The Digital Arts and Humanities Lab is based in the Faculty of Arts Building (FAB by name, fab by nature!) at the University of Warwick, in the West Midlands of England. The lab creates learning, research, and development opportunities for our community of researchers, teachers, technology specialists, and students. We research new tools and techniques, as well as methods for developing our capabilities. This is guided by the structure described in the DAHL Framework• Discover, analyse, and interpret patterns in large real-world datasets (present or historical).
• Discover, communicate, analyse, and interpret human stories in close-up.
• Undertake, analyse, and interpret creative practice and experimentation, exploring being humans in a world satu... More.
The essential underlying philosophical idea behind our approach is that Arts and Humanities education plays an essential role in society, developing people with the capabilities and sensibilities we need to allow us (and the planet) to flourish. Technologies of all kinds are essential to this – both positively as part of creative solutions, and in equipping us with a critical understanding of the damaging impacts technologies may have. Tech is so deeply embedded in life today, the nature of our relationship with it colours everything we do.
For example, having an instrumental relationship with a bot may alter how we relate to real people. And consequently we need to critically and creatively explore these relationships. The Arts and Humanities disciplines are essential to this.
The DAHL explores how we develop and use technologies and a relationship with technologies to support these goals.
Read about what we did in 2023-24.
Read about what we plan to explore in 2024-25.
Latest articles
What does a Technology Adoption/Adaptation Advisor do?
We frequently run events to engage the Faculty community in exploring new technologies. The VR Club is an example. We do this to:
Gain shared knowledge (for us and the participants) of how innovations may fit (or not) into people’s study, work, and lives – how they might solve a problem, help to achieve a goal, ...
Advice (#1) for Classics students doing digital storytelling film making projects
Students do a digital storytelling assessment as part of the Hellenistic World module in Classics and Ancient Civilisation (Warwick University). Here’s the advice I give them to get started with it.
Get inspired
For this project, my advice to begin with is to have a look at some good historical documentaries, and consider how they use visuals ...
DAHL activities in 2023-24
In 2023-24 we covered topics including:
Could an AI do stand-up comedy in VR? A discussion with comedy researcher, technologist, and stand-up Jim Judges to explore the capabilities and limitations of AI in the creative industries.
Museum design: integrating physical and digital (in which I demonstrated the use of Raspberry Pi physical computing).
Making big events interactive using ...
Learning through stretch-challenges in creative digital industries
Immersive experience company MBD have recently undertaken a difficult creative challenge, not as a commission, but as a self-set difficult project. This kind of stretch-challenge, and
reflective practiceStanding back from your work and considering what is going well, what not, how you might do things better, or do different things, and what you can learn from experiences. Much of what we think about reflective practice comes from the philosopher Donald Schön's research into successful practitioner... More, is an important approach we can all learn from, whether we are in the creative digital industries, academia, or elsewhere.
Camera techniques for academic films
This is a presentation from 2016, but still relevant today. It demonstrates a useful range of easy to do techniques for making interesting films that engage the viewer.
DAHL Topics for 2024-2025
A reflection on the plans for DAHL this year, from Dr Robert O’Toole.
My approach this year will be to explore a range of exciting and challenging topics covering the four aspects of the
DAHL framework• Discover, analyse, and interpret patterns in large real-world datasets (present or historical).
• Discover, communicate, analyse, and interpret human stories in close-up.
• Undertake, analyse, and interpret creative practice and experimentation, exploring being humans in a world satu... More, resulting in live events, podcasts, videos, articles, and reading lists – including recommendations for online courses, software, hardware and techniques. ...
When should we formally regulate a technology?
This is inspired by the first chapter of Lucy Suchman’s book Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2nd edition 2012). Suchman is an anthropologist who has worked in, and critically examines, the technology industry (having been a researcher at the massively influential Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre). I’ll not examine that work in detail here. This is some notes ...
The ethical challenges of self-driving cars
I’m listening to the philosophical podcast series This is Technology Ethics. Much of this concerns, but is not limited to, the advance of AI and its implications.
Episode 2 (20th September 2023) uses the case of self-driving cars (SDCs) to explore methods in ethics. As the authors say, this is a current hot-spot for technology ethics ...
Self-service recording studios at Warwick
This article is about new facilities at Warwick that make it easy for us to record high quality video presentations, interviews, and discussions. There are also plans to add podcasting facilities to these rooms.
Teams as a base for active, engaged, collaborative teaching
This video demonstrates the approach that I am using in January 2024, for our undergraduate Intro to Design Thinking module. Our aim is for the students to feel and behave as if they are members of a design consultancy team, so we use methods and tools used in that kind of organisation. Teams is the ...
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