CCDHHN

Coding Fundamentals for Humanists
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 (America/Halifax) | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Marie-Hélène Burle and Tannia Chevez

This course is intended for humanities-based researchers with no programming background whatsoever who would like to understand how programs work behind the scenes by writing some simple but useful programs of their own. Over the week the emphasis will be on understanding how computer programmers think so that participants will be able to at least participate in high-level conceptual discussions in the future with more confidence. These general concepts will be reinforced and illustrated with hands-on development of simple programs that can be used to help with text-based research and analysis right away. The language used for most of the course will be Python because of its gentle syntax and powerful extensions. Using the command-line interface and regular expressions will also be emphasized. We will also spend some time taking glimpses at what is happening in the other DHSI courses to understand how reading and writing programming code goes well beyond what we touch on in this class.

This offering is co-sponsored by ACENET.

Race and Social Justice: DH Methods and Applications
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Dorothy Kim and Jordan Clapper

Over the past five years we have seen a proliferation of academic job advertisements, publications, and discussions demonstrating ways in which race and social justice can be engaged in digital humanities scholarship. Interest by students and local communities in technological advancements through Web 2.0, social media, and mobile phones are permitting new forms of research and practice. #transformDH, #DHpoco, #femDH, and #BlackLivesMatter have helped to challenge the all-white discourse, often dominated by scholars in the disciplines of English and history, that is too often found in digital humanities. What happens to students in digital humanities methods classes who bring non-traditional bodies into this world? There have been discussions how to insure that syllabi and materials for digital humanities classes are inclusive – specifically, how an introductory DH methods class keeps race, social justice, and inclusivity as cornerstones in their pedagogy. The traditional divides witnessed in the tech world will only be replicated in the world of both undergraduate and graduate DH courses without attention to race, social justice, etc. This week-long class will show how, through an interdisciplinary intersectional and CRT framework, both race and social justice can be central to any DH teaching, pedagogy, and practice. The course will pay special attention to queer theory, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, WOC/Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and disability studies as they currently help to reshape digital humanities teaching and methods across our university/college classrooms.

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities.

Multimodal Rhetorics, Digital Writing
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Denna Iammarino and Kristine Kelly

A longstanding relationship exists between the digital humanities and writing studies asevidenced by journals like Kairos and Computers and Composition Online; however, inpractice, the multi-faceted and mutually influential relationship between digitaltechnology, rhetorical theory, and interdisciplinary writing practices tends to beunderestimated. By centrally orienting this relationship, our course will exploremultimodal writing practices, theories, and pedagogies in digital spaces and reconsiderhow rhetorical aims, digital platforms, and disciplinary conventions work together togenerate complex and unconventional ways of writing and opportunities for teaching.We will consider multimodal composition across digital and analog environments,including open-access platforms like Scalar and Twine, and we will re-purpose everydaymaterials and software to reconsider rhetorical principles (like invention andarrangement). Adopting an interdisciplinary writing studies lens, we will investigatequestions like:

How do we persuade and engage differently in digital and multimodal spaces?

How do we understand what it means to be an author and a reader in different formats or media?

How can we adopt co-creation and collaboration as frameworks for inclusive writing practices in digital spaces?

This course will be hands-on and will help faculty, graduate students, librarians, andinstructional technologists design assignments and activities for (digital) humanities andinterdisciplinary courses that include writing. We will collaborate on designing andscaffolding assignments, identifying methods for assessment, and collectivelyinvestigating the relationship between digital making tools and rhetorical practice andpedagogy. At the end of the week, participants will have a fully designed, scaffoldedassignment and a better understanding of ways to incorporate digital writing approachesand tools into their teaching and scholarly communication.

Engaging Play
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Sean Smith and Jeffrey Lawler

This class provides students with hands on experience with games and their uses in the humanities classroom. The focus of our course is to learn how games are structured, how they function and how they can become an integral part of a humanities curriculum. Participants will learn to use Twine and incorporate game narratives into their own classes. Taught by Jeffrey Lawler and Sean Smith, co-directors of the Center for the History of Video Games, Technology and Critical Play, the course covers a variety of topics such as game theory and questions that games, including tabletops and video games, raise within humanities disciplines.

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities.

Designing Digital Publications
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Dan Tracy and Mary Borgo Ton

This course will focus on strategies for designing, building, and publishing long-form scholarship in fully digital formats. As we consider commonly-used platforms like Pressbooks, Omeka, and Scalar, we will discuss flexible writing workflows and best practices for developing a multimodal expressions of your research, regardless of medium. Our discussions will be guided by an audience-centered approach to project design, and the course will offer participants ample opportunities to reflect on their own research, professional goals, and audiences as they make choices about the content and layout of their own projects. This course is ideal for graduate students who are contemplating a born-digital dissertation, scholars who are working heavily with multimedia, and those who are curious to explore alternatives to print-based scholarship.

This course balances lectures with hands-on activities.

NLP, LLMs, and Network Science Apps for Text and Media Analysis and Creativity
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Chris Tănăsescu

The course offers an effective hands-on intro to natural language processing (NLP), text and media analysis, and text and/or media corpus network visualization and analysis. It will harness the power and amplitude of large language models (LLMs) alongside other computing resources in analyzing both single/discrete datums and big data, be they text or media or both. The skills, affordances, methods, and concepts will be paced and assembled into a pipeline starting from locating, collecting/scraping, and (pre)processing relevant datasets, continuing by deploying specialized libraries and developing algorithms for multi-feature data analysis, and culminating with fine-grained holistic networked assemblages modeling and scrutinizing the datasets in depth and comparatively across corpora and media.

We will be doing coding in Python and learning how to use (and compare) (sub)word, text, and media modeling open-source LLMs/frameworks such as GPT (2 and later), (M)BERT, GPT-NeoX, T5, (Meta-)Llama, OLMo, and a host of others in concurrence with a wide-range of relevant libraries including Scikit-learn, NLTK, FastText, Stanza, and SpaCy (displaCy), involving embeddings with text classifiers and/or image/video/audio vectorization, e.g.., Deep Learning architectures, CLIP, MediaPipe, TensorFlow & Keras, Pytorch, LibROSA, etc. In the context, we will also learn how to train or fine-tune our own LLMs.

After using BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and pytesseract (Python-tesseract) to automatically collect and (if needed) OCR our data, the subsequent computational analyses will be translated to networks ranging from plain (single-layer) graphs to multiplexes to most general multilayer networks to be visualized and/or analyzed by means of NetworkX or, in the more specific or complex cases, in-house/indie algorithms. The translation to networks will also involve correlations between various forms of vectorization applied to text (and/as inter)media as coexistent in or combined into modeling the data.

On the fifth day (Friday, June 6th), everybody will have the opportunity to participate in the #GraphPoem event, an intermedia social computing and data-commoning performance drawing on the algorithms, methods, and programming presented or developed in class.

The knowledge and skills acquired—alongside our in-class applications—will be useful in education, research, and analytical-creative work involving NLP, automated text and (mono and multilingual) corpus analysis, network science (or graph theory) applications, inter/trans-disciplinary text (and) media studies, computational literary studies/analysis/criticism, computational linguistics, multimodal and intermedia(lity) studies and creativity, HCI creative writing and experimental/intersemiotic/literary translation, digital editions, digital poetry/e-lit/digital art, social (media/network) analysis, complexity studies in/and social science, and applications in the philosophy of mathematics.

This is a hands-on course with some lecture components.

Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On With CollectionBuilder for
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Teaching and ExhibitsOlivia Wikle, Evan Williamson, Devin Becker

This course introduces fundamental web and DH skills using CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for building digital collection and exhibit websites driven by metadata and hosted on a lightweight infrastructure. The high cost and IT requirements of digital collection platforms are often a barrier to creating new collections for sharing or teaching humanities research. CollectionBuilder is optimized for non-developers and simple hosting solutions, allowing researchers to take greater ownership over their digital projects and lowering barriers to customization. Scholars in this course will learn CollectionBuilder by engaging in a scaffolded approach with hands-on experience in digital library foundations such as accessibility, metadata creation, and web development. Building on these skills, students will learn the basics of working with plain text files, CSV data, Markdown, Jekyll, Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages in order to create and customize their very own digital collection. By the end of this course, students will have gained the knowledge and independence necessary to implement CollectionBuilder in contexts that include creating and disseminating research collections and custom digital exhibits, or teaching digital libraries in the classroom. They will also have built their own digital exhibit, such as those built by our previous DHSI classes in 2023 and 2024.

No programming experience is necessary, although you should have a strong interest to learn! Participants are asked to bring their own computers. All software used in the course is free, open source, and cross platform and will be installed during class time.

Agile Project Management for Humanities Research
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: James Smith

Agile project management is about negotiating the completion of a project from beginning to end while remaining flexible. Being patient and delaying decisions until you have to make them, gathering as much information as you can in the meantime, and then taking action with the information you have, always keeping alternatives in mind in case your first plan of action doesn’t pan out. Just as a fighter shifts from foot to foot to be ready to counter a punch, the agile project manager constantly considers shifts to accommodate any changes in the project’s environment. But it’s about more than just negotiating within the rules. It’s about changing the rules of the game to better ensure a successful project.

This course combines lecture, discussion, and hands-on activities.

DH for Librarians
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: John Russell and Rachel Hogan

This course will focus on the processes and methods of digital humanities and how they intersect with librarianship practice. We will start by considering big picture questions: how have librarians approached “doing DH” and “supporting DH” in libraries, what has the practice of DH librarianship been, and what could the future of DH in libraries be? From there, we will survey different aspects of DH in librarianship in more detail, including assessment and strategic planning, reference and consultation, instruction, project management, and collaborative partnerships. Along the way, we will explore key resources, methods, and tools, as well as threshold concepts, data literacy, and relationships to other parts of academic libraries.

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) for Historical Research
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Shu Wan

This course introduces the basic knowledge of social network analysis (SNA) to digital humanities scholars, especially historians. The course will consist of three parts. The first introduces the theory and terminology of SNA, centrality, its measurements, and other key SNA categories such as groups/subgroups, ego networks, and two-Mode networks. The second part introduces the use of SNA in historical research by reviewing the recent publication. The last part will offer a historical social network dataset for students to practice SNA research. This course will use NodeXL instead of relevant R or Python packages.

Unveiling the Past: Advancing Knowledge of the Humanities and Special Collections through Multispectral Imaging
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Juilee Decker and David Messinger

In the past, scholars applied lemon juice and a heat source when uncovering hidden features of historical documents (think: “National Treasure”). We now know that this method damaged artifacts unnecessarily. Interest in this field has led to newer, safer practices involving cameras, sensors, and LED panels. A low-cost, low barrier-to-entry Multispectral Imaging System for Historical Artifacts (MISHA) funded by NEH and developed by the course instructors and their interdisciplinary lab puts image capture and processing tools, as well as the system itself, within the reach of non-scientists. By participating in this week-long course, participants will learn a brief history of cultural heritage imaging, with an emphasis on multispectral imaging; will try their hand at capturing images and processing them; will learn of use cases where MISHA and other imaging systems have been able to illuminate content and context of manuscripts, sheet, leaf, and folia created from the medieval to the modern; and will use the MISHA system and to develop new digital humanities skills that pertain to discoverability, access, preservation, and the production of new knowledge. The intended audience is humanities scholars interested in text recovery, codicology, and imaging practices as a new and accessible DH method.

At the end of the week, participants will leave with knowledge of cultural heritage imaging’s history and theories, particularly multispectral imaging; experience using a MISHA system for image capture; familiarity with image processing methods to yield new knowledge (focusing on six sample data sets featuring collections from the medieval to the modern); and strategies of how to incorporate digital tools within their research, scholarship, and/or pedagogy.

The course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities working with sheet, leaf, and folia from an “educational use” collection to demonstrate capacity of multispectral imaging as a digital humanities tool for access, discovery, interpretation, and research.

Writing Nonfiction in the Company of Artificial Intelligences
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: William J. Turkel

This course is a hands-on introduction to using LLM technology (large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini) to assist with the practice of writing nonfiction. Popular discussions of this technology have focused on the unconstrained models’ tendencies to hallucinate, their inability to cite or return verifiable sources of information, and their potential misuse for misinformation and disinformation. When you are working with these models at a more technical level, however, you learn that their capabilities are changing every few weeks. As current problems are solved new opportunities and challenges arise. This course teaches ways to constrain and even make use of hallucination, to draw information and make inferences from verifiable structured data, and to rigorously cite sources. The workflows that you will learn are firmly grounded in the tools and techniques of the digital humanities: text encoding, the semantic web, linked open data, bibliography, databases, web APIs, text analysis, and text mining. There are two key differences, however. Rather than working with off-the-shelf tools or building them from the ground up, generative AI allows us to work from the top down. We also make extensive use of the models’ ability to co-author code as well as prose.

This course will require a minimal additional fee for software.

Outils numériques et études littéraires: vers de nouvelles perspectives critiques
2025-06-02 08:00 - 2025-06-06 17:00 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: David Wrisley and Parham Aledavood

Ce cours propose un aperçu des méthodes numériques appliquées aux études littéraires. Il s’adresse aux débutant·e·s intéressé·e·s par le potentiel du numérique dans leurs recherches et souhaitant découvrir une diversité de techniques. Nous explorerons des exemples novateurs de recherches en études littéraires, en abordant les méthodes et la gestion des données qui les rendent possibles. Une approche critique guidera l’introduction de plusieurs méthodes, telles que l’analyse automatisée des textes, la stylométrie, la cartographie numérique et l’analyse computationnelle d’images. À l’issue de ce parcours, divisé entre ateliers pratiques et discussions théoriques, les participant·e·s auront une meilleure compréhension des méthodes computationnelles appliquées à une variété de perspectives critiques. Il sera possible ensuite d’approfondir leur expertise de manière autonome ou en participant à d’autres formations spécialisées du DHSI.

Ce cours sera enseigné en français, avec des lectures et des exemples tirés de différentes langues, y compris l’anglais.

Data Bites - Optimize Directory Structures for Research Data
2025-06-09 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 9 2025

This practical workshop, delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, focuses on strategies for organizing research data using clear and logical directory structures. Designed for graduate students, researchers, and staff, the session helps participants manage files more effectively to support collaboration, reproducibility, and long-term data stewardship.

Participants will learn how to:

Apply best practices to maintain consistency and clarity throughout the research lifecycle

Design directory structures that reflect research workflows and support project organization

Implement naming and hierarchy conventions for easy navigation and version control

Presenter(s): Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

The Small Web: Making Minimal Websites and Digital Ephemera by Hand
2025-06-09 00:00 - 2025-06-13 23:59 | Toronto Metropolitan University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada
Dates: June 9th to June 13th 2025

Part of IDARE Summer University 2025: « Handmade Digital »IDARE: INTERACTIVE DIGITAL ARTS, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

The Small Web: Making Minimal Websites and Digital Ephemera by Hand

Please note: in-person or virtual attendance is possible for this workshop.

Instructor: Reg Beatty

The « small web » is a space where people question how desirable it is to have their online presence pre-formatted and then harvested by a ubiquitous corporate culture. It’s a space that is looking for alternatives to this platformed self-expression, trying to make room for something less rule-bound — something that’s unconventional, unexpected. And one of the ways the small web imagines this might happen is through a return to « making. » In trying to reset our digital lives the impetus of our own making allows us to refocus on the creative process (and pleasure!) of coding from scratch.

This course will take a minimalist approach, showing how a small number of HTML elements and CSS rules can do most of the heavy lifting necessary to make a website. We’ll cover how to coordinate structure, content, and style, including fonts, images, colour, video and audio. And we’ll build our web pages on neocities which, as a community, exemplifies the freedom of the small web.

The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways. — J. R. Carpenter from « A Handmade Web«

Reg Beatty is a bookbinder, book artist and designer. He has maintained a studio in Toronto since 1992, lectured at a variety of institutions, and taught bookarts and book design at OCADU, York University and Sheridan College. As project manager and in-house designer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, he helped create the new interface and content management system for Yellow Nineties 2.0. He received an MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York, where his major project investigated the algorithmic book. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Japan, and across Canada.

Tiny Games: Handmade Playables
2025-06-09 00:00 - 2025-06-13 23:59 | Toronto Metropolitan University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada
Dates: June 9th to June 13th 2025

Part of IDARE Summer University 2025: « Handmade Digital »IDARE: INTERACTIVE DIGITAL ARTS, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Tiny Games: Handmade Playables

Please note: in-person or virtual attendance is possible for this workshop.

Instructor: Jeremy Andriano

Video games can be tiny! In this course, you will be introduced to several digital authoring tools that can be used to take a slow, personalised, handmade approach to making small video games and interactive stories. You will learn how to make one scene single player role-playing games (RPGs) with Twine 2 and Inky; you will learn how to use Bitsy for constructing pixelated visual poems; and you will explore making short, parser-based escape rooms in Inform 7. By focusing on tiny ludic experiences, we will give you everything you need to create your own complete tiny game and share it with the world!

On Day 1, we will explore examples of tiny games and learn how to access and install Twine 2, Inky, Bitsy, and Inform 7. There will be short demonstrations of each program, and you will start ideating your own tiny game. Subsequent days will focus on one style of game — hypertext RPG, pixelated poetry, or escape room — and the associated authoring tool(s), with demonstrations and instruction in the morning and a guided, open workshop in the afternoon. At the end of the week, we will showcase our tiny video games!

Jeremy Andriano (he/him) is a Master’s candidate in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His research investigates electronic media, culture, and technology with a focus on game studies, multilinear narrative, digital humanities, algorithm and human-computer interface. He has an undergraduate degree in English, Honours (TMU 2023), is a frequent contributor to the Unarchived Podcast, and has taught multiple workshops on Ink/Inky for the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of Creating Playable Stories with Ink and Inky (2023).

Micro-Editions: Handmade Digital Editions
2025-06-09 00:00 - 2025-06-13 23:59 | Toronto Metropolitan University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada
Dates: June 9th to June 13th 2025

Part of IDARE Summer University 2025: « Handmade Digital »IDARE: INTERACTIVE DIGITAL ARTS, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Micro-Editions: Handmade Digital Editions

Please note: in-person or virtual attendance is possible for this workshop.

Instructor: Jason Boyd

Online publishing makes feasible the publication of texts of varying lengths, from the very long to the very brief. While many digital editing projects have very broad scopes (i.e., the complete works of a single author), it is also possible to produce an edition of a single short document — one publication venue for such tiny editions is the journal, Scholarly Editing. This course introduces students to the creation of micro-editions using the XML-based markup specification developed by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. Students will develop a micro-edition of a short text of their choosing: this could be a letter, a poem, a short story, or another short document Students should send a description of the text they wish to edit to the instructor in advance of the workshop.

Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at TMU, and the Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities. He was the TEI Editor for the Fortune Theatre Prototype Digital Edition, and has been exploring how TEI can be used to facilitate exegetical analysis of biographical texts through the Texting Wilde Project. He has also explored social editing through the Wikisource edition of Canadian Singers and Their Songs (1919), and has recently published « The Ludic Edition: Playful Futures for Digital Scholarly Editing » in Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century.

Reproducible Research Practices and Tools
2025-06-10 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 10 2025

Description: Have you ever tried to run someone else’s code and it just didn’t work? Have you ever been lost interpreting your colleague’s data? This hands-on session will provide researchers with tools and techniques to make their research process more transparent and reusable in remote computing environments. We’ll be using platforms like JupyterHub and scripting languages like Bash to demonstrate the material. In this workshop, you’ll learn about:

Organizing your file directories

Writing readable metadata with README files

Automating your workflow with scripts

Capture and share your computational environmentUsing large language models (GenAI) to assist with the above

Teachers: Sarah Huber (University of Victoria), Shahira Khair (University of Victoria), and Drew Leske (University of Victoria)

Level: Introductory

Format: Lecture + Hands-on

Prerequisite: Familiarity with command-line tools in a Unix environment is not a requirement for the workshop but may be helpful for some of the hands-on activities.

Creating OER with Students
2025-06-11 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Manitoba, 100 Innovation Drive, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 6A8, Canada
Led by Apurva Ashok (Rebus Foundation)

Join us for a hands-on workshop where we will explore practical, fun, and effective strategies for co-creating Open Educational Resources (OER) with students. We’ll discover how open educational practices and renewable assignments can transform classroom dynamics by engaging students as active knowledge creators rather than passive participants. Together, we’ll examine approaches to embedding accessibility and cultural relevance into your OER design process while also building digital competency skills for both educators and students. Through guided reflections and practical exercises, you’ll develop the skills necessary to create more inclusive and representative learning materials alongside your students. Participants who complete the workshop activities will receive an online certificate and a digital badge recognizing their commitment to open education.

Part of « Open Horizons: Affordability and Access through Open Education »

Manitoba Open Education Symposium, June 11–12, 2025

Implementing Institutional RDM Strategies
2025-06-12 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 12 2025

Description: With the release of the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy all Canadian post-secondary institutions and research hospitals that administer Tri-Agency funding were required to develop and post institutional research data management (RDM) strategies by March 1, 2023. As institutions finalized their strategies, they began to consider what implementation would look like. To support inter-institutional, cross-functional dialogue around implementation, a two-day, SSHRC-supported workshop was hosted at the University of Waterloo in September 2023. Over 30 institutions of varying sizes and research intensities sent cohorts representing libraries, information technology, and research offices to participate in dialogues around challenges and collaborative solutions in RDM strategy implementation. The high-level recommendations from that workshop have been released as the report Building an Inter-Institutional and Cross-Functional Research Data Management Community: From Strategy to Implementation. In this short workshop, participants will discuss the recommendations in the report and how they can be implemented in their institutions.

Teachers: Jennifer Abel (University of Calgary) and Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo)

Level: Intermediate

Format: Workshop

Prerequisites:

Participants should also read the executive summary of the report before the workshop.

Participants should be involved in RDM-supporting work in their institution; e.g., in the library, research office, IT/research computing, ethics, etc.

Data Bites - Creating a Data Dictionary for Research Projects
2025-06-16 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 16 2025

This practical workshop, delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, introduces the purpose and structure of a data dictionary to support clear, consistent, and reusable research data. Designed for graduate students, researchers, and staff, the session emphasizes how data dictionaries enhance data documentation, sharing, and reuse.

Participants will learn how to:

Use templates and tools to build data dictionaries that promote transparency and reproducibility across research projects

Identify key components of a data dictionary, including variable names, definitions, formats, and units

Create and maintain a data dictionary that aligns with best practices and supports FAIR principles

Presenter(s): Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

Depositing in Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository
2025-06-19 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 19 2025

Description: This online workshop will support researchers with uploading data files of all types and examples of documentation and metadata for submission to an institutional collection (hosted in Borealis). Participants will learn more about direct integrations for dropbox, handling .zips, geospatial file support, creating documentation and metadata, linking to code and publications, integrated previewers and analysis tools for reuse and sharing.

Teachers: Amber Leahey (OCUL, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto), Billie Hu (OCUL, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto), Alyssa Conlon (OCUL, Scholars Portal, Queen’s University)

Level: Introductory

Format: Workshop

Prerequisites: None

Using Data Collections in Odesi and Scholars GeoPortal in Your Research
2025-06-19 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 19 2025

Description: This online workshop will demonstrate to researchers how-to search, filter by variables, topics, and themes, as well as exploring and analyzing data using these repository platforms. Highlights of collections including historical census data and geographic boundary data as well as open historical topographic maps and data for reuse. Participants will be able to search for data and explore datasets to learn more about data for reuse. A significant focus will be on Canadian open access and historical government data, an open Q&A portion will be facilitated by staff and data experts for further consultation.

Teachers: Amber Leahey (OCUL, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto) and Alicia Urquidi Diaz (OCUL, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto), Alexandra Cooper (Queen’s University)

Level: Introductory

Format: Workshop

Prerequisites: None

Metadata in the DRI Ecosystem: A Pragmatic Introduction
2025-06-19 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 19 2025

Description: Metadata is as metadata does. As researchers and institutions embrace digital research infrastructures (DRIs) and digital tools for conducting research, researchers need a better and deeper practical understanding of metadata in these new digital contexts.

Usually defined as essentially being data about data, metadata provides additional information or context about an item (a digital object, a piece of data..). Most people have an intuitive understanding of the ways metadata can make it easier to understand, manage, and organize digital items, based on their experiences interacting with metadata in practice–from managing personal files in their own computers or on the cloud, to using library catalogues or scientific databases.

This workshop will aim to demystify DRI metadata by experiencing it “in action” across three data services: Borealis, Scholars GeoPortal, and Odesi. The goal is to connect the (sometimes arcane) metadata best practices and recommendations with some actual, practical (and often surprising!) implications of your metadata decisions.

Teacher: Alicia Urquidi Diaz (OCUL, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto)

Level: Introductory

Format: Workshop

Prerequisites: None

Plugins in QGIS
2025-06-26 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 26 2025

This intermediate-level workshop is meant to extend basic knowledge of QGIS by exploring common plugins. Familiarity of the QGIS is therefore a prerequisite. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to use plugins to

Access dynamic basemaps hosted on web servers

Query and download Open Street Map (OSM) data

Geocode address data from a spreadsheet, and

Create an interactive webmap from a QGIS project

Familiarity with GIS is prerequisite for this workshop.

This workshop is taught by a graduate student in Geography with expertise in GIS and cartographic methods.

Things to do before arriving:

QGIS is a free and open source desktop geographic information system (GIS). It can be installed on Windows, MacOS, and Linux using the download instructions here: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html.

Before attending, please download the most recent QGIS Long Term Release and review the Research Commons’ Introduction to QGIS.

Presenter(s): Lily Crandall-Oral

Critical Editing and Interpretation in TEI
2025-06-27 00:00 - 23:59 | The University of British Columbia, 1958 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V62 1Z2, Canada
Date: June 27th 2025

Location: UBC Digital Scholarship Lab, Koerner Library, 4th floor

Recommended Reading

Beshero-Bondar, Elisa, Lee Skallerup Bessette, Quinn Dombrowski, and Roopika Risam. “DSC #5: The DSC and the Impossible TEI Quandaries.” The Data-Sitters Club. June 25, 2020. https://doi.org/10.25740/wq850xt2646.

This session will offer an introduction to critical digital editing in TEI. In particular, this session will provide a hands-on introduction to how the TEI facilitates editorial markup for manuscript and print texts. Topics will include encoding manuscript features–such as additions, deletions, and other revisions in one or more hands–and editorial interventions, such as editorial notes, gaps, and supplied text; marking up interpretations and mechanisms for encoding analysis; and handling of figures, tables, and images.

We recommend installing Oxygen XML Editor. If you do not have a current subscription, 30-day trial licenses are available here: https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/register.html. A limited number of computers in the UBC Digital Scholarship Lab have licensed Oxygen XML installed if you prefer to work on those machines (note: you will need to save your work to cloud storage or a portable device as the computers are wiped each night).

Data Bites - File Naming Best Practices for Research Data
2025-06-30 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: June 30 2025

This practical workshop, delivered by the delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, introduces strategies for consistent and meaningful file naming to support better research organization, collaboration, and long-term data reuse. Designed for graduate students, researchers, and staff, this session helps participants avoid common pitfalls and adopt best practices in their research workflows.

Participants will learn how to:

Avoid problematic file names that can cause compatibility issues across platforms and systems

Apply clear and consistent file naming conventions

Incorporate elements like version control, dates, and identifiers for easy file tracking and retrieval

Presenter(s): Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

Data Bites - Choosing File Formats for Research Data
2025-07-07 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: July 7 2025

This practical workshop, delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, explores how selecting the right file formats can support long-term preservation, data sharing, and reuse. Aimed at graduate students, researchers, and staff, the session highlights best practices for choosing formats that align with FAIR data principles.

Participants will learn how to:

Apply practical guidelines for selecting file formats throughout the research data lifecycle

Identify preferred file formats for preservation, sharing, and interoperability

Distinguish between proprietary and open formats and understand their implications

Presenter(s):Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

Data Bites - Creating README Files for Research Data
2025-07-14 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: July 14 2025

This hands-on workshop, delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, introduces the importance of README files in documenting research data for long-term access and reuse. Designed for graduate students, researchers, and staff, the session provides practical guidance for creating clear, consistent, and useful data documentation.

Participants will learn how to:

Use templates and open tools to create and maintain README files throughout the research lifecycle

Identify the key components of an effective README file, including dataset description, file structure, and usage instructions

Apply best practices to improve data transparency, usability, and alignment with FAIR principles

Presenter(s): Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

Data Bites - Optimize Directory Structures for Research Data
2025-07-21 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: July 21 2025

Presenter(s):Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

This practical workshop, delivered by the UBC Library Research Data Management team, focuses on strategies for organizing research data using clear and logical directory structures. Designed for graduate students, researchers, and staff, the session helps participants manage files more effectively to support collaboration, reproducibility, and long-term data stewardship.

Participants will learn how to:

Design directory structures that reflect research workflows and support project organization

Implement naming and hierarchy conventions for easy navigation and version control

Apply best practices to maintain consistency and clarity throughout the research lifecycle
