”Batteries not Included – Digital Humanities: in Archaeology, at Birmingham and Beyond!”
Professor Vince Gaffney (University of Birmingham)

The Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (IBM VISTA) at Birmingham has now been in operation for a decade. Originating as an archaeological GIS support group within a commercial unit, the operation has expanded and VISTA staff and researchers now participate in digital projects covering many periods and in many countries. Not surprisingly, the nature of the Centre's operations has changed over time.  This paper reviews recent work at the Centre, including major projects at Stonehenge and across the North Sea, and considers how the digital archaeology might develop in the face of evolving technology and also archaeological expectation.

In the month of "Blue Monday" - the so-called "most depressing day of the year" - Professor Carrette uses his inaugural professorial lecture to consider what makes life worth living. The lecture will examine in detail an 1895 essay by the American, New York born, philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It will address both religious and non-religious meanings of life and seek to reveal James's appreciation of the vital element that keeps us alive and free from depression. As James argues, it is fear of life rather than death that is the problem of existence. The lecture will show how "not-knowing" is as important as knowing and that the poetic imagination is as important as scientific fact in the making of a philosophy of life. The lecture will lighten its subject matter by framing its four sections with film clips from Woody Allen's angst filled reflections on the meaning of life, showing there is some similarity between these two very different New Yorkers.

One of the challenges for theology is the apparent ease with which one can search for correlations between religious narratives/imagery and movie narratives/imagery, and the hunt for Christ figures in movies is certainly leading the pack. Such projects can reach absurd limits, to the point that by adopting a typology developed by Anton Karl Kozlovic in 2004 it would not be difficult to identify Meryl Streep's Oscar-nominated performance in The Iron Lady as being rich in christological provenance. In my talk, though, I will reject the assumption that such endeavours are efficacious, either theologically or culturally, and I will argue that such typologies actually close down, rather than open up, serious dialogue between theology and film. Using a number of illustrations, I will be encouraging those interested in this sort of approach to push theological considerations beyond the Christ-figure designation and into a deeper examination of both the movie as a whole and its theological implications. I will conclude by asking whether Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher is really a Christ-figure, or whether, in an inversion of Kozlovic's typology, Jesus Christ may more properly be understood as a Streep/Thatcher-figure.

When someone speaks but is not heard because of their accent, or their sex, or the colour of their skin, they suffer a distinctive form of injustice—they are undermined as a knower. This kind of injustice, which I call testimonial injustice, is not only an ethical problem but also a political one; for citizens are not free unless they get a fair hearing when they try to contest wrongful treatment. I shall argue that not only individuals but also public institutions need to have the virtue of testimonial justice. If our police, our juries, our complaints panels lack that virtue, then some groups cannot contest. And if you can’t do that, you do not have political freedom.

ŒGods, soldiers, mummies: making Egypt Roman
        In the century after conquering Egypt from Kleopatra, did Rome have any cultural impact on Egypt¹s complex indigenous and hellenistic civilisation? Was there any ŒRomanisation¹ of Egypt? This illustrated lecture pursues some case studies drawing on both the papyrus documents and archaeological finds: the cult of the crocodile god Sobek at Tebtunis, the legionary veteran Pompeius and the death of his daughter, the Fayyum mummy portraits, the tax-collector Nemesion and the emperor Claudius¹ letter to Alexandria.