Conceptualising and Creating a Digital Edition
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 (America/Halifax) | Ontario
This course will explore all aspects of conceptualizing, planning for, and creating a digital edition. It provides a basic introduction to the various types of digital editions, the practice of editing in the digital age, and a survey of the many digital tools available to serve project goals. Approaching a digital edition means taking time to think about how end-users will want to work with a particular edition. Beginning with the research and analytical needs of end-users in mind, editors are better able to develop effective editorial strategies that will result in a dynamic, useful, and usable, digital edition. In this course, participants will engage in hands-on learning and group discussions related to project conceptualization, editorial policies and processes, and the selection and use of digital tools that can serve the needs of researchers and other end-users. Participants will bring a few sample materials they are working with. We will use these in a class project – creating a digital edition over the course of the week using skills learned in each session. Our goal is for participants to return to their home institutions ready and able to build upon, enhance, and transform these initial ideas into robust digital editions.
This offering is co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Editing at UVa.
This course combines lecture and hands-on activities. Consider this offering to build on: Digitisation Fundamentals and their Application; Understanding the Pre-Digital Book. Consider this offering in complement with and / or to be built on by: Digital Documentation and Imaging for Humanists; Pragmatic Publishing Workflows; XPath for Processing XML and Managing Projects; and more!

Web APIs with Python
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
This course is aimed at humanities scholars interested in tapping into the data streams and functionality offered by platforms and content providers such as Twitter, Google, and the New York Times. Introduction to APIs will open with the basics of Python, a scripting language widely used in industry and the academy because of its human readability. We will proceed to the fundamentals of working with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the most common way to programatically access web-based services and data. Lessons will cover the fundamentals of programming, the workflow of building a small script/app, accessing data from a variety of sources, and reading technical documentation. The course will be useful for those interested in understanding programming concepts, developing applications, and working with data.
This is a hands-on course. Consider this offering in complement with Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists); CloudPowering DH Research; Practical Software Development for Nontraditional Digital Humanities Developers; Introduction to Data for Digital Humanities Projects; Text Analysis with Python and the Natural Language ToolKit; and more!

Cybersecurity for Humanists
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
University researchers are facing increasingly sophisticated security threats. Cyber security attacks against education and research sectors are growing faster than any other sector. Digital Humanities has brought historical and cultural research to a public audience like never before, thanks in large part to the web. Archives and applications are making rarefied cultural objects available almost anywhere on the globe, but they are also now exposed to risks associated with any online activity. This course will introduce attendees to many security best practices and policies by conducting a holistic risk assessment. We will rely on open standards like those produced by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Essentials tool kit. During the course of the week, we will develop a threat model for your project, lab, or centre. We will work to identify ways to limit your project’s attack surface and generate custom research security policies for you and your collaborators. This session will help you develop a security-first research practice that protects the safety of your data, your researchers, and your research subjects. A security-first research practice helps ensure data integrity for your project in a global political climate that can be antagonistic or even hostile to humanities research.
This is a hands-on course with some lecture components. Consider this offering to be built on by and/or in complement with Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods, Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements, DH For Department Chairs and Deans, Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches, Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Critiques & Praxis, and more!

Open Knowledge in Wikipedia and Beyond: Possibilities and Responsibilities
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
In this course, we will work on the definition of Open Knowledge and its commonalities, differences and relationship to Open Access and Open Data. We look through non-profit projects of Wikimedia and through other academic and non-academic projects, by focusing on technological, collaborative, legal and ethical questions.
Whereas legal and technological restrictions, and collaborative methods are mostly well defined by laws, user guidelines and the current state of the art, social restrictions often seem to be open to interpretation. We will find and discuss guidelines to let ethical questions find access into the guidelines of Open Access projects. There will also be room to discuss your own Open Knowledge projects, based on what we learnt, if you want to share them with the class. This course is aimed at students, academic stuff, non-academic and academic archivists and librarians, community members and anyone else with an interest in ethical, legal, collaborative and technological questions about Open Knowledge.

Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
This course dives into the Semantic Web with its possibilities for humanities research through exploring ontologies and vocabularies for Linked Open Data: how they are constructed, how they function in relation to data structure and creation, and how they impact dissemination and querying. Practical exercises will include ontology creation and extension, using ontologies in the creation of LOD or conversion of existing data using a range of tools, and the use of ontologies in data querying, analysis, and visualization. Discussions and reflection on class activities will work towards an understanding how ontologies both mobilize and constrain data, analyzing the implications of different ontologies as forms of modeling, and evaluating the suitability of particular ontologies for different approaches to research. We will be particularly concerned with the ability of ontologies to reflect the heterogeneity, specificity, and situatedness of humanities data, and to support critical approaches such as feminism, critical race, and indigenous studies.
This course is offered by the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship cyberinfrastructure project, which will be providing tools and methods for converting humanities datasets into LOD. Researchers are encouraged to bring content they are interested in mobilizing in the form of an essay, article, primary text for editing; XML (e.g. TEI or MODS) data; or a spreadsheet or CSV file. These will form the basis of discussions, analyses, and experimentation with tools.
This offering is co-sponsored by LINCS.
This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on formats. Consider this offering in relation to the following. Predecessors: Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web; Making Choices About Your Data; Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods (good for evaluating the vocabularies that we find); Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements (good for evaluating vocabularies that we find); Queer Digital Humanities: Intersections, Interrogations, Iterations (good for evaluating vocabularies that we find); Databases for Digital Humanists; Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists). Successors: Introduction to Network Analysis in the Digital Humanities; Ethical Data Visualization: Taming Treacherous Data; Web APIs with Python; Information Security for Digital Researchers; Introduction to IIIF: Sharing, Consuming, and Annotating the World’s Images. Peers: Open Access and Open Social Scholarship; Endings: How to end (and archive) your digital project; XPath for Processing XML and Managing Projects; Agile Project Management. And more!

DIY Computational Text Analysis with R
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
This is a course in stylometry, or the analysis of countable linguistic features of texts. While stylometry has been usually associated with authorship attribution, the same methods are successfully applied to more general text analysis, and, recently, even analysis of other modes such as music and image. The statistics of such features as word, word n-gram or character n-gram frequencies, are not only a highly precise tool for identifying authorship, but can in fact reveal patterns of similarity and difference between various works by one author, works by various authors, finally between authors differing in terms of chronology, gender, genre or narrative styles, between translations of the same author or group of authors, or specific voices such as idiolects of characters in novels. This provides a new opening in literary studies, and the results of a stylometric analysis can be compared and confronted with the findings of traditional stylistics and interpretation. It also opens a new set of questions about style and its transfer, as well as the nature of particular features and language.
The participants of our course will learn major stylometric tools and methods, from simple keywords extraction to machine-learning classification based on text features, followed by visualization techniques ranging from dendrograms to networks. The participants will learn how to identify the problem, define relevant research questions, and design an experiment. We will use our own package written for the R statistical programming environment — ‘stylo’, which allows us to avoid R’s usually steep learning curve – we don’t expect advanced programming skills. We will provide text corpora to use for training purposes, but also hope and expect participant bring their own data and problems to work on.
This course combines lecture and hands-on activities. Consider this offering to build on: Fundamentals of Coding / Programming for Human(s|ists); Web Development / Project Prototyping for Beginners with Ruby on Rails; Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities. Consider this offering in complement with and / or to be built on by: Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities; Understanding Topic Modelling; Data Mining for Digital Humanists; and more!

Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Critiques & Praxis
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
What is our ethical imperative as teachers and scholars in the digital and public humanities? How might we identify and address the colonial histories, legacies, and discursive practices pervading the contemporary technoscape and our departmental curricula? How might we hone our individual and collective capacities to sustain communities of care and transform oppressive structures of knowledge-making in the neoliberal academy? Through engaging with and reflecting on these critical questions, this weeklong course invites scholars, creative practitioners, and off-campus community members to develop collective strategies for refusing the damaging colonialities of teaching, learning, and research practices. As co-participants, we will foreground an ethic of care and community building in identifying tactics that we can share and act upon to challenge and transform colonial ideologies and systems embedded within the increasingly interdisciplinary practices of digital humanities. Building upon Paulo Freire’s writings on the pedagogy of the oppressed and aligning with Global South, Indigenous, Black, and women of colour feminist, queer, and crip justice work, we will imagine and continue the ongoing process of bringing into being the anti-colonial possibilities of classroom teaching for a bolder and more affirming environment for digital humanists inside and outside the academy.

Deep Learning for Humanists
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | Ontario
This hands-on course will introduce neural networks, image preprocessing, and deep learning models for those who wish to explore deep learning for the digital humanities. This course will first focus on learning activation functions, loss functions, and gradient descent, then explore image processing and deep learning models. After that, we will train GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and cGANs (conditional Generative Adversarial Networks) models to colorize black-and-white images. Throughout this course, participants will be able to create their own datasets for deep learning then run deep learning models with them.

Humanités numériques: Web sémantique et données
2024-06-10 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
10 juin 2024 et 14 juin 2024

Atelier sur les principes du Web sémantique et des données ouvertes liées

Les ateliers sont admissibles au certificat si aucun crédit curriculaire n’a été obtenu.

Game Making for Scholarship and Storytelling
2024-06-10 00:00 - 2024-06-14 23:59 | Toronto Metropolitan University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada
IDARE, hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), offers learning opportunities in digital making for artistic, scholarly, and educational purposes. These opportunities are open to the TMU community and to the public.

IDARE’s inaugural offering, part of the IDARESU, the IDARE Summer University, will be a week-long course on “Game Making for Scholarship and Storytelling.” Participants will be introduced to four open access creation platforms (Twine 2, Ink/Inky, Decker, and Bitsy), and will be able to start making their own game. Participants can choose to attend for the full week or one or more classes dedicated to a particular platform.

Led by: Jeremy Andriano, Reg Beatty, Jason Boyd, and Bobby Papoutsis

Diversity, Access, and Accessibility (Technical)
2024-06-13 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, LEMDO Director Janelle Jenstad will give a talk on “Endings Compliance, Open Access, and Equity,” explaining how LEMDO creates Endings-compliant anthologies and editions for maximum digital sustainability, archivability, and longevity.

Navarra Houldin (LEMDO Project Manager and expert in EDI and Accessibility) will then talk about “Making Editions Accessible.” Building on the DRE Editorial Guidelines’ question “Who are you editing for?” Navarra will do a positionality exercise to help editors identify their own subject position with respect to the target audience of a LEMDO edition. The session will end with a quick overview of how to write alt text and use plain language.

Anthology leads, current editors, prospective editors, and LEMDO-curious students and scholars are very welcome!

Led by: Janelle Jenstad

Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions (Technical)
2024-07-25 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, LEMDO Project Manager, Navarra Houldin will introduce practice for encoding style in semi-diplomatic transcriptions using LEMDO’s default styling, file-wide styling, and renditions.

Advanced Topics in Semi Diplomatic Transcriptions (Webinar 1)
2024-08-08 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, Director of LEMDO, Janelle Jenstad, will go through how to encode speech prefixes and literary divisions in semi-diplomatic transcriptions. We are excited to welcome Mahayla Galliford, LEMDO Senior Encoder, to speak on encoding stage directions in semi-diplomatic transcriptions.

Advanced Topics in Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions (Webinar 2)
2024-08-22 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, LEMDO Project Manager, Navarra Houldin, will go into detail about inline styling for semi-diplomatic transcriptions. This will include support using CSS within TEI files and an introduction to CSS Flex.

Basics of Computers
2024-09-20 13:00 - 15:00 | Ontario
Most of us have experience using a computer, whether for school, work, or entertainment, but how many of us have actually had an expert teach us how to use it? When one of your computing devices goes wrong, do you struggle to understand why? Perhaps you do an internet search in the hope that someone else who has had the exact same problem as you found a solution that also works for you. It doesn’t need to be (quite) this way. This talk doesn’t teach you how to troubleshoot everything, but does give you insight to how media, programs and data are encoded and used by computers so you can make more sense of why computers behave the ways they do and solve some of your problems with greater efficiency and less frustration. We provide an approachable overview of how a computer works, by both looking at their history and breaking one down to explain individual components, before highlighting some of the tradeoffs to consider when buying a computer. We provide practical, simple, and actionable advice on digital security and show you a few “pro tips” on how to make the most of your workstation, phone, or whatever device you happen to use. Whether you have a lot or a little experience using your digital technology, if you want to learn how to use your devices more effectively, this workshop is for you!

Collation (Technical)
2024-09-26 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, LEMDO Project Manager, Navarra Houldin, will teach LEMDO encoders how to create links in the LEMDO environment using anchors, pointers, and references.

Machine Learning and Open Science: Research Data Management Community of Practice
2024-09-26 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 26 September 2024

Machine Learning and Open Science: Research Data Management Community of Practice Online

Our Research Data Management Community of Practice is back with a bang! September’s session is all about Machine Learning and Open Science. With training data impacting research results, what’s the best way to share ML-based science and ensure research is reproducible and valid? Join us Thursday, September 26 at 11 AM for a great discussion between researchers!

Dr. Alemu Gonsamo (Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Earth, Environment & Society) and Ricardo Barros Lourenco (Earth, Environment & Society) will unpack training algorithms with data from the Ministry of Natural Resources and then sharing data for a recent paper on peat depth and carbon storage.

Dr. Cynthia Lokker (Health Research Methods, Evidence & Impact) and Rick Parrish (Programmer/Analyst, Health Information Research Unit) will discuss sharing machine learning data for an article and their move from data available on request to a publicly findable restricted access dataset backed by a data sharing agreement. Rick will also share details on depositing an algorithm separately from a dataset.

Introducing Digital Scholarship 1: Digital Storytelling, Counter Narratives and Design Fictions
2024-10-01 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 1 October 2024

In the first installment of this two-event series, learn more about the interdisciplinary, multifaceted, and emergent approaches to digital scholarship from our 2024 Graduate Residency cohort.

Storying Disability: Digital Community Archives as Public Memorial at New York’s Craig Colony for Epileptics – Katie Waring

My project seeks to understand patient experiences with institutionalization at the Craig Colony for Epileptics in Sonyea, New York. As the first such institution for disabled people in the United States, the Craig Colony occupies an important role in disability history, yet little attention has been paid to the experiences of the patients forced to live there. This project integrates oral histories with survivors alongside archival research and photographs into an interactive digital map for users to explore and navigate using the design tool Vev. In this presentation, I will showcase the map and discuss the possibilities digital storytelling can offer as a strategic practice of remembrance in unearthing disability history, as well as how such strategic practices can help advocate for new and better futures for disabled communities.

Katie Waring (she/her) is a multimedia writer and doctoral candidate in the Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies program at McMaster. Her research aims to understand the potential for community-engaged digital storytelling in highlighting suppressed histories. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh and her creative work has been published in literary journals such as The Normal School and American Literary Review, among others. She’s originally from New York State.

“The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman”: Practicing Refusal Through Digital Counter-storytelling – Andrea Vela Alarcón

My project aims to be a creative digital intervention presenting illustrated AR vignettes and questions reflecting the gendered relations shaped by the long history of resource extraction in Iquitos (Peru). This project departs from the framework of refusal, a concept and practice rooted in Indigenous and Black thought. Refusal exposes and rejects the histories, knowledge production practices and relations of oppression taking away our subjecthood. However, refusal is also a creative outlet embracing the “possibility of living otherwise” (Campt, 2019). This presentation showcases three AR vignettes enacting a creative refusal by being a tool and entry point to explore the gendered violence and colonial resource extraction in Iquitos. I will discuss the possibilities digital counter-storytelling open as a process and site of political action exposing and unmasking non-innocent histories legitimizing resource extraction’s gendered violence of Amazonian girls and women.

Andrea Vela Alarcón (she/her/Ella) is a community educator, illustrator and doctoral candidate in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her academic, creative and pedagogical practices are rooted in anti-colonial approaches and feminist care ethics to facilitate spaces of critical conversations and creation geared toward a world beyond extraction. Through her work, Andrea collaborates with communities in the crafting of stories that center refusal and resistance for environmental justice.

Fostering Creative Confidence: Reframing Ambiguity Through Storytelling and Design Fiction – Fatima Nazir

As part of my ongoing work, I have developed a workshop that empowers students from various disciplines to build ‘creative confidence’ through storytelling and by reframing ambiguity in ways that foster excitement and joy in learning. This workshop, within the context of Design Thinking education, helps students view ambiguity as an opportunity for innovation rather than discomfort. I will discuss how design fiction—a method that creates story worlds in which prototypes explore discursive spaces—facilitates this shift. Participants redesign everyday objects to reflect future scenarios or alternate realities, imagining futures that encompass technological, social, and cultural narratives. With prompts, collaborative prototyping, and reflective discussion, the workshop fosters creativity, risk-taking, and comfort with ambiguity across various fields.

Fatima Nazir has a multidisciplinary background in applied psychology and human behaviour and is pursuing graduate studies in Engineering Design (Product Design). Passionate about storytelling and human-centered design, her work in research, design, and collaborative projects aims to create inclusive spaces that place people’s stories at the heart of product decisions. Her work spans from reimagining learning experiences and fostering creativity in education to advancing co-design practices in engineering and healthcare to address systemic challenges and improve outcomes.

Let’s Talk! Academic Podcast Entanglements – Milica Hinic

My graduate residency project for the Sherman Centre is a podcast series titled, The Academic Podcast Entanglements. It is composed of 8 episodes of in-depth conversations with transdisciplinary academic podcasters from Humanities and Social Sciences. My presentation will focus on the ways faculty, staff, and students use podcasting as a method within knowledge mobilization systems. I will discuss the many ways podcasts engage individual or collective knowledge brokers such as academics, researchers, students, community members, organizations, etc. Through these critical conversations the academic podcast amplifies the values and tensions of: (1) lived experiences (2) co-creation of meanings (3) and building relationships. The goal is to share what we know, what we don’t know and make spaces for new ways of doing podcasting in our digital futures.

Milica Hinic (She/Her) is an MA student in Communication and New Media at McMaster University. Her research interests include podcasting and knowledge mobilization in higher education and beyond. She finds innovative ways of sharing information and connecting knowledge brokers across diverse fields, institutions, organizations, and communities. As a result, she co-designs projects from beginning to end and co-creates meaningful project outputs that generate social impact.

Details: This virtual workshop will be recorded and shared on the same page, and discoverable via the Sherman Centre’s Online Learning Catalogue.

Best Practices for Managing Data in your Research
2024-10-02 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 2 October 2024

TIFU by losing a ton of data for my research – Have you ever seen a description like this on Reddit? Are your desktop and downloads folders a jumble of files named Data-finalFINAL-USETHISONE? Is all of your lab’s data stored on a single drive? Join research data management services and learn how investing a small amount of time in organizing your data now can save you a lot of time and prevent future headaches. In this introductory workshop, learn about research data management best practices. We will go over best practices for data planning, storage, organization, preservation, and sharing.

By the end of the session participants will be empowered to: Produce a plan for their data, organize and document their data consistently, store and back-up their data securely, and select an appropriate data repository for archival and sharing.

Details: This virtual workshop will be recorded. The recording will be posted to the Sherman Centre’s Online Learning Catalogue.

Facilitator Bio:

Isaac Pratt (he/him) is a research scientist by training and has a PhD in Anatomy & Cell Biology. He leverages nearly a decade of interdisciplinary research experience to help support students, staff, and faculty. His expertise lies in questions surrounding data storage, security, planning, archival, and sharing. Isaac also provides support and curation services for McMaster Dataverse. His other interests include reproducible research methods, open science, and data science.

Danica Evering holds expansive experience with research support, education, project management, advocacy, and knowledge translation; with fluency in social practice art, healthcare, community research, data, and systems development. Danica supports students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with RDM through the data lifecycle—Data Management Plans, storage and backup, data security, data sharing. With an MA in Media Studies from Concordia, they are interested in fostering RDM within curious scholars and disciplines.

Introducing Digital Scholarship 2: Data Analysis, Open-Source Tool Development, Platform Governance and Algorithmic Harms
2024-10-02 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 2 October 2024

In the second installment of this two-event series, learn more about the interdisciplinary, multifaceted, and emergent approaches to digital scholarship from our 2024 Graduate Residency cohort.

Developing standardized methods for transportation analysis – Bruno dos Santos

Transportation poverty occurs when financial difficulties and transportation challenges make it difficult for people to participate in daily activities. In Canada, this problem is aggravated by a lack of standards to ensure the fair distribution of transportation infrastructure and limited guidance for planners to address equity in their projects. However, with data now more accessible than ever, there are opportunities to improve equity in transportation planning. My presentation highlights the standardized methods I developed for transportation analysis during my residency at the Sherman Centre. I will present the COMMUTECA21 R package, created in collaboration with McMaster University’s Centre for Research Data, which provides tools for conducting transportation analysis of accessibility in any region of Canada using national survey data.

Bruno dos Santos (He/Him) is a Ph.D. student in the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University. He holds a M.Sc. in Remote Sensing from the National Institute for Space Research (São Paulo, Brazil). His doctoral research focuses on understanding how transportation acts as a barrier for individuals in finding or maintaining employment.

Unlocking Toddler Activity Insights: Introducing an Easy-to-Use Machine Learning Tool for Everyone – Elyse Letts

This presentation will showcase the latest version of my new open-source tool to assess toddler physical activity. This python tool allows non-experts to use a machine learning model without needing to code. It produces a physical activity summary from a raw accelerometer data file. Physical activity is essential for children’s healthy growth and development. The Canadian 24-hour Movement Behaviour Guidelines suggests that toddlers get 180 minutes of daily physical activity. To understand if toddlers are meeting guidelines, we must first accurately measure their activity. In my thesis work, I have developed a machine learning model that measures toddler activity. I have expanded this into a tool that can be easily used by those who work with toddlers, for example clinicians, researchers, and public health agencies.

Elyse Letts (she/her) is a PhD student in Medical Sciences at McMaster University with the Child Health & Exercise Medicine Program. Her research focuses on improving physical activity and sedentary time measurement in toddlers as well as investigating the impact of physical activity on toddler health outcomes. Prior to joining McMaster, she completed an undergraduate degree (BSc) in Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo.

Understanding the role of civil society in multistakeholder global platform governance at UNESCO – Brad McNeil

In October 2023, UNESCO released its ‘Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms,’ a major step in global digital platform governance by an international intergovernmental body. The Guidelines were developed through multistakeholder consultations occurring from December 2022 to June 2023, involving the public and private sectors, civil society, media, academia, and the technical community. The consultation process engaged 134 nations and received over 10,000 comments, making it one of UNESCO’s largest open consultations to date. Although UNESCO offered select quantitative data to showcase the diversity of stakeholders involved and to summarize feedback received, these summaries provide an incomplete picture of the multistakeholder process. My project uses the anonymized consultation data to critically assess the multistakeholder quality of the consultations, particularly highlighting concerns from civil society in the Global South. This presentation will explore alternative data visualizations to better represent these voices, offering a critical perspective on the institutional narrative.

Brad McNeil (He/Him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University.  His research interests lie at the multiple intersections between freedom of expression, content moderation, and platform governance. His doctoral research focuses on global platform governance, with special attention to the ways that international organizations such as Intergovernmental institutions and non-governmental organizations are structuring a vision of global platform governance.

Understanding the Nature and Risks of Welfare Algorithmic Harms – Anabelle Ragsag

With the rise of the use of networked technologies and algorithms comes the intensification of surveillance. As welfare and social assistance systems adopting AI, algorithms, and automation, the poor are increasingly subjected to new modes and intensified ways and systems of surveillance and regulation. This presentation will share what the AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Incidents and Controversies Repository (the AIAAIC Repository) have identified as algorithmic incidents in the welfare system around the world, their nature, risks, and impacts. This presentation for the 2024 Sherman Centre Graduate Residency is a smaller part of my doctoral thesis that aims to understand how Asian solo mothers experience welfare surveillance and how do they identify and make use of their agency in this surveillance-heavy contexts.

Anabelle Ragsag is a PhD student at the School of Social Work who is interested in the politics and technologies of social assistance. Originally from Mindanao, southern Philippines, Anabelle is a community organizer based in Hamilton. Through her program development and evaluation work; teaching, speaking and writing; and parenting, she tackles systemic inequities by building the capacity of racialized women, to collaborate with other women, to challenge structures, and to create spaces within and outside those that exclude them.

Breaking the Silence: Understanding HPV Vaccination Gaps among Canadian Men – Naharin Sultana Anni

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is often associated with women due to its link to cervical cancer, overshadowing the significant risk it poses to men. In Canada, men are frequently overlooked by HPV vaccination programs, leaving them vulnerable to HPV-related cancers like oropharyngeal and laryngeal cancers, due to limited awareness, cultural stigmas, and absence of targeted vaccination efforts.

This project aims to address these gaps through a comprehensive online survey targeting men residing in Canada aged 16 and above, available in English and French. The survey explores knowledge, attitudes, and practices surrounding HPV and its vaccine. This presentation will highlight preliminary results from the first 100 participants, focusing on key trends in awareness, barriers to vaccination, and implications for public health strategies to create inclusive vaccination programs.

Naharin Sultana Anni is a Ph.D. candidate in Global Health at McMaster University, focusing on knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to HPV among men in Canada. Her research aims to provide insights that can shape effective public health strategies and promote inclusive HPV vaccination programs. She holds an MBBS from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Yonsei University, South Korea.

Details: This virtual workshop will be recorded and shared on the same page, and discoverable via the Sherman Centre’s Online Learning Catalogue.Date:

Data Management Plan Bootcamp
2024-10-04 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 4 October 2024

Data Management Plans (DMPs) are both incredibly helpful research tools and increasingly required for grants but it can hard to know how to complete a Data Management Plan if it’s your first time. If you’re in the process of creating a DMP, either for a grant application or for your own research, join RDM Services for this afternoon session. By the end of the session, you’ll understand what the major components of a DMP are and walk away with a potentially completed plan for your own research!

This session is especially relevant if you’re in the beginning stages of a research project or streamlining best practices for your research team. Come on your own, send your research staff, or bring your whole research group. This 3-hour session will briefly introduce the different sections of a DMP and all the important things to consider as you build it. The RDM services team will provide tailored guidance as you write your plan on site, and we’ll have some light snacks and refreshments to keep you going. Come away with a clear path forward or even a finished DMP!

Let us know if you’re solo or joining as a research team – we’ll make sure you space to work together.

Learning Outcomes: Identify a strong data management plan compared to a weak response, section by section. Produce a solid outline of their own DMP.

Preliminary Work: Consult with PIs, supervisors, or anyone else to ensure you have access to any data-related information (including ethics requirements) you need to actively work on a DMP.

Details: This workshop will not be recorded.

“What gets counted… counts.” Data feminist approaches to digital humanities research
2024-10-08 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Ottawa, 50 University Private, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada
Date: 8 October 2024

STUDENTS from Big Data, Culture and Society will share their work applying a data feminist approach to research on targeted ad promotion, use of generative AI in fanfiction communities, computer science curricula, and more!

English presentation.

Introduction to JupyterLab
2024-10-08 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: 8 October 2024

Using a single development environment for all stages of your research project can greatly facilitate your work organization. To do so, our team recommends JupyterLab, a software package that combines code, text, equations, graphics and visualizations in a single document. This tool can also execute program lines one at a time, allowing you to pinpoint their respective effects. This training course will allow you to make the most of JupyterLab’s graphical interface and key features.

Registration

Academic participant : 10$

Non-academic participant : $200

Prerequisites

Knowing the keyboard combinations for these characters: [ ] ( ) { } ! $ | * # @ & / < > ~ ‘ “

Understanding the notions of file and directory.

Course plan

Introduction to JupyterLab

Best practices.

Notebooks (Python, R, Julia)

Virtual Desktop, VS Code, OpenRefine

Resource Monitoring

Instructor

Elie El Haber, analyst in advanced research computing at Calcul Québec.

Introduction à la programmation avec Python [en ligne, PYT101]
2024-10-15 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
15 octobre 2024

La programmation est un outil polyvalent qui permet de mener à terme des projets variés, dont l’analyse de vos données, leur manipulation et l’automatisation de tâches. Cette formation vous permettra de découvrir la programmation et de réfléchir à son intégration dans un projet de recherche. Les concepts abordés existent dans la plupart des langages de programmation. Cet atelier est donc pertinent même si vous souhaitez analyser vos données avec un langage autre que Python.

Inscription

Participant académique : 10$

Participant non-académique : 200$

Prérequis

Comprendre les concepts de fichiers et dossiers;

Avoir suivi UNX101 ou connaitre les bases de la ligne de commande Unix.

Plan de cours

Les bases

Analyse de données

Visualisation

Les listes

Répétitions d’opérations

Expressions conditionnelles

Fonctions

Formateur

Charles Coulombe, analyste en calcul informatique de pointe à Calcul Québec.

Prérequis techniques

Nous utiliserons Zoom comme plateforme. Comme il s’agit d’un atelier pratique, il est utile d’avoir deux écrans afin de pouvoir afficher l’écran de l’instructeur d’un côté et votre propre écran de l’autre.

Nous utiliserons aussi l’interface Jupyter Lab. Assurez-vous d’avoir un navigateur Web moderne tel que Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge ou Safari.

Contact

Pour toutes questions, écrivez-nous à formation@calculquebec.ca.

N﻿otes

La formation pourrait être annulée advenant un nombre trop peu élevé d’inscriptions.

La formation n’est pas enregistrée;

Optimizing Research Impact: Establishing and Maintaining Researcher Profiles
2024-10-16 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 16 October 2024

The ability to effectively track and express your research impact is an essential skill for today’s researchers. Profile tools like ORCID, Google Scholar, and McMaster Experts provide a valuable space to showcase your research outputs (from publications to datasets to creative works) and enable efficient workflows for demonstrating your impact. In this webinar, we will guide researchers through the process of establishing researcher profiles: from initial set-up, to efficient maintenance; to the generation of basic impact reports.

Learning Outcomes: Attendees will learn how to: 1) Select the most appropriate research profile(s) for their needs. 2) Automate the initial population and maintenance of their research profile(s). 3) Generate basic research impact reports using profile data.

Details: Any preparatory work for the session can be found on its information page. This virtual workshop will be recorded and shared on the same page, and discoverable via the Sherman Centre’s Online Learning Catalogue.

Facilitator Bio:

Jack Young (he/him) is McMaster’s Research Impact Librarian, supporting the use of bibliometric data to enhance the reporting and strategic planning practices of the University’s academic departments, institutes, and researchers.

Sabrina Kirby (she/her) is the Research Technology Analyst for the McMaster Experts service, providing support to researchers and research administrations working with their Experts profiles and the varous systems and integrations that comprise McMaster Experts.

Introduction to R
2024-10-17 00:00 - 23:59 | McMaster University, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L8, Canada
Date: 17 October 2024

This beginner-level workshop will focus on basic concepts of R programming using R Studio. Various Data Types and Data Structures will be discussed as well as basic data manipulation. No prior knowledge of R programming is required for this workshop. This workshop consists of a synchronous workshop session, which will be recorded and shared publicly afterward.

Learning Outcomes: Get started with R Programming after learning the basic concepts.

Details: Any preparatory work for the session can be found on its information page. This virtual workshop will be recorded and shared on the same page, and discoverable via the Sherman Centre’s Online Learning Catalogue.

Facilitator Bio:

Vivek Jadon (he/him) provides research support in the use of numeric research data. As part of his role, Vivek is McMaster University’s official representative for Statistics Canada’s Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) program and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Both of these programs provide researchers with vast archive of research data from various disciplines for high quality research and instruction. Vivek is also involved in building awareness and promoting RDM activities/services at McMaster.

The Around the World of Parliamentary Immunity: A Case Study of Comparative Legislative Research in Three Post-British Rule Parliaments
2024-10-22 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Ottawa, 50 University Private, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada
Date: 22 October 2024

This workshop takes place from 11:30-12:30 (Eastern) in Perez Hall room 302.

Parliamentary immunity is a significant aspect of parliamentary life. Created centuries ago by the British House of Commons, the system has influenced other national legislative bodies. However, little is known about the degree to which elements of the Westminster model have been inherited by parliaments. DR. SHLOMI BALABAN (postdoctoral fellow at uOttawa) is joining us to demonstrate how he’s using ArcGIS Storymaps alongside previously unpublished digitized archival materials to visually represent parliamentary connections as a form of “geo-digital genealogy” of the law.

English presentation.

Modernization (Technical)
2024-10-24 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
In this technical webinar, LEMDO Project Manager, Navarra Houldin, will introduce the basics of regular expressions (regex). This useful tool will help editors to quickly find-and-replace in their modernized text template files.

Introduction to programming with Python [online, PYT101]
2024-10-29 00:00 - 23:59 | Ontario
Date: 29 October 2024

Programming serves as a versatile tool for a wide range of endeavours, including analyzing data, manipulating data, and automating tasks. Through this workshop, you will learn the basics of programming and consider how it fits into your research project. These concepts aren’t exclusive to Python; they’re applicable to most programming languages, making this workshop pertinent regardless of your chosen language.

Registration

Academic participant : 10$

Non-academic participant : $200

Prerequisites

Understanding the notions of file and directory;

UNX101 completion or knowledge of the basics of the Unix command line.

Course plan

Basics

Data analysis

Visualization

Lists

Repeated operations

Conditional expressions

Functions

Instructor

Charles Coulombe, analyst in advanced research computing at Calcul Québec.

Technical prerequisites

We will use the Zoom platform. Because this event is a practical workshop, it is very useful having a secondary screen where you would get the instructor window on one screen and your own window on your main screen.

We will use the Jupyter Lab interface. Make sure you have a modern Web browser like Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari.

Contact

For any question, please write to training@calculquebec.ca.

Notes

The workshop could be canceled if the number of registrations is too low.

The workshop is not recorded;

Introduction aux humanités numériques
2024-10-29 00:00 - 23:59 | UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal, 400 rue Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, Québec, H2L 2C5
Les humanités numériques réfèrent à l’utilisation d’outils et de pratiques numériques dans les sphères des sciences humaines et sociales et des arts et lettres. Le numérique peut intervenir à différents moments d’une recherche en sciences humaines et sociales et en arts et lettres, et ce, peu importe la nature et la portée du projet.

Cette présentation se veut une introduction aux méthodes et outils en humanités numériques ainsi qu’un tour d’horizon des ressources et services offerts au Service des bibliothèques de l’UQAM en lien avec les humanités numériques.

Guides liés: Humanités numériques by Simon Côté-Lapointe
