Intro to Spatial Analysis for the Humanities
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 (America/Halifax) | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Amanda Madden

This course is intended to be an introduction to the spatial humanities both in practice and theory and is suitable for both novices and those with more experience. The course will consist of readings, lectures, and hands-on practice with basic GIS and other softwares. An emphasis will be placed on spatial humanities as a way of thinking. By the end of the course, students will have a basic toolset to apply the techniques and theory of spatial humanities to both their research and teaching. This course will combine lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities with emphasis on the latter.

Introduction to Digital Approaches in Music Research
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Timothy Duguid

This course introduces current practices in encoding, analysing, and presenting music information. It will begin by introducing the philosophy, theory, and practicalities behind encoding symbolic music notation and will then explore pathways for analyzing and publishing that encoded data. Participants should have a basic knowledge of how to read music, but no prior experience with coding or XML is assumed.

DH for Chairs and Deans [Consultancy]
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Harold Short, John Unsworth, and Ray Siemens

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.

Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Lynne Siemens

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.

DH Programming Pedagogy in the Age of AI
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Anastasia Salter and John T. Murray

In this team-taught workshop, we invite scholars to join us in exploring the relationship between generative AI and the future of programming pedagogy in the digital humanities and a frontline of what the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI called “critical AI literacy.” Generative AI offers opportunities to make programming more accessible to diverse learners, and we explore how to use these emerging technologies to build inclusive pathways into programming through natural language interfaces and “literate programming.” This course will emphasize two critical programming languages, JavaScript and Python, that are commonly taught in humanities courses due to their applicability for interactive experiences, public humanities, and textual analysis. This workshop will build participants’ comfort with both generating and debugging code with AI tools, as well as deploying generative AI outside of mainstream commercial projects. Participants will be invited to approach GitHub, Copilot, Hugging Face, TensorFlow, and Jupyter Notebooks through a beginner’s mind, working through, critiquing, and developing assignments and pedagogical applications or their own classrooms. Participants with and without programming experience are welcome.

Equity, Advocacy, and Care Frameworks for DH Labs and Communities
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Jacquelyne Thoni Howard

This course will guide attendees through the process of developing and enhancing student engagement and educational digital humanities programming using equity, advocacy, and care frameworks. Informed by liberatory and feminist pedagogies, this workshop will demonstrate how to build DH programming that meets the diverse educational and research needs of students, faculty, institutions, and community partners. Participants will read and discuss critical studies that explain how experiential and educational digital humanities programming can be used to build equitable and interdisciplinary learning spaces that enhance career readiness and skill-building for students while contributing to the research of faculty and community partners. Participants will actively ideate, collaborate, and construct strategies for designing advocacy-driven digital humanities labs, curriculum modules, and experiential programs that integrate with equity curriculum. They will write program goals, explore funding options, design recruitment plans, learn about project management techniques, find technical support options, and develop program assessments. By the end of the course, attendees leave with can project plan that they can implement at their institutions.

Introduction to Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Susan Brown and Kim Martin

This workshop provides an introduction to the web of data for humanities researchers and cultural data stewards. Linked open data is highly structured interoperable data hosted on the web that is structured with semantic relationships so that machines can become partners in discovering, disseminating, sharing, and analyzing data. Done right, LOD contributes to a semantic web of resources that can be accessed and used across multiple online locations, aggregating knowledge and facilitating its reuse: it is FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data in the most profound sense. The workshop will cover reasons for publishing cultural and research collections as LOD by looking at a range of existing uses in humanities research and GLAM (gallery, library, archive, and museum) contexts.

Participants will gain hands-on experience with several linked open data projects and tools; learn about the resource description framework (RDF), ontologies, and vocabularies used to create linked open data; learn how LOD can be leveraged in queries, visualizations, and web applications; gain an understanding of how LOD is created; and be introduced to a number of practical, ethical, and theoretical considerations that should inform the creation and reuse of diverse, nuanced, responsible, and usable linked open data for cultural research and dissemination. By the end of this workshop, participants should have grasped the major concepts of linked open data and the components of its technology stack; understand the basics of linked data creation, publication, and use; and be positioned to start to develop a linked data project of their own.

Intended audience: Advanced students, subject matter experts and researchers, librarians and data curators from GLAM contexts, research software engineers, and the LOD-curious!

Conceptualizing and Creating a Digital Edition
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Katie Blizzard and Lorena Gauthereau

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.

Queer(ing) DH
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Jason Boyd and Edmond Chang

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. 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.

Open Assembly: Teaching & Publishing with COVE Studio & Editions
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Kate Oestreich

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.

Practical JavaScript for Interactive Scholarship
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Stephen Zweibel and Zachary Lloyd

This is a basic introduction to JavaScript, which is the programming language of the web. The class is designed for anyone interested in developing a website, or creating an interactive data visualization. By the end of this course, you will be able to read JavaScript you find online and adapt it to your needs. You will also have an opportunity to work with common JavaScript libraries/tools and enhance your own research practices.

Computational Text Analysis with Stylometry and R
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Joanna Byszuk and Jacek Bąkowski

This is a beginner to intermediate-level course in computational text analysis. It 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, using some freely available and easy-to-use tools, such as ‘LIWC’ or ‘Stylo’ and most commonly applied methods, such as stylometry.While stylometry, i.e. the analysis of countable linguistic features of texts 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, image and video. The statistics of even such simple features as word, word n-gram or character n-gram frequencies are not only a highly precise tool for identifying authorship but can also reveal patterns of similarity and difference between groups of works, as well as individual works, or specific voices within them, such as idiolects of characters in novels. Such methods are also frequently applied to compare works by one author or various authors or translators, and finally between works differing in terms of chronology, genre or narrative styles, etc. The results of computational text analysis can be compared and confronted with the findings of traditional studies, opening a new set of questions about style and its transfer, as well as the nature of particular features and language.With this course, we aim to help participants build the knowledge and skills required to identify the problem they want to examine, define relevant research questions and apply the right method, and, finally, to design and complete their own experiments from corpus building to interpretation of results. Participants will learn how to use major modern stylometric methods in a reliable and reproducible manner, from simple keyword extraction and feature selection and analysis, to supervised and unsupervised machine learning based on text features, followed by visualization techniques ranging from PCA and dendrograms to networks. The software used in the course can easily be installed and run on participants’ own computers. While we do not expect the participants to have strong programming skills, having a basic understanding of running and reading code can improve the course experience and allow the participants to benefit more from the course. We will provide text corpora for training purposes but also encourage participants to bring their own data and research problems to work on during the course.

This course combines elements of courses previously taught at DHSI by Computational Stylistics Group (Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki, Joanna Byszuk, Jeremi K. Ochab), i.e. ‘Stylometry with R’, ‘DIY Computational Text Analysis with R’, as well as ‘Out of the Box Text Analysis’ taught by late David Hoover.

Processing Your XML/TEI with the XML Family of Languages
2025-05-26 00:00 - 2025-05-30 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Elisa Beshero-Bondar and David Birnbaum

This class teaches you how to navigate and process XML using tools designed for the purpose–XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron. We cover these together as members of the same XML family, sharing a common syntax in XPath. New and experienced coders of XML will benefit alike from this course, whether just beginning a project or seeking to update and refresh skills. Our goals are 1) to share strategies for systematically building archives and databases, and 2) to increase participants’ confidence and fluency in extracting information coded in XML in those archives and databases. XPath is the center of the course, but we will show you how it applies in multiple XML processing contexts so that you learn how these work similarly and how these are used, respectively, to validate documents and to transform them for publication and other reuse. We’ll apply XPath to check for accuracy of text encoding–to write schema rules to manage your coding (or your project team’s coding).

You’ll practice and gain fluency in writing XPath expressions and patterns, including sequence expressions, regular expressions, datatypes, predicates, operators, and functions (from the core library and user-defined). We’ll write XPath to calculate how frequently you’ve marked a certain phenomenon, or locate which names of people are mentioned together in the same chapter, paragraph, sentence, stanza, or annotation. You’ll learn how XPath can help you to build exciting visualizations from XML code (such as to make a chart like a timeline or a network graph). Whether you are an XML beginner or a more experienced coder, you’ll find that strengthened skills in XPath and the XML family will help you with systematic encoding, document processing, and project management.

This is a hands-on course.

Data Bites - Creating README Files for Research Data
2025-06-02 00:00 - 23:59 | Québec
Date: June 2 2025

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

Participants will learn how to:

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

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

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

Presenter(s):Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

DH Sample Platter
2025-06-02 00:00 - 2025-06-06 23:59 | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Led by: Markus Wust

Have you ever looked at the wide variety of courses offered at DHSI and wondered what all those technical terms mean? Or had problems deciding on which technologies might be best suited for your work or most interesting to pursue further? This course is meant to provide a broad overview of technologies that are often used (and talked about) in the Digital Humanities. While it cannot (and is not meant to) serve as a replacement for any of the technology-focused workshops at DHSI, this course can provide a foundation to help you make informed decisions on where to direct further studies as well as get you over the initial hurdle. Each technology will be approached through a mixture of lectures and exercises.

Proposed topics: We will survey the following technologies and methods: How does a computer work?; Image and video editing; Audio recording and editing; XML and text encoding; Text analysis; 3D Modelling; Content Management Systems; and Geographic Information Systems. This course will have lecture, demo, and hands-on components. It is a good foundation for all tool- and technology-oriented DHSI offerings.

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

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

This offering is co-sponsored by ACENET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This course balances lectures with hands-on activities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This course will require a minimal additional fee for software.

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

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

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

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

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

Participants will learn how to:

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

Design directory structures that reflect research workflows and support project organization

Implement naming and hierarchy conventions for easy navigation and version control

Presenter(s): Eugene Barsky, Vanessa Choy

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

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

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

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

Instructor: Reg Beatty

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

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

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

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