This workshop will introduce attendees to techniques for scraping information from the web using Python’s Beautiful Soup (bs4) toolkit. We will begin with a basic overview of the “anatomy” or structure of a webpage. Students will then learn how to write a script for extracting textual data from websites like Reddit and organizing it into spreadsheets. The second half of the workshop will explore how to use Python’s Pandas library to clean and analyze your data. In addition to technical skills, students are encouraged to engage with critical questions like: What is web scraping for and what can we, as researchers, learn from publicly available data? What are the potential ethical and legal challenges of data harvesting, and how do we do it responsibly?

Date: 15 February 2024 Using a single environment for all stages of your research project can help you organize your work. To this end, our team recommends JupyterLab, a software that logs code, text, equations, graphs and visualizations in a single document. This tool can also execute the lines of a program one at a […]

Date: 15 February 2024 R is a free and open-source programming language for statistical computing, modelling, and graphics, with an unbeatable collection of statistical packages. It is extremely popular in some academic fields such as statistics, biology, bioinformatics, data mining, data analysis, and linguistics. This introductory course does not assume any prior knowledge: it will […]

Date: 15 February 2024 In this short session, we will demo some of Python’s capabilities to researchers new to the language, starting with multiple ways to run Python, high-level data collections such as lists and dictionaries, using Python for data processing and manipulation, and data visualization. This short lecture-style course will be followed by a […]

Date: 16 February 2024 3D visualization has been used in traditional scientific computing for several decades to visualize the results of multidimensional numerical simulations. In humanities, 3D visualizations have been mostly restricted to specialized areas such as game engines, architectural renderings, virtual environments, photogrammetric processing, and visualization of point cloud data. In this short course, […]

How does deep learning really work? What exactly are those large language models everybody talks about? How can I build a neural network? What is NLP? This presentation will answer these questions in a non-technical manner to give you a high-level understanding of a discipline that has become crucial in all fields of research. The […]

Have you ever wished you could stand in and study an imaginary or long-vanished space–from a work of literature or from a distant period in history, or perhaps a virtual creation of a famous thought experiment or a speculative model of something that doesn’t exist in the real world? 3D visualization can grant that wish. […]

February 26-28, 2024, 12:00-2:00 pm EST Welcome by: Presented by: Alex Razoumov Duration: 3 * 120 minutes (total 6 hours) Description: Python can be used in many humanities and social sciences workflows, and it is an easy and fun language to learn. This introductory 3-day, 6-hour course will walk you through the basics of programming […]

February 26-28, 2024, 12:00-2:00 pm EST Presented by: Marie-Hélène Burle Duration: 3 * 120 minutes (total 6 hours) Description: R is a free and open-source programming language for statistical computing, modelling, and graphics, with a large collection of packages and a great community. It is extremely popular in many academic fields, including the humanities. This […]

This is a day-long workshop that will explore 3d modelling and printing. We’ll take a physical object from the real world, use a series of sophisticated software to render it into a 3d model, and then learn how to print that model on a 3d printer.

Grant applications and ethics protocols suggest you need to ensure research data is kept secure, but the “how” of managing this task is rarely addressed. We’ll guide you through common research issues connected with privacy and security: using online or “cloud” services for file storage, ensuring a lost laptop doesn’t mean compromised data, taking control of […]