Huw Jones is Head of the Digital Library Unit and Digital Humanities Coordinator at Cambridge University Library, working with researchers, curators, and technical staff to make the Library’s special collections accessible online. Cambridge Digital Library is our main platform for digital humanities, containing more than 30,000 items, from the papers of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, to manuscript and photograph collections representing the global scope of the Library’s physical collections.

IIIF and Digital Humanities

Cambridge Digital Library has been supporting content-driven Digital Humanities projects since the online launch of the Isaac Newton papers in 2011, covering everything from 3,000 year-old Oracle Bones to aerial photography from the 1940s. In this talk, I will explore some of the developments we have seen during this period – imaging as an investigative research activity, digital resources as datasets, the formalisation of digital humanities in Cambridge, and the growing emphasis on collaboration in the field as a whole. In this context, I will focus on IIIF as an open and collaborative technology which is having a huge impact not just on the technical possibilities for the sharing and analysis of image data, but also on the culture of digital humanities. Finally I will look at what’s new in digital humanities, and how a similar open and collaborative approach might open up new possibilities in new areas.