Summer Workshops
NEW in 2023!
This year we are experimenting with offering some modular workshops alongside our usual 4-day workshop format.
If a course is a 4-day workshop, then you will be in that workshop for the full 4 days of the summer workshops.
Those interested in the modular workshops will take either a full-day or half-day workshop on Tuesday, plus one of the 3-day courses, or a series of modules related to Linked Open Data that allow for choices between parallel modules at several points.
All participants are reminded that these are hands-on workshops, so be sure to bring your laptop!
The short workshops are:
- TEI Basics
- Linked Open Data Fundamentals
- What are the Digital Humanities?
- Best Project Practices with CWRC
- Introduction to Zotero - Cancelled
- Introduction to Research Data Management (RDM)
- Introduction to Voyant
The three-day workshops are:
The four-day workshops are:
- Introduction to TEI Text Encoding and Editorial Workflows
- Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars
- Approaching Media Archaeology from a Digital Humanities Perspective: Introduction, Tools, and Techniques - Cancelled
- Materializing the Collection - Cancelled
- Data modeling and TEI customization - Cancelled
- Introduction to Python Data Analysis
Workshop details
Time: Full day
Location: McLaughlin Library, Room 269
Instructor: James Cummings and Diane Jakacki
Summary: This serves as both a standalone introduction to text encoding and the first day of the Introduction to TEI course.
Participants will learn the principles of why and how we encode texts using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. In hands-on sessions, and using the open-source, open-access web-based LEAF-Writer text editor, participants will learn the basics of TEI text-encoding: how to structure a text to capture bibliographic and semantic data for analysis and dissemination.
By the end of this day participants will have experimented with encoding a variety of textual genres, and gained a greater understanding of how encoding with TEI can support further work in digital editorial production.
Time: Full day
Location: McLaughlin Library, Whitelaw Room, 246B
Instructors: Members of the LINCS Team
Summary: This serves as both a standalone introduction to linked open data and the first day of the Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars course. Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to a set of standards and practices that allow data to contribute to the Semantic Web. This introduction will cover how LOD works in theory and practice, and provide an overview of various projects and tools for using and making it, with an emphasis on cultural data.
What are the Digital Humanities?
Time: 9:30am -12:00pm
Location: McLaughlin Library, Room 109
Instructor: Kim Martin
Summary: This workshop is perfect for anyone unsure of what "DH" has to offer! We'll briefly explore the history of this interdisciplinary field before we go on to discuss a variety of well-known DH research projects that may provide inspiration for your own! Participants should come prepared to think creatively and engage with others about their own research. This course serves as a perfect prelude to the three afternoon offerings below!
Best Project Practices with CWRC
Time: 9:30am -12:00pm
Location: McLaughlin Library, Whitelaw Room, 246A
Instructor: Diane Jakacki and Mihaela Ilovan
Summary: What are best practices and why do they matter? Whether your work involves born digital content or digitized materials, best practices will make your online content more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and help you address SSHRC’s new requirements for research data management. This 3-hour workshop will introduce some of the key concepts and practices required to achieve these ends, bringing them to life through the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory’s free and open online workspace.
Intro to Research Data Management (RDM)
Time: 1:30pm -4:30 pm
Location: McLaughlin Library, Room 109
Instructor: Lucia Costanzo
Summary:Figuring out how to manage your research data is an important part of the research process. Planning ahead on how you will organize your data will save you time understanding your own data in the future and with your sharing data with other researchers. In this workshop you will learn about:
- Basics of RDM (what is research data, RDM, RDM & research data lifecycle?)
- Explaining the importance and parts of a Data Management Plan (DMP)
- Depositing research data in a repository (benefit, selecting a repository, prepping your data for deposit,
This workshop will have engaging demonstrations and hands-on exercises related to Digital Humanities. At the end of workshop, participants will be comfortable with how to manage their research data through the research process including organizing and documenting data, storage and security, and publishing, sharing, preserving data plus know how to create a DMP!
Time: 1:30pm -4:30 pm
Location: McLaughlin Library, Whitelaw Room, 246A
Instructor: Kiera Obbard
Summary: Voyant Tools is an open-source web-based text reading and analysis environment. This workshop will provide an introduction to Voyant Tools, including Cirrus, Trends, and other tools, and will provide an overview of the applications of computers-assisted text analysis in the humanities.
Three-Day Courses - May 10th - 12th
How to End Your Digital Project
Instructors: Janelle Jenstad and Joey Takeda
Location: McLaughlin Library, THINC Lab
Length: 3 days* (Wed-Friday)
*Consider taking a 1-day workshop to round out your DH@Guelph experience!
Summary: Few digital projects are finished and archived; some are eventually abandoned or neglected, while others fail and disappear. What do we need to do to ensure that our digital projects, begun with the best intentions and often with generous funding, produce coherent, consistent, and complete products that can be accessible and functional for decades to come? This three-day course is intended for people who are engaged in a digital project that is nearing completion, people who worry that their project will never end, people who want to deposit their project in a library or digital archive, and people who are planning ahead to end and archive a project.
Using case-studies of both successfully preserved and lost projects, this workshop outlines best practices and concrete approaches for achieving Endings-compliance. We will ask what it means to end a project, what should remain “on the shelf” in 20 years, and what happens when we run projects through existing archiving tools. We address the difference between archivable data and an archivable project, and the importance of preserving the latter as well as the former despite the challenges of digital dependencies. We cover practical steps to “staticize” various types of site, ask critical questions about interface, and discuss best practices for design. The course concludes with a documentation exercise that will help participants identify the strengths and weaknesses of an edition’s documentation.
The course, taught by a humanist and developer from the Endings Team (UVic and SFU), will include lectures, workshops, demonstrations, hands-on exercises, discussion, and peer feedback. Participants will leave with a detailed Endings-compliant project plan for a specific project version, with timelines, a list of requirements, potential outputs, and an archiving strategy to plan, develop, build, release, and archive your digital project in maximally sustainable ways.
Choose your own CWRC Adventure
Instructors: Mihaela Ilovan
Location: McLaughlin Library, Whitelaw Room, 246A
Length: 3 days* (Wed-Friday)
*Consider taking a 1-day workshop to round out your DH@Guelph experience! Those who are new to CWRC or would like a refresher are strongly advised to attend the Tuesday morning workshop, “Introduction to online scholarship with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory”. Those interested in the new capacities of CWRC to support the creation of Linked Open Data are welcome to combine this with “Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars.”
Summary: This intimate three-day workshop supports the specific goals and needs of participants in working with the free and open Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory/Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CWRC; “quirk”; cwrc.ca) virtual research environment. Possibilities include a pedagogical undertaking for an upcoming class, a proof of concept to support a fall grant application, or an existing CWRC project looking to extend in a new direction or preparing to migrate to the new release of CWRC.
The workshop program will be adapted to meet the needs of participants--whether they involve working with digitized or born-digital content in textual, visual, audio or video formats; detailed textual scholarship or thematic collections that span multiple media; textual scholarship or digital editions; student group projects such as oral histories or careful remediation, annotation, enhancement, or contextualization of existing texts; solo endeavors or collaborative groups.
Whether you are new to CWRC, a graduate student looking to explore possibilities, an early adopter of the updated platform, or a seasoned user wanting to devote time to developing your project further in a supported environment, this workshop provides the opportunity to work with CWRC’s assistant director, Mihaela Ilovan, with input from director Susan Brown, to advance your specific goals.
Participants are invited to reach out to cwrc@ualberta.ca with any questions prior to registration; otherwise we will be in touch to confirm your goals. French speakers who can follow spoken English are welcome to participate in French. Those who are new to CWRC or would like a refresher are strongly advised to attend the Tuesday morning workshop, “Introduction to online scholarship with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory”. Those interested in the new capacities of CWRC to support the creation of Linked Open Data are welcome to combine this with “Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars.”
Four-Day Courses - May 9th - 12th
Introduction to TEI Text Encoding and Editorial Workflows
Instructor: Diane Jakacki
Location: McLaughlin Library, Room 269
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday, including TEI Basics on Tuesday)
Summary: This course is designed to provide participants with hands-on experience capturing, annotating, and tagging for entities and semantic meaning within texts. It is also meant to help people think about where TEI fits into their editorial workflow in order to optimize textual editions and collections for best practices in analysis, collaboration, and publication. The course will be taught using the LEAF-Writer web-based XML editor, which means that we will focus on why people encode texts without having to learn how to code.
The course will be taught in a modular fashion, so that participants who are new to text-encoding and those interested in focusing on a particular aspect of encoding or the text-editorial workflow optimized by LEAF-Writer, LEAF, and LINCS can all benefit equally.
Participants in the course will learn how to:
- Structure text to capture TEI data and metadata
- Apply principles of diplomatic, semantic, and annotative encoding to a variety of texts
- Prepare texts for encoding using OCR/HTR tools
- Set up customizations that increase the research value of scholarly work
- Prepare encoded texts for discoverability on the Semantic web
- Scope an editorial project to reflect and anticipate personal, project team, and institutional skills and capabilities
To best support ideas of accessibility and user-friendly tools and platforms, the course will include open-source and/or open-access tools and platforms, including but not limited to LEAF-Writer Commons, GitHub, TEI-Roma, and Transkribus.
Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday, including Linked Open Data Fundamentals on Tuesday)
Location: McLaughlin Library, Whitelaw Room, 246B
Instructors: Members of the LINCS Team
This modular workshop offers both a conceptual overview of Linked Open Data (LOD), a set of standards and practices that allow data to contribute to the Semantic Web, and a series of modules that will introduce participants to working with LOD, from workflows for data cleaning, creation, and publication to interacting with LOD through various interfaces for browsing, querying, and visualization. An initial introduction will cover how LOD works in theory and practice, and provide an overview of various projects and interactive tools. This introduction will be followed by modular sessions focused on various aspects of LOD creation and use, many featuring tools and workflows supported or hosted by the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship. The modular sessions will allow participants to focus on areas of interest or need, including ones related specifically to creating LOD from structured data (spreadsheets/databases), XML including TEI, and natural language, led by members of the LINCS team.
Those desiring a broad introduction to LOD and the Semantic Web, as well as those wishing to work with LINCS tools or preparing data for publication through LINCS, will benefit from this workshop. Sample data will be provided for those without their own datasets. If you plan to bring your own data, please be in touch with instructors in advance. Attention will be given throughout to scholarly perspectives on Linked Open Data and the challenges and opportunities it poses for humanities scholars as far as modeling, context, nuance, and honouring difference and specificity are concerned.
Topics include: Introduction to LOD fundamentals, projects, and tools (can be attended independently as a short workshop on Tuesday); ontologies and vocabularies; data preparation, cleanup, and reconciliation; getting going with the SPARQL query language; exploring, refining, and creating data in ResearchSpace; exporting LOD to other tools; structured data conversion with X3ML; from TEI to LOD with XTriples and the LEAF-Writer XML editor; and NLP tools for data linking including the Named Entity Recognition Vetting Environment.
Introduction to Python Data Analysis
Instructor: Paul Barrett
Location: McLaughlin Library, Room 109
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday)
Summary: This course introduces students to core concepts in Python programming, data creation, and data analysis. The course assumes no prior programming or Python knowledge. Students will be introduced to the Python programming language and will use Python to collect, curate, and analyze data. They will create data structures, use programming libraries to manipulate and work with data, and develop their own functions. Students will learn to use APIs to connect their programs to external libraries and data sources and will engage in distant reading of social media.
Workshops Cancelled in 2023
Introduction to Zotero - Cancelled
Time: 1:30pm -4:30pm
Instructor: Melanie Cassidy
Summary: This workshop will introduce researchers to the Zotero Reference Management tool and its capabilities, including how to import and export citations, organize and share references, and create bibliographies.
Instructors: Paula Nunez de Villavicencio and Arun Jacobs
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday)
Summary: This workshop enables participants to examine the ways in which media archeology works as an effective research methodology for Digital Humanities (DH) scholarship, as its simultaneous focus on larger media infrastructures, such as globalized corporate entities networking with nation states, alongside the detailed histories and bureaucratic materials generated by specific media technologies and their data structures, make visible and legible the production and circulation of power within contemporary networks of media technologies. Extending from DH scholars such as Alan Liu (2012; 2013) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2013), this course examines how media archeology is crucial to reckoning with the historical and ongoing targeting of marginalized and vulnerable individuals and populations, in particular those who are racialized and gendered, and sourcing what Ezikiel Dixon-Roman calls “hauntings” (2017) of technical progress, funding, data practices and other historical trajectories within contemporary media technologies. The expected outcomes of this workshop include an understanding of media archeology and the role of Knowledge/Power for the surveillance and governance of select populations. A major activity of this workshop includes working with and alongside patents through a novel approach to examine their work in producing a problematized view of human/technology relationships.
Materializing the Collection - Cancelled
Instructors: Shana MacDonald and Brianna Wiens
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday)
Summary: This course builds on the organizers' growing interest in co-creating new forms of interface that leverage physicality and kinesthetic intelligence. Through the process of making, thinking, and remaking, we will explore the personal, social, and ethical consequences of turning people, environments, communities, or experiences into data, aggregating that data, then abstracting it graphically. Our primary area of concern in the course is with the potential of graphical data visualizations to further the dehumanization and decontextualization of the human experience. We are further concerned that certain individuals, communities, and environments are more vulnerable to what may occur within practices of computational translation and abstraction. This course proposes to explore these questions and themes through developing processes of thinking through data/making via different acts of materialization. Materialization (or to materialize) is defined as “to invest or become invested with a physical shape or form”. Materialization is a process of transmutation where the results are uncertain and in flux. Scaffolding the course via a series of experiments, participants will explore ways to shift textual or quantitative data into material builds that generate new qualitative data and allow participants to encounter embodied experiences of data in/as research. Our goal will be to guide our participants towards furthering their transmutations into sites of remediation by adding an additional layer of experience and knowledge production through public, digital repositories including social media.
Data modeling and TEI customization - Cancelled
Instructors: Syd Bauman and Sarah Connell
Length: 4 days (Tues-Friday)
Summary: Since the release of the most recent version of TEI (P5) in 2007, TEI users have had a very different relationship to the TEI Guidelines. Unlike previous versions (and most other encoding systems), TEI P5 does not exist in a “default” or “vanilla” state: any TEI schema used in a text encoding project must be generated from the TEI source and involves some degree of choice and selection. When thoughtfully planned, the TEI customization process permits a text encoding project to configure the TEI system to conform to their own model of their texts. This can make a huge difference to the efficiency of a TEI project and the quality and longevity of its data. Good customizations record the project’s specific modeling decisions and ensure consistency in the data (both by helping encoders avoid errors while capturing a TEI document, and by machine-checking TEI documents when proofing), while retaining as much interoperability and mutual intelligibility with other TEI projects and tools as possible. Customization also contributes importantly to the process of data curation, both at the time of data creation and later in a project’s life cycle. This seminar will introduce participants to the central concepts of TEI customization and to the language in which TEI customizations are written (which is itself a TEI language). Topics covered include:
- Background on how the TEI scheme is organized
- Document analysis and data modeling
- Essentials of the TEI’s customization language (ODD)
- Generating schemas and documentation from an ODD
- Further data constraint using Schematron (including XPath)
- Using ODD to provide a processing model for the data
- Strategies for systematic review of encoded files using XPath
- Issues of workflow, long-term maintenance, conformance, and interoperability