Introduction to Python Data Analysis
2024-05-14 00:00 - 23:59 (America/Halifax) | University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Dates: 14th-17th May 2024

This course introduces students to core concepts in Python programming, data creation, and data analysis. The course assumes no prior programming or Python knowledge. Students will be introduced to the Python programming language and will use Python to collect, curate, and analyze data. They will create data structures, use programming libraries to manipulate and work with data, and develop their own functions. Students will learn to use APIs to connect their programs to external libraries and data sources and will engage in distant reading of social media.

Instructor: Paul Barrett

Uncovering Hidden Trends & Patterns Using Data Visualization
2024-05-14 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Dates: 14th-17th May 2024

Effective data visualization can make information consumable, convey important concepts and ideas and even make your arguments more persuasive. In this workshop we’ll examine the data visualization lifecycle. Learn to gather, create, clean, process, visualize, and share complex data: from numerical to text to network.

In this four-part workshop we will cover:

Finding and Getting Data – Learn how to find existing data, and strategies for creating your own.

Cleaning and Processing Data – Understand the process of identifying and fixing dirty data.

Visualizing Data – Use best practices to design, create, and refine data visualizations.

This workshop will have engaging demonstrations and participants will have a chance to practice with data and hands-on exercises related to the Digital Humanities. Participants will be required to bring their own laptop and software installation instructions will be provided prior to the workshop. At the end of the workshop, participants will be comfortable with using various tools to harvest, clean, and visualize. Core tools will include OpenRefine, Exploratory.io, Tableau, Voyant and Gephi.

Instructor: Jennifer Marvin

Text Analysis with Computation and Large Language Models
2024-05-14 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Dates: 14th-17th May 2024

This workshop will introduce students to the possibilities of analyzing text using computationally focused methods. This includes classic computational text analysis such as topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and word embedding. All of this and more available to everyone via open-source Python Libraries. However what is different is that this class will also delve into a new emergent area: analysis using large language models (LLM). Much is being said presently about LLMs and for better or for worse they are becoming a part of daily life for answering questions and attempting to automate certain tasks. What is novel is a research focused possibility to use LLM for something known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). With RAG an LLM is pre-seeded with a corpus of documents that it will refer to when generating responses. It is possible then to make natural language inquiries against the corpus in order to generate insights. There are limitations to this however as LLMs are notorious for drifting from the truth, but it is worth exploring the capabilities of such systems.

This class will provide learners an opportunity to walk through a complete analysis of a dataset using all of these computational methods to see the full gamut of what is possible. As a concluding activity participants will be encouraged to scaffold their own dataset into this developed framework to see what research insights they can produce.

Instructors: Tim Ribaric and John Fink

Simple 3D Animation for Digital Humanities
2024-05-14 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Dates: 14th-17th May 2024

One of the most engaging ways to represent multidimensional phenomena — from the tiniest handheld objects to the largest edifices of the built environment and beyond — is through 3D animation. In this course, we will find 3D humanities data and put them in 3D motion to explain humanities concepts. We will focus on the process, workflow, navigation, basic coding, sensitivity, and problem-solving skills that are valuable for telling many kinds of stories in many kinds of humanities contexts.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Navigate a virtual 3D CAD (computer-aided design) interface, model and animate 3D geometry, lights, cameras, and surfaces, acquire and prepare real-world data to build 3D environments, discuss the conceptual and spatiotemporal limits of using 3D data, and develop awareness for the cultural considerations and biases that underlie 3D tools and productions.

Instructor: Ar Ducao

A Safer Internet for All: Self-Care and Community Care in Online Spaces
2024-05-14 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Dates: 14th-17th May

What is digital violence? How do our online communities replicate and amplify the complex racialized, gendered, and intersectional power dynamics of our offline communities? What are strategies for prevention and response? Digital violence has intensified since the beginning of the global pandemic. This array of harmful behavior includes (but isn’t limited to) sharing intimate images without consent; doxing; hijacking online events; impersonation; and cyberstalking. Digital violence impacts all communities, but new adults most commonly experience online abuse. This course will focus on you and your online communities. You will identify what online privacy protection is relevant and necessary to you. Your culminating project will then ask you to engage in the practice of visionary fiction to envision your ideal online community. What practices of care make an online community safe and inviting for people who are most vulnerable when participating? Our time together will inspire, empower, and energize us to create and participate in online communities characterized by strong cultures of consent and liberated participation in online spaces.

Instructor: Chelcie Juliet Rowell

Getting Started (Technical)
2024-05-23 00:00 - 23:59 | LEMDO
This month we are focusing on getting started on a LEMDO edition. In this technical webinar, LEMDO Project Manager, Navarra Houldin, will guide new editors through the process of being set up in the LEMDO Subversion repository. LEMDO Director Janelle Jenstad will be present to support editors in breakout rooms and to answer questions.

Intro to Video Editing with iMovie or Microsoft ClipChamp
2024-05-23 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Victoria Libraries, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Are you a UVic student, faculty, or staff member and want to learn more about video editing? If so, then this hands-on workshop will give you an introduction to video editing using either iMovie or Microsoft Video Editor. Once you’ve completed this session you’ll create and edit a video including:

Create a New Project

Import video from an SD card

Trim & Split video clips

Insert transitions/cards between clips

Create Title and Credits

Mute or adjust the audio volume in video clips

Video Export and publishing options

Advanced learning outcomes for participants who want to do more:

Import audio

Make a slow-motion video clip

Crop a video clip

Create a green screen video (iMovie only)

Instructors: Dani K. Johnson and Rich McCue

Humanités numériques: fondements disciplinaires (École d'été sur les Humanités numériques)
2024-05-27 00:00 - 23:59 | British Columbia
27 mai 2024 – 1 juin 2024

Approches théoriques basées sur les fondements disciplinaires au cœur des humanités numériques.

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

Transcription with Whisper.ai and Microsoft 365
2024-05-27 00:00 - 23:59 | University of Victoria Libraries, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Why use transcription services?

Automated transcription services can help save time in qualitative research. While there are many options available, Microsoft 365, Whisper Transciption, and Zoom are services that are free for UVic students and faculty. When choosing transcription services to use, one should also take into account the pros, cons, and research ethics considerations that are specific to each service.

Learning Objectives

Describe the benefits and use cases for transcribing audio with Microsoft 365, Whisper.ai, and Zoom compared to other transcription technologies

Setup (if necessary) and open Microsoft Word 365 in a web browser on your computer (not the installed Word application)

Setup (if necessary) and open Whisper Transcription on your computer

Describe the benefits and use cases for transcribing audio with Whisper.ai compared to other transcription technologies

Transcribe an audio file

Export transcription in two or more different formats

Instructor: Rich McCue

Humanités numériques: langages de programmation
2024-06-03 00:00 - 23:59 | British Columbia
3 juin 2024 et 7 juin 2024

Atelier sur les concepts fondamentaux d’un langage de programmation en explorant son application aux sciences humaines

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

[Foundations] Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
For those new to the field, this is an introduction to the theory and practice of encoding electronic texts for the humanities. This workshop is designed for individuals who are contemplating embarking on a text-encoding project, or for those who would like to better understand the philosophy, theory, and practicalities of encoding in XML (Extensible Markup Language) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. No prior experience with XML is assumed, but the course will move quickly through the basics. During the course we will provide online space for the practical application of project planning and technical knowledge acquired throughout the week.Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

This is a hands-on course. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by: Advanced TEI Concepts / TEI Customization; Code the X-Files using the XML Family of Languages; Digital Documentation and Imaging for Humanists; Conceptualising and Creating a Digital Documentary Edition; A Collaborative Approach to XSLT; Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities; Making Connections: The Semantic Web for Humanities Scholars; Designing Digital Publications and more!

[Foundations] Introduction to Computation for Literary Studies
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course demystifies, and offers a survey of, the computational tools and techniques being used for literary studies. Aimed at novice and DH-curious scholars and practitioners, participants gain familiarity with fundamental concepts and methods so that they can better appreciate the potential of computer-assisted critical techniques. Classes are divided between discussions of key theoretical considerations and practical instruction in a selection of tools. Participants are exposed to macro-analytical techniques like most frequent word analysis, collocation, stylometry, topic modelling, digital mapping, and network analysis, gaining experience with environments like Voyant, R, Carto, Palladio, and Gephi. The course also details best practices relating to the preparation and management of digital corpora. Having completed this course, participants will have a better understanding of how computational methods can be used to produce quantitative data for use in the support of literary studies. More advanced expertise can subsequently be developed at any one of a number of DHSI offerings dedicated to particular methods.

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by: Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities; Stylometry with R: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Literary Texts; Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists); Understanding Topic Modeling; Data Mining For Digital Humanists; and more!

[Foundations] Race, Social Justice and DH: Applied Theories and Methods
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
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. Consider this offering to build on: Fundamentals of Coding / Programming for Human(s|ists); Web Development / Project Prototyping for Beginners with Ruby on Rails. Consider this offering in complement with and / or to be built on by: Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication; Digital Humanities with a Global Outlook; Digital Indigeneity; Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; Queer Digital Humanities; Surveillance and the Critical Digital Humanities; Anti-Colonial DH Pedagogy; and more.

[Foundations] Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, projects like FemTechNet argue that such history is often hidden and feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. In order to address this, the seminar will offer a set of background readings to help make visible the history of feminist engagement with technology, as well as facilitate small-scale exploratory collaboration during the seminar. Our reading selections bring a variety of feminist technology critiques in Media Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, and related fields into conversation with work in Digital Humanities. Each session is organized by a keyword – a term that is central to feminist theoretical and practical engagements with technology – and will begin with a discussion of that term in light of our readings. The remainder of each session will be spent learning about and tinkering with Processing, a programming tool that will allow participants to engage in their own critical making processes.

Pushing against instrumentalist assumptions regarding the value and efficacy of certain digital tools, we will be asking participants to think hard about the affordances and constraints of digital technologies. While we will be engaging with a wide range of tools/systems in our readings and discussions, we anticipate that the more hands-on engagement with Processing will help participants think about operations of interface, input, output, and mediation. In addition to the expanded theoretical framework, participants can expect to come away with a new set of pedagogical models using Processing that they can adapt and use for teaching at their own institutions.

This course combines lecture, seminar, 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. Consider this offering in complement with and / or to be built on by: Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication; Digital Humanities with a Global Outlook; Digital Indigeneity; and more.

[Foundations] DH for Chairs and Deans
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
Intended for university administrators who seek an understanding of the Digital Humanities that is both broad and deep, this offering establishes a cohort that [1] meets as a group for three dedicated sessions before the first day of DHSI (on the Sunday beforehand) and several dedicated session midweek to survey and discuss pragmatic DH basics and chief administrative issues related to supporting DH and those who practice it at their institution, [2] allows those enrolled to audit (as non-participatory observers, able to go from class to class) any and all of the DHSI courses, and [3] individually engages in consultation and targeted discussion with the instructors, who are the first three chairs of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO), speakers and consultants contributing to the course, and others in the group outside of course time during the institute.

This is a seminar style / audit-oriented course. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by: Scholarscapes, Augmented Dissemination via Digital Methods; Models for DH at Liberal Arts Colleges (& 4 Yr Institutions); Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities; Digital Pedagogy Integration in the Curriculum; Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research and Public Engagement; Online Collaborative Scholarship: Principles and Practices (A CWRCShop); Professionalizing the Early Career Digital Humanist: Strategies and Skills; and more!

Podcasting from Scratch
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course for beginners will explore the how and why of podcasting. We’ll consider the benefits of the medium, and learn how to plan, record, edit and publish audio content. Expect to do some listening and reading outside of class time, and have your favourite audio and text editors ready.

Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course will cover the basics of project management from project definition to project review upon completion. Topics such as budget setting and controls, risk management, critical path scheduling, software tools, and related Internet resources will also be discussed. Material will be covered through lectures, discussions, case studies, and presentations. By the end of the course, participants will be able to implement the course concepts and tools in their projects.

This course has lecture, seminar, and hands-on components. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by most other DHSI courses that focus on the pragmatics of planning elements of research, including Agile Project Management.

Databases for Humanists
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
Digital Humanities projects use more and more data every year. It’s no wonder — the rise of “big data” and “data science” are transforming how we humanists do our research. Databases are becoming increasingly important foundations for data analysis and data visualizations of all kinds. This course is about building and using databases, whether that means a small personal project like creating a reading list or managing large projects like wrangling unwieldy research materials, performing data science metrics, or analyzing social networks. We’ll see that databases are really about much more than just “looking things up.” Database query languages allow us to find patterns in our data, to see how things change across time, and to discover anomalies that may lead to new research questions. Over the course of the week, we’ll install the free database, MySQL, on everyone’s computer and we will learn the basics of designing, creating, and querying relational databases. No prior programming experience is necessary.

This course combines lecture, discussion, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering in complement with: Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists); Visualizing Information: Where Data Meets Design; Introduction to Computation for Literary Criticism; and more.

Designing Digital Publications
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
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. This offering harmonizes with courses on project planning and management, open access and open social scholarship, digital storytelling, and digital editions. We are particularly eager to support projects that grow from DHSI courses on race, social justice, intersectional feminist and queer digital humanities.

Engaging Play
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
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. Consider this offering a compliment to Games for Digital Humanists and build on Using Digital Games as Critical Methods of Intervention, Advocacy, and Activism in Humanities Scholarship. Here we take a disciplinary specific approach to video games and offer practical ways of implementing them in lower division survey courses and upper division research seminars. Participants will leave class with a model assignment, prototype Twine game, and practical advice for implementing the project in upper or lower division history curriculum.

Critical Making as Scholarship
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
In this team-taught workshop, we invite scholars to join us in exploring the potential of critical making to transform their scholarship: to make it playful, experiential, public, interactive, and weird. Daniel Chamberlain defines work grounded in this way as critical making, a practice which “extends beyond critique into artistry: in making, design and function are not separate. The message (or story) of a work is intertwined throughout its making.” This places the emphasis not on learning tools for their own sake, but on thinking through the relationship of our tools (and our code) with our disciplines and scholarship. It is not enough to master a tool or software program. A critical maker reflects on the tool itself, and rejects, supplements, extends, and critiques it as part of the process of making. As Matt Ratto contends, the products of critical making are “a means to an end…[to] achieve value through the act of shared construction, joint conversation, and reflection” (Ratto). Accordingly, participants in this workshop will learn a variety of ways to make both physical and computational things (and physical-computational things) as well as ways to critically examine the assumptions built into technologies, how to make more inclusive technologies, and how to use making as mode of research. Centering the humanities within critical making provides depth and richness in the interpretation and analysis of technologies that is not available from other approaches. During the week-long workshop, we will immerse our fellow humanists in critical making, building their confidence and self-efficacy with material and software-driven making and preparing them to engage in both their own research and pedagogy using models building on comics, interactive fiction, craft, and computation. We will work with both physical and material elements for prototyping and design as well as digital tools including Twine, an open-source platform for making hypertext and Tracery, a procedural library for grammar-driven generation.

Open-Assembly Teaching, Making, and Publishing: COVE Editions and Studio
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course will introduce the open-assembly teaching and making tools at the nonprofit COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education), which anyone, anywhere can use without having to learn to code. COVE is a scholar-driven, open-access platform that publishes both peer-reviewed material and active-learning or “flipped classroom” student projects built with our web-based online tools. COVE operates as a two-fold platform: Studio, where instructors can create anthologies of primary works that can then be made available for multimedia student annotation, and Editions, which hosts published and private editions, galleries, maps, and timelines, and facilitates peer review. DHSI students will learn the COVE toolset and principle of “open assembly,” or free, transformative remixing of texts, items, and archives. They will build an anthology (in COVE Studio) and begin an Edition, Map, Gallery, or Timeline (in COVE Editions) that they can easily complete afterwards. They will then share these projects with the DHSI community.

Consider this offering in complement with Designing Digital Publications, Critical Making as Scholarship, and Conceptualizing and Creating a Digital Edition.

Digital Pedagogy and the Book: Tools, Methods, and Projects
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course will help faculty, staff, and instructional technologists conceptualize, design, and explore platforms for courses teaching book history and editorial practices. The course will provide readings on the history of the book and the book after the digital turn, and together we will discuss ways to immerse students in archival, editorial, and analytical practices regardless of their access to material books in special collections. Throughout the week, we will explore digital tools and platforms and consider how to best adapt them for the study of book history. We will collaborate on designing and scaffolding assignments, consider methods for assessment, and collectively build a repository of resources, links, and prompts. At the end of the week, participants will leave with a fully designed course unit and a better understanding of how to incorporate digital tools within their book history lessons and courses.
This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering in complement with, and/or to be built on by: Digital Pedagogy Integration in the Curriculum; Understanding The Predigital Book: Technologies of Inscription; Using Digital Games as Critical Methods of Intervention, Advocacy, and Activism in Humanities Scholarship; Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities.

Introduction to IIIF: Sharing, Consuming, and Annotating the World’s Images
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
Access to image-based and A/V resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are containers for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. A growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and content repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image and AV delivery. IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals; To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world, to define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories, and to develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.” (https://iiif.io) and with the release of version 3.0 to extend these benefits to Audio and Video resources. This course will introduce students to the basic concepts and technologies that make IIIF possible, allowing for guided, hands-on experience in installing servers and clients that support IIIF, and utilizing the advanced functionality that IIIF provides for interpretive research, such as annotation.

Queer(ing) DH
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
Queerness and the digital humanities share a common ethos: a desire to make meaning in new ways. Indeed, the intersection of DH and queerness is a site of rich potential that can inspire (and challenge) us to think differently about DH, its methods, its purpose, and its politics. This is true whether we are building a DH project or writing DH critique.This course draws from readings, discussions, interactive exercises, visits by guest speakers, and short, collaborative hands-on making projects to explore a variety of questions about queerness and DH. What does DH bring to queer studies? What does queer studies bring to DH? How might a queer DH project serve social justice? How can we develop DH projects that are queer in their design? What might it mean to queer DH itself? How can we understand DH as already queer? This course values self-reflection, intersectional perspectives, and cultural critique. It addresses the challenges and frictions facing those who do queer DH work. What are the obstacles for queer DH within larger structures of academia and funding? Is there a tension between the push for skill-building within DH and queer studies’ critiques of neoliberalism? When do the norms of DH themselves run counter to the values of queerness?
Our readings will address topics that fall under the wide umbrella of the “digital humanities,” including (but not limited to) data visualization, classification systems, programming languages, video games, mapping and geography, online archives, and tangible computing. We will also engage with queer communities at and around the University of Victoria by visiting the Trans Archive. As instructors, we bring to this course an understanding that LGBT/queer people, identities, and histories are multiple and complex. We strive to foster thinking about queerness and DH that engages meaningfully with intersecting issues of race, class, disability, nationality, religion, and indigenous rights.
This course includes lecture, seminar, demo, and hands-on components. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by: Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods; Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities; Spatial DH: Unsettling Cultural Territories Online; Anti-Colonial DH Pedagogy; and more!

Surveillance and the Critical Digital Humanities
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course uses an anti-colonial framework to analyze the ethics surrounding physical and digital surveillance methods, including the use of algorithms, biometrics, social media, and physical data. We will examine the ways in which communities experience surveillance differently, based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. To do so, we will read the work of leading scholars like Simone Browne and Safiya Noble, conduct self-assessments to determine our own participation in surveillance culture, and discuss strategies to limit surveillance in the university classroom.

Natural Language Pro​cessing with Pytho​n
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course will introduce you to many techniques available to process, analyze, and visualize textual data with Python. You will learn the fundamental theories and methods used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by writing code. We will begin with a swift introduction to Python syntax and Jupyter Notebooks, learning what we need to know to be effective in the course. We will emphasize Python’s built-in capabilities for handling text as we transition into using many of the most popular Python packages for NLP, including the Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK). The NLTK is a large library of tools and resources that will allow us to conduct part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and text classification. Because of its extensive documentation, NLTK remains an ideal choice for researchers interested in showing proof of work through citation and reproducibility. We will use other packages for Machine Learning (ML) tasks, such as Gensim for topic modeling and Stanza for multi-language capabilities and access to contemporary ML language models. We will learn to visualize our findings beautifully with packages such as Networkx, Seaborn, and Bokeh. Experience with Python is not strictly required for participation in the class, but a general understanding of programming methods and terms will be an asset. This class will help you think about humanities problems through computation. By the end of our time together, you will understand the kinds of questions we can answer with NLP methods and be ready to implement them in code.
This is a hands-on course with some lecture components. Consider this offering to be built on by and/or in complement with Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists), Wrangling Big Data for DH, Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities, Text Processing – Techniques & Traditions, Visualizing Information: Where Data Meets Design, Web APIs with Python, Parsing and Writing XML with Python, and more!

Social Knowledge Creation / Construction
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course explores historical and contemporary theories of knowledge construction and conveyance in an interdisciplinary context, balancing earlier thought and theory, via readings related to pertinent traditions, with direct engagement of current applications and active experimentation in the area, including via contribution to a live wikibook on the subject. Topics include: ways of knowing; inter/disciplinary and methodological foundations; digital scholarship; social knowledge production; knowledge construction and constriction; social media communities and collaboration; knowledge space design; gamification; tools and techniques.

Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This course explores how opening access to data changes the digital humanities project. We will cover the reasons for publishing open data, how we can create open data, and how we can work with open data. We will see how linked open data allows us to share data and incorporate data from other projects. We will learn about data models, data formats, and software tools for working with linked open data. We’ve designed the course to give you the tools you need to incorporate linked data into your projects, whether you’re a software engineer, a project manager, or a subject matter expert.
This course combines lecture and hands-on activities. Consider this offering in relation to the following. Predecessors: 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!

Out of the Box Text Analysis
2024-06-03 00:00 - 2024-06-07 23:59 | British Columbia, Canada
This class will focus on using digital tools to enhance and deepen traditional ways of reading and analyzing texts. We will explore ways of answering questions about authorship, textual, chronological, and authorial style, genre, and meaning. The first sessions will introduce some freely-available tools and some widely available general software, and will address the issues of planning a project, and finding/creating and preparing the texts for analysis. We will begin with some prepared groups of texts for guided investigation as a group, so that we can concentrate on general problems, issues, and opportunities. Because my own background is in literature, the emphasis will be on literary texts. In later sessions, participants will be able to use these tools (and perhaps others, depending on their interests) to explore texts of their own choosing, or to examine some already-prepared sets of texts in greater detail and depth. The backgrounds and experiences of the participants will undoubtedly differ; therefore, we will aim for an intensely collegial and collaborative atmosphere, so as to capitalize on these differences.
Most of the tools and methods work across different languages, though there may be some problems with transliterated and accented languages, and there is a good deal of variation in how effective different techniques are for different languages. Most also require a substantial amount of text–either one long text or at least several texts of 1000 words or more. On the other hand, this class will focus on relatively detailed and intensive analysis, and is not appropriate for those who are interested in working with huge data sets or very large numbers of very long texts. For the purposes and methods of this class, a set of 100 novels should be considered a very large amount of data.
We will be meeting in a computer lab where all the software used will be available, though most of it can easily be installed and run on students’ own computers, if they want to. Much of the work will be done in Stylo and in tools that operate in Microsoft Excel. Potential participants whose own computers are Macs and/or who have specific (groups of) texts or kinds of problems in mind that they would like to work on in the class can contact the instructor to discuss any potential difficulties or challenges.
This is a hands-on course. Consider this offering to build on, or be built on by: Stylometry with R: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Literary Texts; Extracting Cultural Networks from Thematic Research Collections; or Wrangling Big Data for DH. Consider this offering in complement with Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists); Text Analysis with Python and the Natural Language ToolKit; Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities; Understanding the Pre-Digital Book; XPath for Processing XML and Managing Projects; and more!
