Every scholar in digital humanities and/or social sciences has probably already faced the challenge posed by consulting large digital newspaper archives in order to extract detailed information about a topic. It is beyond any doubt that computational-oriented methods and tools currently available may provide a great contribution; however, applying such methods and tools could pose several difficulties, especially in dealing with large ensembles of items.
Category: Meta-Activities
Meta-Activities are activities which, unlike regular research activities, do not apply directly to a research object, but rather to a combination of a research activity with a research object. A case in point would be a tutorial Teaching the digital Encoding of music, or a report Introducing Pattern Recognition in images. Meta-Activity tags can be added to provide additional context to a typical activity+object pair of tags. In some cases, however, meta-activities may also apply to objects, for example in the case of objects like “Infrastructure” or “Digital Humanities”.
Introduction: Folgert Karsdorp, Mike Kestemont and Allen Riddell ‘s interactive book, Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python had been written with the aim in mind to equip humanities students and scholars working with textual and tabular resources with practical, hands-on knowledge to better understand the potentials of data-rich, computer-assisted approaches that the Python framework offers to them and eventually to apply and integrate them to their own research projects.
The first part introduces a “Data carpentry”, a collection of essential techniques for gathering, cleaning, representing, and transforming textual and tabular data. This sets the stage for the second part that consists of 5 case studies (Statistics Essentials: WhoReads Novels? ; Introduction to Probability ; Narrating with Maps ; Stylometry and the Voice of Hildegard ; A Topic Model of United States Supreme Court Opinions, 1900–2000 ) showcasing how to draw meaningful insights from data using quantitative methods. Each chapter contains executable Python codes and ends with exercises ranging from easier drills to more creative and complex possibilities to adapt the apply and adopt the newly acquired knowledge to their own research problems.
The book exhibits best practices in how to make digital scholarship available in an open, sustainable ad digital-native manner, coming in different layers that are firmly interlinked with each other. Published with Princeton University Press in 2021, hardcopies are also available, but more importantly, the digital version is an Open Access Jupyter notebook that can be read in multiple environments and formats (.md and .pdf). The documentation, coda and data materials are available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/3560761#.Y3tCcn3MJD9). The authors also made sure to select and use packages which are mature and actively maintained.
Introduction: In this resource, Caterina Agostini, PhD in Italian from Rutgers University, Project Manager at The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton shares two handouts of workshops she organized and co-taught on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). They provide a gentle introduction to IIIF and clear overview of features (displaying, editing, annotating, sharing and comparing images along universal standards), examples and resources. The handouts could be of interest to anyone interested in the design and teaching of Open Educational Resources on IIF.
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In the next Spotlights episode, we are looking behind the scenes of TaDiRAH with Dr. Luise Borek and Dr. Canan Hastic who give us a rich introduction to the new version of it. We discuss communities around TaDiRAH, the evolution of DH, open data culture, linking with Wikidata…and many more!
Introduction: What are the essential data literacy skills data literacy skills in (Digital) Humanities? How good data management practices can be translated to humanities disciplines and how to engage more and more humanists in such conversations? Ulrike Wuttke’s reflections on the “Vermittlung von Data Literacy in den Geisteswissenschaften“ barcamp at the DHd 2020 conference does not only make us heartfelt nostalgic about scholarly meetings happening face to face but it also gives in-depth and contextualized insights regarding the questions above. The post comes with rich documentation (including links to the barcamp’s metapad, tweets, photos, follow-up posts) and is also serve as a guide for organizers of barcamps in the future.
Introduction: Issues around sustaining digital project outputs after their funding period is a recurrent topic on OpenMethods. In this post, Arianna Ciula introduces the King’s Digital Lab’s solution, a workflow around their CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) instance, and uncovers the many questions around not only maintaining a variety of legacy resources from long-running projects, but also opening them up for data re-use, verification and integration beyond siloed resources.
Introduction: As online became the default means of teaching globally, the thoughtful use of online technologies will play an even more critical role in our everyday life. In this post, Christopher Nunn guides you through how to publish your lectures as podcasts as MP3 with the help of the open source tool, Audacity. The tutorial had been published as a guest post on Mareike Schuhmacher’s blog, Lebe lieber literarisch.
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.
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.
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.