DH Workshops at Guelph

The DH@Guelph team is excited to announce that registration is now live for our DH@Guelph Summer Workshops 2020. Please save the dates of May 4-7th 2020 and join us for what promises to be an exciting week.
Our keynote address will be delivered by the wonderful Angel David Nieves, and we’re thrilled to welcome the fab folks from Feral Feminisms for a panel on open, feminist publishing!

Our Courses:

1. Materializing the Collection (Milena Radzikowska, Dr. Shana MacDonald)

2. Computational Digital Humanities: Command Line Fundamentals (David J. Birnbaum, Emma Schwarz)

3. Reading the Humanities from a Distance: A Survey of Text Analysis Tools (Jennifer Marvin)

4. Semantic Text Analysis with Word Embeddings (Lisa Baer)

5. Equity in Digital Publishing (Ela Przybylo, Amy Verhaeghe, Sharifa Patel, Krista Benson, Jae Basiliere)

6. Spatial Humanities: Exploring GIS in the Humanities (Quin Shirk-Luckett, Teresa Lewitsky)

7. Machine Learning and Digital Humanities (Dr. Rachel Starry, Paul Barrett, Nathan Taback)

8. Linked Data and Ontologies for the Humanities (Susan Brown, Kim Martin, Deb Stacey)

9. Getting Going with Scholarship Online: An Introduction to CWRC (Mihaela Illovan, Susan Brown) You can register at this link, and don’t hesitate to email dhguelph[@]uoguelph.ca with any questions or concerns.
Warmly,
Kim Martin (Associate Director)Susan Brown (Director)DH@Guelph

Call for Papers – NJIT Digital Humanities Showcase 2020

We are inviting proposals from NJ, NY and from around the region for the NJIT Digital Humanities Showcase 2020 to take place on Friday, April 17, 2020. Please see below the call for proposals or here. Deadline to submit an abstract is March 1.

CFP: NJIT Digital Humanities Showcase 2020Friday, April 17, 2020, 11:30am-2:00pmDigital Humanities at NJIT (DH@NJIT) invites proposals for the annual DH Showcase. The Showcase brings together researchers, scholars, librarians, and technologists in the humanities from around the region to present current projects and research work, while investigating broader ideas in the digital humanities as a growing field of intellectual inquiry.

The Showcase is interested in proposals for short papers and digital posters/demonstrations. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Big Data in digital humanities
Digital approaches to textual studies
Public digital humanities
Creative coding and electronic literature
Spatial analysis, mapping
Digital art/architectural history
Sound
Digital accessibility
Digital humanities pedagogy
Preserving and sustaining digital humanities projects
Digital gaming, critical play, game design, and gaming culture
Studies on the uses and behaviors of social media sites users
Community-based online media practices
Digital humanities project design/management
Institutional DH partnerships and project-based collaborations

We hope the Showcase will stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue and cross traditional professional barriers. We are particularly interested in international and underserved populations’ perspectives on digital humanities and computer science.

Interested applicants are invited to submit a title and 200-300 word abstract along with a 2-page CV by March 1, 2020 using the Submission Form (https://forms.gle/e1fPovrf4JHTSo8z8). NJIT Digital Humanities Showcase 2020 welcomes submissions in the following formats:

Short paper (7 minutes)

Digital poster/project demonstration

The event is free and open to the public.

Antwerp Summer School in Digital Humanities: Making a Digital Edition – Basic Skills and Technologies

Focus: Digital Scholarly Editing, Raspberry Pi, Command Line, HTML, JSON, TEI-XML, XPath, XSLT, eXist-db

Dates: 29 June -3 July

Place: Antwerp (Belgium)

Price: €150 (early bird); €200 (regular)

Deadline: 16 March (early bird); 6 April (regular)

From 29 June to 3 July 2020, the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC) is organising its third annual Summer School in Digital Humanities.

Course Description

The summer school will exist of an intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital scholarly editions. Over the course of the week, participants will gradually learn how to transcribe and describe textual cultural heritage documents in TEI-compliant XML, process their transcriptions using related X-technologies (Xpath and XSLT), and prepare them for the web. Specifically, participants will set up a Local Area Network of Raspberry Pi minicomputers to develop an eXist-db XML database for hosting and sharing their materials in the form of a digital scholarly edition.

As students will be introduced to these technologies step by step, the course requires no prior skills or knowledge – other than to complete a minor autodidactic exercise to make sure everyone has a basic understanding of some of the core technologies the course will build on (HTML, CSS, Command Line).

Keynote Speaker

The organizers are happy to announce that the summer school’s keynote lecture will be presented by prof. dr. Elena Pierazzo, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Tours, at the Centre d’Études Superieures de la Renaissance where she directs the MA program in Digital Humanities and approaches to the digitisation of cultural heritage materials (Intelligence des Patronises).

Professor Pierazzo has been the Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative for two mandates, and has served for two mandates in the TEI Technical Council and was involved in the TEI user-community, with a special interest in the transcription, edition and cataloguing of modern and medieval manuscripts. She was co-chairs the working group on digital editions of the European Network NeDiMAH and one of the scientist in chief for DiXiT a Marie Curie ITN devoted to the training of doctoral students to the practice of digital scholarly editing. And in 2019, she was invited by the ADHO (Alliance of the Digital Humanities Organisation) as the co-Chair of the Program Committee of the DH2019 in Utrecht.

Although this lecture is part of the summer school’s official programme, the keynote will be organised in the context of the University of Antwerp’s platform{DH} Lecture Series, and opened up to the larger public.

Registration

Registration for the summer starts from €150 (early bird) and closes on Monday 6 April (regular). For more information on the application procedure, please visit our registration page.

As a training event, the summer school is organised in conjunction with CLARIAH-VL – a collaborative infrastructure project across Flemish universities to which ACDC and the platform{DH} are affiliated. For more detailed information about the summer school and our programme, please visit our website: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/summer-schools/digital-humanities/.

Dip Into NYC Digital Humanities Week

Workshops have been organized, speakers have been invited, and spaces reserved. NYCDH Week 2020 is officially one week away. With more than 40 workshops, demos, and events (our most ever), a robust Kickoff Event on Monday which includes graduate student awards, themed panel, keynote speaker, lightning talks, and the presentation of the NYCDH Award, and a chance to meet hundreds of active and involved colleagues NYCDH Week is going to be a blast! So here are a few announcements.

First of all, we are proud to announce that Matthew K. Gold will be the recipient of the NYCDH Award for his significant contributions to the NYCDH community. Past NYCDH Award winner Steven Brier will be presenting Matt with the award at the Kickoff Event. Read about Matt’s work and the NYCDH Award here.

Second, our panel on Histories and Representations of Communities Across the Five Boroughs is finalized and will feature Monxo López from the Museum of the City of New York, Shawn Hill and Desislava Stoeva of Fordham University, and Sara B. Cohn from City College, CUNY. You can read more about the panel and panelists here.

And don’t forget that Matt Knutzen of the NYPL will be providing the keynote at the Kickoff Event as well. Read about Matt here.

The Kickoff Event on Monday, February 3 is almost already fully registered so sign up fast!

Perhaps most importantly however is it is time to sign up for workshops, demos, and events. The NYCDH Week website has been fully updated with topics, times, and locations, so now is the time to find out what appeals to you most. Along with some old regulars we have a lot of new sessions this year so there is bound to be something for everyone. You can look at the sessions by either browsing by title on this page, or looking at the weekly schedule here (for daily listings use the pulldown menu in the top navigation).

We look forward to a great week and to see new and familiar faces alike throughout the city next week. Enjoy!

Reading (as) Data: Literary History with Mass-Digitized Collections

All are welcome to attend this talk

12:00 to 1:30pm, Friday, January 31, 2020. NYU Department of English, Event Space
244 Greene St, Room 106

In Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, newspapers were the main source of fiction, local and imported. Fast forward to the 21st century, and the National Library of Australia’s Trove database hosts the largest open-access, mass-digitized collection of historical newspapers internationally. This fortunate confluence of technological systems (newspapers and mass-digitization) made possible the discovery of a transnational collection of over 21,000 publications of novels, novellas and short stories in early Australian newspapers. With reference to this massively expanded record of fiction in Australia and Australian fiction, this paper poses some key questions for literary and reading history in the mass-digitised age. Is bigger always better in computational literary studies? What new data-rich methods are useful for literary and reading history? And what happens to all this data when our projects finish?

The speaker is Katherine Bode, Professor of literary and textual studies at the Australian National University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018-2022). She is the author of books including A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018) and Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012).

Call for Papers — 2020 Culture Mapping Symposium

NewYorkScapes, NYUDH, and the Digital Culture/s Colloquium are thrilled to announce the 2020 Culture Mapping Symposium, to take place April 17-18 at NYU’s Washington Square campus. The deadline for submissions is February 17, 2020.

This year, we are also glad to be able to offer two travel grants for students and/or early career practitioners. Simply apply inside the submission form! Presenters can expect to hear back in March.

CULTURE MAPPING 2020: FUTURES

CALL FOR PAPERS, PROJECTS, AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

In Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, scholar and feminist digital humanities practitioner Jacqueline Wernimont examines recordkeeping technologies used to account for human lives and bodies, beginning as early as the 15th century. The book, in part a robust critical historiography, challenges us to interrogate and engage mindfully with contemporary data issues and methods, and with the ways in which they shape our narratives regarding the value of lives and cultures.

In the introduction, Dr. Wernimont describes the project as “speculative and experimental, reading mediations and making a mess of apparent order in service of alternative futures.” By tracing the long, fraught histories of technologies of human enumeration, Numbered Lives refuses to take for granted the epistemological and ontological models undergirding quotidian quantum media; for Wernimont, it is through this interdisciplinary and media-archaeological that “we can [perhaps] find matrices that will help us create more just futures.”

Culture Mapping 2020 takes the occasion of a new decade to assemble scholars, students, artists, and other practitioners to reflect together on their own work and processes to a similar end: in service of alternative, capacious futures that feature justice, accessibility, and critical pedagogy as core concerns. We invite proposals that explore the intersection of culture studies, “mapping” in its myriad registers, and digital methods through the lens of this theme.

Proposals from across the humanities, arts, and social sciences are welcome. Faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, staff and administrators, and community members are all encouraged to participate. Potential areas of engagement include but are not limited to:

• Digital cartography & GIS as tools for humanities research and teaching

• Visualizing literary and historical materials, including speculative fiction

• Digital-born media, art, literature, and games that thematize futurity

• Resistant, anti-racist, decolonial, indigenous, and feminist mapping

• City and community planning; urban studies

• Speculative design and emerging technologies, including XR and participatory media

• Activist methodologies and pedagogies

• Data management planning and digital project maintenance

Submissions can take the form of traditional paper / project presentations (10-20 minutes), five-minute lightning talks, performances, installations, or roundtables (30-40 minutes). You may also propose a workshop on a methodology — technical or otherwise — in which you have expertise and which you feel would be of broad interest.

To submit a proposal, please complete the online submission form. The submission deadline is February 17, 2019.

Call for Papers, American Studies Association

DH, Small and Radical

A guaranteed session sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, November 12-15, 2020, Baltimore, Maryland

The Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association invites proposals for papers that consider the topic “Small DH” under the ASA 2020 conference theme, “Creativity Within Revolt.”

Small DH can include individual scholars working on DH projects, DH programs at small and/or underfunded institutions, DH programs at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs) that have received significant grant funding for DH, and/or DH initiatives or projects that are not affiliated with an institution.

With large institutions producing big DH projects (big data, big project teams, big grants), is doing DH at small institutions a form of revolt? Can Small DH be radical, or offer the promise or potential of radical, long-lasting change?

Additionally, DH has been viewed as a potential avenue of revolt within the academy, and alternately as a symptom of the neoliberalization of the academy (and therefore “revolting” to many). How does Small DH inform this debate, or change our understanding of DH’s potential to inspire revolt?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Expectations of starting DH programs at small schools, with limited or no funding
Grant-funded DH programs at SLACs
Labor issues and Small DH
Outsized expectations and Small DH
Minimal computing
Well-funded DH projects with small research teams
Choosing to do DH outside of the academy
Ways professional organizations can/should support Small DH

Please send a 300-word proposal and a brief bio to ASAdhCaucus@gmail.com by Wednesday, January 29 at 10:00 pm ET. Decision notifications will be sent the following day.

Apply to the Venice Summer School in Digital and Public Humanities

The first edition of the Venice Summer School in Digital and Public Humanities, will be held from 6-10 July 2020, organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) at the Department of Humanities (DSU), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

The Summer School aims at providing advanced and in-depth training in theories, technologies and methods of Digital and Public Humanities, focusing on cultural, archeological, historical, literary, and artistic materials. The school will give the participants the opportunity to engage in debates about digital and public cultural heritage and humanities research, while enhancing their competences and skills of digitizing materials and sources and for modeling, analysing and visualizing multimedia humanities data. All classes will be taught in English.

The VeDPH summer school is divided into four thematic strands:
(1) Digital Textual Scholarship
(2) Digital and Public History
(3) Digital and Public Art History
(4) Digital Archaeology and its Public

The School is composed by a series of plenary lectures, parallel workshops, and site visits. Lectures will describe the greater context in which these theories and methods will be applied: a world in which the work of scholars is routinely aided by computer-assisted techniques, with both old and novel problems, challenges and solutions. With a learning-by-doing approach, participants will reflect every stage of the realisation of a digital object and on how to make use of the data in own projects. Lessons and labs will be focused on modeling, retrieving, analysing, visualising, and publishing data created on relevant sites of the city of Venice (such as the Biblioteca Marciana, Archivio di Stato, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Ghetto) and its surroundings (such as M9 Museum in Mestre, excavations at Torcello or Altino). Legal questions of intellectual property and publication licences will be covered, as well as the latest web developments, such as semantic web and linked open data technologies, in order to evaluate different data models for cultural heritage objects.

Strand #1: Digital Textual Scholarship
This strand focuses on the application of digital methods and technologies to literary and historical texts and documents, especially from Venetian archives and libraries. Introductory lessons on theories and best practices are accompanied by hands-on and laboratory sessions for their immediate implementation in collaborative project works. Participants are introduced to theories and best practices of digital scholarly editing. Aspects of textual materiality (digitisation, formal description and analysis) are covered as well as methods and standards for the encoding, annotation and transformation of texts (XML, TEI; XSLT). Finally, the integration into the semantic web (Linked Open Data, IIIF) will be preformed and tools for the enrichment, analysis and visualisation of textual data will be applied (CollateX, Natural Language Processing, Distant Reading). The strand includes a visit of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

Strand #2: Digital and Public History
This strand focuses on the application of digital techniques and a public approach to the development and presentation of historical research. The digital aspect revolves around some of the main tools used by digital historians, such as Text Mining, Network Analysis, and Historical GIS. The ‘public’ aspect is centred on the issues related to the research with the public and the dissemination beyond the classroom, from public memory to public sources to public engagement, with specific focus on topics such as TV, museums, and social media. The theoretical debate and the role played by digital and public historians in the changing landscape of the historical discipline are also considered. The strand includes a visit to M9-Museo del ‘900 in Mestre, to give the students a concrete example of how the past can be seen and shown through the digital & public lenses.

Strand #3: Digital and Public Art History
This strand focuses on the technological development and its cultural implications which occured in the arts sector over the last decades. In doing this, the digital aspect is approached both on the side of artistic production and the art system as well as on the side of museums and art historical representation. The issues of technological change, digital nativity, virtual realms and digital tools will be discussed at length and put in the context of past and recent artistic productions, art institutions and public sprawl. Both the theoretical debate and practical tools for digital art historians shall be explored by means of lectures and labs. The strand includes a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to give the students a concrete example of new digital and public approaches in art institutions. Eventually, the strand includes the opening of an art exhibition on the analog-digital relationship by Italian painter Aldo Sergio expressly organized for the Venice Centre for Digital and Public History.

Strand #4: Digital Archaeology and its Public
This strand focuses on theories and practices that archaeologists apply in surveys, remote sensing, spatial analysis, data collection, and data management. Participant will engage in digital strategies to analyze the heritage and visualize, share and communicate it to the public. They will approach digital heritage as a virtual tool to explore the mutual relationship between environment, humans and the past. Using the lagoon area as test case (Adria, Mira, Torcello, Altino and Caorle), the aim of the strand is to learn how critically archaeology may be engaged with the “digital”. We will work on questions such as “why, by whom and for what purpose do we cultivate digital technologies”. Digital data and public(s) are deeply connected, and nowadays archaeologists are not only asked to build set of coherent digital data from the surveys, but they have to foster methods for engaging new audiences and facing the global societal challenges. Digital tools may help the de-colonization of the archaeological practice, going beyond the mere reconstruction of the past and being able to detect and analyze the cultural and political frameworks by which we share and perpetuate the memory.

Keynote speakers: Serge Noiret (European University Institute, Florence), Elena Pierazzo (Université de Tours), and Fabio Vitali (Università di Bologna)

Guest lecturers: Peter Bell (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), Mirco Carrattieri (Istituto Ferruccio Parri, Milano), Frédéric Clavert (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Lisa Dieckmann (Universität zu Köln), Francesco Frizzera (Museo della Guerra, Rovereto), Erma Hermens (Rijks Museum Amsterdam), Angus Mol (University of Leiden), Giampaolo Salice (Università di Cagliari), Miroslav Halak (Galerie Belvedere, Vienna), et al.

Lecturers from VeDPH/DSU: Federico Boschetti, Alberto Campagnolo, Leonardo Campus, Elisa Corrò, Stefano Dall’Aglio, Holger Essler, Lorenzo Calvelli, Carolina Fernández-Castrillo, Franz Fischer, Daniele Fusi, Tiziana Mancinelli, Diego Mantoan, Paolo Monella, Dorit Raines, Linda Spinazzè, Barbara Tramelli

Each strand will include 15 participants maximum.

Participation fee: €300

14 scholarships are available with an amount of € 600 each (gross payment).

Application deadline: 06.03.2020 (midnight CET)

Ranking results: 20.03.2020

Acceptance deadline: 02.04.2020

The application must be submitted via e-mail to: didattica.dsu@unive.it or via PEC (certified email) to: protocollo@pec.unive.it and bear the subject header: Application for Admission to VeSSDPH.

The following documents may also be attached to the application:
– Application Form (see below)
– Motivation letter
– MA Diploma (or equivalent)
– CV evidence in experiences, skills and knowledge in the field
– Copy of valid ID or passport

Essential Criteria: University master/diploma (or equivalent)

Selection and Ranking Criteria (total score 20/20):
1) Motivation letter (max 16) – Reason of interest as demonstrated by a short description (max. 100 words) of an approved or ongoing research project involving Digital and Public Humanities methodologies:
a) quality of research project
b) integration of Digital and Public Humanities methods in the project
c) career perspectives
d) lack of funding / institutional support / training opportunities

2) Graduation mark (max 2), PhD (max 2)

Submission date will be taken into consideration in the case of candidates with equal ranking.

For further information visit https://www.unive.it/vedph or write to didattica.dsu@unive.it

Call for Application and Application Form (download):
https://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/comunicazione/cafoscarinews/img/grafica/Call_for_Application_VeSSDPH.pdf

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Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Institute (HILT) Registration Open

The Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Institute (HILT) is delighted to announce registration for our 2020 Institute is now open. HILT2020 is hosted by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, May 18-22, 2020.

Courses for HILT2020 are:

Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities

Critical Digital Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Material Culture

Getting Started with Data, Tools, and Platforms

Introduction to Text Encoding

Introduction to Web Development Design and Principles

Latinx Digital Praxis: From theAnalog to the Digital

Spatial Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Applications

Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula

For more information on HILT2020 including registration, costs, and scholarships please visit: http://dhtraining.org/hilt/conferences/hilt-2020/. To register directly, please visit: https://cvent.me/4BrrGO

Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities

Taught by Anne Cong-Huyen and Dhanashree Thorat

In the last few years, we have seen a resurgence of minority activisms, ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Me Too movement, from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico, even as white supremacist and xenophobic ideologies and policies have flourished. When silence can be tantamount to complicity, what is our responsibility as academics and what can digital humanities offer in this era of renewed political activism?

This course takes a historically grounded approached to apply anti-racist feminist praxis to digital humanities. Focusing particularly on labor, infrastructure, methods, and pedagogy, we will interrogate the silences and gaps in digital humanities as well as work to adopt and embed anti-racist praxis in our digital humanities work. These are some of our guiding questions our course will take: What can digital humanities practitioners learn from past and current liberation movements? How do we build and support anti-racist feminist movements and networks in our digital humanities work? How can digital humanities pursue community accountability and advocacy?

This is an introductory course and we will begin with foundational scholarship on anti-racist praxis as well as the disciplinary critique of digital humanities by #transformDH and #DHpoco. No prior coding experience is needed and readings will be provided. As scholars and librarians with backgrounds in Asian American studies and community organizing, we center scholarship and knowledge production from Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Global South scholars and activists. Each day will combine conversation and dialogue with hands-on activities. The goal of this course is to enable participants to reflect on and implement anti-racist praxis in their own scholarship, methodology, pedagogy, and labor practices. This course will be taught using Emergent Strategy & Anti-Oppressive Facilitation methods, practices drawn from community organizing that build care into their processes.

Participants will collaboratively build a guide and bibliography for anti-racist feminist digital humanities, with the intent of future peer review and publication.

Critical Digital Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Material Culture

Taught by Aleia Brown

This course will teach participants an approach to theory and practice of critical curation and web publishing for material culture that is grounded in historical inquiry and context. Participants new to digital curation will learn how to use common tools, while more proficient digital humanist might learn new methodologies around critical curation and harm reduction. A survey of Black women’s material culture will form the central case study for the course. Participants will have the opportunity to work with data sets provided by the instructor that surface how Black women have fashioned themselves (through adornment), their environments (through utilitarian, and decorative and fine arts), and their experiences (through in-person and digital aesthetic choices). While the material culture presents compelling cause for celebration and appreciation, they also invite us to confront issues of appropriation, violation of sacred interior spaces, and barriers into the creative economy. By positioning Black women as makers, participants will also understand the dynamics of their work and their role in both historical and contemporary struggles for freedom. Exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic implications will help participants understand how they might ultimately manage data and develop digital exhibitions of their own. Together, we will explore how our work as digital humanists can abet or reduce the harms that hitch on to hypervisibility and erasure of Black women and their creative work.

Participants will learn to employ historical and critical digital curation practices for any data set. Those with projects in progress are encouraged to join and share their experiences and concerns to enrich our group discussions. The lab portion of this course will involve a deep dive into learning Omeka and Scalar. The lab will also briefly introduce other tools like Audacity, Etherpad, Storymaps, and Unity that participants can use to create more dynamic digital collections. Participants will complete the course with a strong grasp on ethics around image-use, copyright, and digital stewardship.

Together we will explore the following questions:

What do we gain (or lose) by embracing historical inquiry that explores the material and digital worlds?
How can we employ methodologies of care while exploring and exhibiting very interior and sometimes sacred spaces and histories in public?
What processes can we employ that do not aid in the harm that comes with Black women’s hypervisibility and erasure?
What does thoughtful digital curation entail?

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the intensive course, participants will be able to:

Apply the idea of thoughtful digital curation
Design a multi-media online exhibition using Omeka and Scalar
Understand and apply a methodology around studying and making public interior histories

Getting Started with Data, Tools, and Platforms

Taught by Brandon Locke and Catherine DeRose

Starting a digital humanities research project can be quite intimidating. This course is designed to make that process less so by exploring tools and platforms that support digital humanities research, analysis, and publication. We will begin by reframing sources as data that enable digital research. We will work throughout the week on approaches to (1) finding, evaluating, and acquiring (2) cleaning and preparing (3) exploring (4) analyzing (5) communicating and sharing data. Emphasis will be placed across all stages on how to manage a beginner digital research project in such a way that helps to ensure that your project remains accessible, that the process is well documented, and that the data are reusable.

Throughout this course, we will examine several existing projects, and move through the process of collecting, cleaning, and structuring humanities data and sources and plugging them into tools and platforms to analyze, visualize, share, and publish the data and analysis. Exploration of these stages of project-building will include a technical walk-through, as well as an examination of the tools and their underlying methodologies.

Introduction to Text Encoding

Taught by Laura Weakly

Introduction to Text Encoding is a beginning level class designed to familiarize humanities scholars with encoding textual materials according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. The TEI Guidelines have long been the de facto international standard for encoding a wide variety of textual materials from books and manuscripts to magazines, correspondence, and legal documents.

We will look at current TEI-encoded digital humanities projects including, but not limited to: the O Say Can You See: Early Washington D.C. Law and Family Project, the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, and the Every Week Magazine Project. We will discuss how the use of TEI aids in providing access and discoverability. We will discuss not only the hows of text encoding — what tags to use and where to use them — but also the whys — what aspects of the materials are encoded and how that encoding will impact scholars and other end users of the materials.

The course also acknowledges that TEI may not be appropriate for all materials and so it will touch on other approaches that may work better in those circumstances. Readings will be provided prior to the class for in-class discussion. Participants will be encouraged to bring their own source materials if available.

Introduction to Web Development Design and Principles

Taught by Karin Dalziel

This course will provide an overview of web development and design principles for beginners. You’ll receive an introduction to the skills and tools to publish a project online that will include basic skills like choosing a domain name, finding a web host, and how to configure your host. Students will be encouraged to acquire their own server space with support from instructors, but this is not required.

From there, the course will explore the basics of web development, including HTML, CSS and Javascript; command line basics; version control using git; and managing your data and preparing it for publication. We will also explore publishing platforms, from a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) to static HTML/minimalist computing methods.

Finally, we’ll discuss how to conceptualize your website/project including, but not limited to: deciding on your site structure, navigation, and layout; adhering to web standards and accessibility; applying metadata to your site so it appears well in search results; designing for multiple platforms; and the basics of visual design.

By the end of this course, students will be capable of publishing a functional website. Students are encouraged to bring a small sample dataset or ideas for a publication to assist with this effort. Participants should bring their own laptop with them or contact the instructor if you cannot.

Latinx Digital Praxis: From theAnalog to the Digital

Taught by Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Carolina Villarroel

Latinx Digital Praxis: From the Archive to the Digital explores analog and digital methodologies to create scholarship and knowledge around the experiences of US Latinx peoples. Participants will be introduced to the process of developing toolkits and resources to explore archival sources of Latinx peoples while taking into account their historical, cultural and political context. Participants will be guided through processes involved in rescuing materials that have been or could fall through the cracks of the institutional apparatus to ask why and how we can rethink these processes in order to incorporate these underrepresented communities and their history within the institutional discourse. We will interrogate the lived experiences of transnational, exile, native, immigrant peoples which are crucial at the time of researching, reading, understanding and writing about them.

Questions that this course will cover include, but are not limited to:

How do we approach US Latinx experience?
How do we understand the importance of ethnic materials in the US?
How do we approach and incorporate languages other than English into DH?
How to identify materials for future projects (research, copyright issues, etc.)?
How do we create meaningful and respectful data?
How do we work with the community owners of the knowledge?
How do we create knowledge and scholarship based on these materials?
How do we engage our local and immediate communities?

We expect participants will complete this course with knowledge of how to use digital surrogates to expand access and dissemination of underrepresented collections, as well as develop plans for community-building and partnerships that could help further the mission and scope of the projects. The course uses an interdisciplinary approach that at its very base questions archival politics and praxis. Additionally, participants will learn about strategies necessary to advocate for programming, grant writing, and faculty and student engagement (undergraduate and graduate).

No prior technical knowledge is required in this course. Anyone with an interest in Latinx studies and digital humanities is welcome.

This course is based on the work of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program located at the University of Houston, one of the premier research programs for US Latinx scholarship with a trajectory of more than 27 years of locating, preserving, and making available the written legacy of Latinx in the US since colonial times until 1960.

Spatial Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Applications

Taught by Christy Hyman

This course asks how can we use maps to reveal spaces of possibility for human potential? How can spatial analysis interrogate geographies in ways that highlight the human elements of agency and powers? Why and how is critical GIS essential in an era of environmental crisis?

This course combines theory, methods, and applications geared towards helping participants develop an understanding of critical spatial data analysis. Mapping encompasses a range of activities that give users the ability to create locational reference to places on a map. In this course we dig deeper to explore how place referencing fits in the range of services offered in a GIS system with a critical lens. This course provides participants with practical experience of geoprocessing analytics such as georectification, overlay analysis, and spatial data extraction. These techniques will be applied to a variety of social and environmental issues using both ArcGIS and QGIS, two popular spatial tools. The instructor will provide the datasets necessary for the course. Prior to class, participants will need to have QGIS installed on their laptops. This course is designed for anyone with an interest in mapping or GIS broadly

Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula

Taught by Brandon Walsh and Kristen Mapes

From individual course assignments to full syllabi, informal training to structuring of degree programs, digital humanists are frequently asked to teach their students and collaborators new methods for digital research in a variety of different situations.. This course focuses on digital humanities instruction activity at several scales: individual assignments, semester-long courses, and full programs. While the conversation will be geared primarily to sustained, long-term instruction typical of credit-bearing courses, the activities and discussions will be relevant for a range of different teaching contexts.

Participants will work together to consider how their individual teaching values and philosophies shape their digital and analog pedagogy. We will focus on tangible expressions of digital humanities pedagogy:

Digital humanities teaching philosophy statements;
DH course assignments;
Syllabus frameworks;
Curricula for a DH program (minor, certificate, etc).

Participants will discuss theoretical approaches to each genre, critique examples, and spend time collaboratively workshopping draft components for their own use.

This course is open to instructors looking to integrate digital humanities into teaching. Students interested in digital humanities pedagogy are especially encouraged to enroll in the course. It may also be relevant to administrators or others charged with developing digital humanities curricula at their institution. While not a prerequisite, some experience in teaching will be helpful for participants taking this course. Please feel free to write if you have concerns about your background or ability to participate in the course – we are happy to discuss it with you.

Text Analysis Methods & Practice

Taught by Katie Rawson

This class will examine methods and practices for text analysis. Freely available tools and excellent tutorials have made it easier to apply computational text analysis techniques; however, researchers may still find themselves struggling with how to build their corpus, decide upon a method, and interpret results. We will survey the how and why of variety of commonly used methods (e.g. word distribution, machine learning, natural language processing) as well as how develop and manage a collection of texts.

Students who take this course will be able to:

Find and prepare texts for analysis.
Store, access, and document their text objects and data.
Discuss their corpus-building decisions and textual data in ways that are methodologically and disciplinarily sound.
Identify appropriate text analysis methods for a given question.
Engage in text analysis methods that use word frequency, word location, and natural language processing.
Articulate statistical, computational, and linguistic principles — and how they intersect with humanistic approaches to texts — for a few text analysis methods.

We will use a mixture of free off-the-shelf tools and scripts in R and Python (you don’t need to know R or Python to take the class). We will primarily work together from shared data sets the instructor will provide. This course will be appropriate for people at all levels of technical expertise. Students should have administrative rights to load software on their laptop.

Call for Papers – Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Training

A Conference of the ADHO Special Interest Group for Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Training
Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2020
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
5-6 June 2020
Proposals, due 14 February 2020, via [https://forms.gle/3598xdXVQfSaJh1T7]

Please join us for the second conference of the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Special Interest Group for Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Training, to take place at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI, https://dhsi.org) in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on 5-6 June 2020.

Proposals are welcome on any topic informing or treating Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Training, including but not limited to: individual experiences with DH pedagogy, teaching and training; the student experience in DH courses and programs; ways in which universities, colleges, and other educational institutions are extending DH in the classroom; implementing DH pedagogical frameworks locally and working across institutions and training institutes to develop and collaborate on materials that can inform ways in which DH offerings and programs are formalized; how ‘traditional’ subjects in(con)form DH and are in(re/trans)formed by DH; inter- and trans-disciplinarity in DH curriculum; D or H cross(multi)disciplinarity by means of DH; assessment techniques in DH curriculum (what types of assessment should occur in digital humanities courses? and how might these assessment practices challenge existing university or community-based outcomes?); the multiple roles graduate student instructors inhabit in DH curricula (student, instructor, teaching assistant); DH training in an international context, how we articulate/coordinate/collaborate across international boundaries, and what we can learn from our differences; developing a multilingual lexicon for teaching DH; and discussion of pedagogical materials (syllabi, tutorials, exercises, learning outcomes, assessment and rubrics).

The event will open with a plenary talk and shared DHSI Institute Lecture by Elisabeth Burr (U Leipzig), director of the European Summer University in Digital Humanities. The event is open to all, and free to those registered for DHSI 2020.

Paper, panel, and session proposals may be submitted via [https://forms.gle/3598xdXVQfSaJh1T7], before 14 February 2020; proposals should include the name, affiliation, and email address of the proposed presenter(s), as well as title and abstract of one to two paragraphs (250 words maximum).