a fun learning exercise. Though online, DHOxSS kept the element of networking alive.  

Though geography is not my area of expertise, the closing keynote was so captivating that I stayed glued to the screen until the end. It focused on how DH could help ease the process of symbolizing and effectively reading and creating maps. Some DH projects in geography were also discussed along with pictorial display making it easily understandable for both online and in-person attendees.

In the end, I just realized that there is absolutely no subject area where DH cannot make a difference.

Thank you DHOxSS for another incredible learning opportunity!