Category: Creation

Creating things generally refers to the activity of producing born-digital digital objects, rather than creating digital objects by capturing and digitizing existing analog objects. Creating can involve writing natural language text (cf. Writing) or, understood more broadly as the creation of a string of discrete symbols, it could also concern other forms of expression, such as creating executable code (cf. Programming), composing a musical score, or creating an image.

Digital scholarship workflows

Digital scholarship workflows

Introduction:  In this post, you can find a thoughtful and encouraging selection and description of reading, writing and organizing tools. It guides you through a whole discovery-magamement-writing-publishing workflow from the creation of annotated bibliographies in Zotero,  through a useful Markdown syntax cheat sheet  to versioning, storage and backup strategies, and shows how everybody’s research can profit by open digital methods even without sophisticated technological skills. What I particularly like in Tomislav Medak’s approach is that all these tools, practices and tricks are filtered through and tested again his own everyday scholarly routine. It would make perfect sense to create a visualization from this inventory in a similar fashion to these workflows.

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DH Research Software Engineers – For We Are Many

DH Research Software Engineers – For We Are Many

Introduction: This white paper is an outcome of a DH2019 workshop dedicated to foster closer collaboration among technology-oriented DH researchers and  developers of tools to support Digital Humanities research. The paper briefly outlines the most pressing issues in their collaboration and addresses topics such as: good practices to ease mutual understanding between scholars and researchers; software development and academic career and recognition; or sustainability and funding.

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Document ALL the things!| The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Document ALL the things!| The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Introduction: Sustainability questions such as how to maintain digital project outputs after the funding period, or how to keep aging code and infrastructure that are important for our research up-to-date are among the major challenges DH projects are facing today. This post gives us a sneak peek into the solutions and working practices from the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. In their approach to build capacity for sustaining DH projects and preserve access to data and software, they view projects as collaborative and process-based scholarship. Therefore, their focus is on implementing project management workflows and documentation tools that can be flexibly applied to projects of different scopes and sizes and also allow for further refinement in due case. By sharing these resources together with their real-life use cases in DH projects, their aim is to benefit other scholarly communities and sustain a broader conversation about these tricky issues.

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Little package, big dependency

Little package, big dependency

Introduction: The world of R consists of innumerous packages. Most of them have very little download rates because they are limited to certain functions as part of a larger argument. Based on a surprising experience with the small package clipr Matthew Lincoln shares his thoughts about this reception phenomenon especially in the digital humanities.

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The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

Introduction: The Research Software Directory of the Netherlands eScience Institute provides easy access to software, source code and its documentation. More importantly, it makes it easy to cite software, which is highly advisable when using software to derive research results. The Research Software Directory positions itself as a platform that eases scientific referencing and reproducibility of software based research—good peer praxis that is still underdeveloped in the humanities. 

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From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources

From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources

Introduction: This lesson by Marten Düring from the “Programming Historian-Website” gently introduces novices to the topic to Network Visualisation of Historical Sources. As a case study it covers not only the general advantages of network visualisation for humanists but also a step-by-step explanation of the process from extraction of the data until the visualization (using the Palladio-tool). This lesson has also been translated into Spanish and includes many useful references for further reading.

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Creating Web APIs with Python and Flask | Programming Historian

Creating Web APIs with Python and Flask | Programming Historian

Introduction: This very complete tutorial by Patrick Smyth will help digital humanists or any interested person on digital technologies applied to projects how to make data more accessible to users through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). After explaining the basics about APIs and databases, an API is built and put into practice. Python 3 and the Flask are the web frameworks used for developing this API.

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