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The University of Guelph is hosting a series of 4-day workshops on topics related to digital humanities research and teaching.
DH@Guelph Summer Workshops are part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute training network. Workshops are eligible for transfer credit towards the University of Victoria Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities.
All are welcome! Please read below for information on the workshops, instructors and registration.
Please register early! Registration deadline is MONTH XX, 2016. After this date a late fee will apply. Any workshops with insufficient enrollment by this date may be canceled.
For more information please email digital.humanities@uoguelph.ca
Program
(Each course runs daily for the full four days, so only one course may be taken in this session)
Getting Going with Omeka
Lisa Cox, Adam Doan, Melissa McAfee, Catharine Wilson (University of Guelph)
This 4-day course provides a thorough introduction to Omeka, a user-friendly web-based publishing platform for creating, displaying, curating, and interpreting digital collections. Widely used by scholars, librarians, archivists, and museum curators, Omeka provides a simple interface for managing and describing diverse digital objects such as images, audio, video, and text. In addition to storing these items in a searchable database, Omeka makes it easy to create attractive online exhibits. It can be used in teaching by allowing the creation of online course modules or a framework for online class projects.
Participants will be introduced to the web-based Omeka.net and the highly-customizable server-based Omeka.org platforms. Each participant will receive their own Omeka instance to use for the duration of the course. The course will provide thorough, hands-on instruction in every step of building a website in Omeka. Topics covered will include: best practices and standards for digitizing original archives, special collections and rare books; curation and project management for exhibits; metadata standards; using and customizing themes to modify the appearance and navigation of the site; and adding extended functionality such as maps, timelines and crowdsourced transcriptions with Omeka plug-ins. In addition, we will also provide case studies to demonstrate how Omeka has been used in varied contexts from digital repositories in libraries and archives to digital pedagogy in the classroom. Participants will be given time each day to apply what they’ve learned in the workshop to develop their own projects. By the end of the course, they will have laid a preliminary foundation for their own Omeka project.
The course will be taught by scholars, librarians, archivists, and developers with experience in Omeka projects such as the University of Guelph’s Scottish Chapbook Project and the Rural Diary Archive. Participants are encouraged to come to the workshop with a project in mind and digitized materials in hand. Alternate arrangements will be made available for those without a project. Participants should bring a wireless-capable laptop.
You’ve Got Data!: Introduction to Data Wrangling for Digital Humanities Projects
Paige Morgan (University of Miami)
“I study [topic] -- but how do I use my topic to start doing digital humanities research?” Answering this question (and getting started doing DH) involves several related questions about data:
What data do you work with?
What format is your data in?
What does the format of your data allow you to do?
How can you transform your data to do different things with it?
This course guides participants through answering these questions in relation to their own research areas. We’ll start with an introduction to the specific tasks that different DH tools and programming languages can accomplish. We’ll also look at some established DH projects, breaking them down to see what data was used and how; and then explore a range of tools (including Scalar, Omeka, Neatline, Google Fusion Tables, Timeline JS) focusing on the type and format of data needed to use them effectively; and work on translating research questions into a series of tasks that a programming language or tool would be able to accomplish. While this course is not a programming course, it provides participants with situational knowledge about programming. This knowledge leads to more productive conversations with technologists, and will help participants determine which tools/languages they might want to learn more about in future, i.e., whether a project is likely to require Python or MySQL or some other alternative platform. Over the course of the workshop, participants will work on creating/acquiring a small set of data and metadata, and putting that dataset into one of the tools introduced. At the end of the week, participants will also have a clearer understanding of the work involved in scaling up, complementing, and/or interfacing with other existing projects.
Participants should come with an idea of a specific topic they want to work with. This topic might be a particular group of texts, images, or other materials, i.e. 18th century novels, the letters of George Eliot, urban graffiti, photographs from the Great War, etc. Sample data sets will also be available. No prior programming knowledge is necessary. Participants should bring a wireless-capable laptop.
Text Encoding Fundamentals and Their Application
Jason Boyd (Ryerson)
For those new to the field, this is an introduction to the theory and practice of encoding electronic texts for the humanities. This workshop is designed for individuals who are contemplating embarking on a text-encoding project, or for those who would like to better understand the philosophy, theory, and practicalities of encoding in XML (Extensible Markup Language) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. No prior experience with XML is assumed, but the course will move quickly through the basics. Participants should bring a wireless-capable laptop.
3D Modelling for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
John Bonnett (Brock University)
This course has three aims. The first is to introduce participants to the world of 3D modelling. What methods and software are available to generate 3D content? What languages are used to support their expression and dissemination over the Internet? The second purpose is practical: it will provide an introduction to 3D modelling, and show how such an activity can be integrated into courses devoted to digital history, virtual heritage, architectural history and theatre history, and related disciplines in archaeology and anthropology. Here participants will be introduced to Sketchup, an 3D modelling software package developed by Google that can be procured for free, or for minimal cost in an education institution. They will also be introduced to the 3D Virtual Buildings Project 2.0, a free on-line tutorial that will provide instruction in Sketchup, and in the use of historical sources to produce 3D models. The third aim of the course will be to explore the pedagogical benefit of 3D modelling. How can such activities support student learning, and in particular the development of their constructive and critical thinking skills? Participants should bring a wireless-capable laptop.
Minimal Computing for Digital Humanists
Kim Martin (University of Guelph), John Fink (McMaster University)
All of the high-performance computers drawing attention in the media make it seem impossible to work without expensive computers and solid tech support. However, the majority of the world does not and might never have access to these machines. How do we make DH work accessible to these groups, while at the same time learning about all the material they have to offer? This course will focus on the tangible benefits of Minimal Computing: computational work done under various constraints. As part of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Working Group we invite you to come and explore the possibilities of small computers (Raspberry Pis, Arduinos), free software platforms software and re-purposing old computer parts to help make information more accessible.
Participants do not need any experience with minimal computing, just a curiosity and an interest in hands-on learning. Anyone with their own hardware is welcome to bring it along (as well as anything else you'd like to experiment with). There will be enough hardware for everyone to have a hands-on learning experience.
Spatial Humanities: Exploring Opportunities in the Humanities
Jennifer Marvin and Quin Shirk-Luckett (University of Guelph)
How can spatial exploration and mapping help you develop new understandings and unique perspectives of fictional and historical material?
Arguably all topics of research in the Humanities have some relationship with space. Everything happens some-where. Dependent upon the discipline and context of study, the definition of space can be influenced by class, capital, gender and race amongst other constructs and further through the perspective of the individual versus the collective. The concept of space in this context is can range from simple, to complex and relativistic.
With the general popularity of tools such as Google Maps, GPSs in our cars and on our phones, spatial understanding has begun to permeate every day communication and navigation, engendering a new level of spatial awareness. Suddenly academics are presented with the opportunity to turn their bits of paper into bytes of data and create digitized versions of previously analog artefacts of history and culture. Subjected to spatial analysis, many artefacts reveal new ways to engage with the information revealing new patterns, trends and understanding that have previously been hidden.
Not surprisingly there has been a steady uptake amongst academics within the Humanities in the usage of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in their research. The results of which have been visually powerful and in many cases offer new perspectives on long studied topics.
This hands-on workshop is for participants who are interested in visualizing their research in a spatial way. At the end of this course participants will be able to:
1. Examine primary source materials (analogue texts and images) for spatial information for the purpose of creating spatial datasets.
2. Understand best practices in digitizing (scanning, photographing, transcribing to tabular formats) analogue materials.
3. Find and evaluate spatial data
4. Create spatial datasets from digitized materials using ArcGIS software. Processes will include:
a. Creating tabular data to be “mapped”.
b. Georeferencing images: assigning geographic coordinates to enable the image to sit in the correct place in the world in
the software.
c. Vectorizing images: tracing significant features from the georeferenced images to create points, lines, and polygon
features to use in analysis.
5. Conduct basic analysis on data created.
6. Test-drive some freely available web-based tools.
Online Collaborative Scholarship: Principles and Practices (A CWRCshop)
Susan Brown (Guelph), Mihaela Ilovan (Alberta), Leslie Allin (Guelph)
This course takes up the movement of scholarship to online environments, exploring possibilities for collaboration throughout the entire scholarly workflow. Digital tools make new kinds of collaboration possible for both individual scholars working alone or large teams who must coordinate complex sequences of tasks, whether those are creating collections of digitized text, images, audio or videos; producing bibliographies; gathering and preparing texts for analysis and visualization; producing scholarly editions or teaching anthologies; or producing born-digital scholarly writings such as glossaries, biocritical entries, or critical analyses. While the course will touch on matters such as the management of collaborative relationships, it is primarily about the potential for leveraging standards and systems to enable collaborative scholarship online. The course is suitable for those wishing a general introduction to digital humanities as well as for those wishing to initiate a longer-term project, providing a general introduction to key principles associated with DH scholarship, ranging from platform-independent data formats and metadata standards to text markup, preservation challenges, and semantic web principles. It will touch on practical, institutional and cultural challenges associated with collaboration, as well as strategies for deciding what types and levels of collaboration are right for particular individuals or projects.
Hands-on experience will be provided primarily within the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory’s online environment. However, long-term participation in CWRC is not a condition of the course; participants will be able to export the digital objects they create. Participants will be invited to contribute over the course of the week to a single collaborative class project, but will also have the option of bringing their own materials to begin to develop individual or group projects. Participants should bring a wireless-capable laptop.
Instructors
Leslie Allin is the data transformation manager for the Canadian Women Playwrights Project with CWRC. She holds a PhD from the University of Guelph, and researches narrative, race, and gendered authority in the context of 19th-century British Empire.
John Bonnett is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Brock University.
Jason Boyd is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Associate Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Ryerson University.
Susan Brown is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship at the University of Guelph, and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. She researches Victorian literature, women’s writing, and digital humanities.
Lisa Cox is a graduate of the Tri-University doctoral program in History and Curator of the Ontario Veterinary College Museum.
Adam Doan is a developer in the Research Enterprise & Scholarly Communication team in the University of Guelph Library. He has worked on the Dear Diary Archive and the Scottish Chapbooks Project.
Mihaela Ilovan is the project manager of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. She holds an MA in Classic Archaeology and is on the brink of obtaining her MA/MLIS in Humanities Computing / Library and Information Studies. Mihaela has eight years experience working on different digital projects, most recently on Implementing New Knowledge Environments. Her interests include the history of human-computer interaction, citation analysis, digital libraries, semantic annotation and user experience In a digital humanities context.
Quin Shirk-Luckett is a Data Resource Centre Analyst with the Research Enterprise & Scholarly Communication team in the University of Guelph Library.
Kim Martin is the Michael Ridley Postdoctoral Fellow with the Library and the College of Arts at the University of Guelph, and a graduate of the doctoral program in Information Science at Western University.
Melissa McAfee is a Special Collections Librarian at the University of Guelph. She is, with Andrew Ross, Project Director of theScottish Chapbooks Project, an Omeka-based digital archive of some six hundred 19th-century Scottish chapbooks from the University of Guelph collection.
Jennifer Marvin is librarian in the Data Resource Centre and Acting Head of Research Enterprise & Scholarly Communications, University of Guelph.
Paige Morgan is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Miami, and a graduate of the doctoral program in English at the University of Washington.
Catharine A. Wilson is Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor of Rural History at the University of Guelph. Her current SSHRC-funded project explores reciprocal work bees (barn raising, quilting bees, threshing bees, etc.) using Ontario farm diaries. It seeks to understand the creation, maintenance and definition of neighbourhood, its practical workings and imagined states. It deepens our understanding of, and challenges, the much romanticized "pioneer days.” She is Director of the Dear Diary Archive.
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