The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance) and the Alliance Federation will be offering an introductory digital research tools webinar series for humanities, arts and social sciences researchers. These are introductory, beginner-level sessions. No prior experience or knowledge is required. You may register for as many or as few of the sessions as you wish. See below for details and registration links. ALL TIMES ARE EASTERN STANDARD. ALL SESSIONS ARE FREE.
This is an introduction to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, and overview of the research support and resources available through the Alliance that are directly applicable to Humanities and Social Sciences researchers. We will give some brief usage cases and the next steps if you are interested in exploring our resources.
Voyant Tools is a web-based tool for digital textual analysis. A suite of analysis and visualization tools allows researchers to “see through” texts and gain insight from word frequency, collocated terms, and other metrics. Voyant Tools is unique because it requires no set-up ahead of time and is user-friendly for those without any coding skills. In this workshop, we introduce participants to Voyant, showing how to create your own corpus in Voyant to analyze digital texts. We will walk you through the basics of finding, formatting, and uploading a text to use in Voyant including cleaning your text. We will demonstrate many of Voyant’s capabilities including visualization tools to create word clouds, word frequency trend graphs, and more playful visualizations that allow you to play with your text. We will also discuss the basics of designing a textual analysis project and give you ideas for using Voyant in your own research.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-introduction-to-voyant-tickets-510894468107
We hear about it all the time, but what really is machine learning? And what about deep learning? Neural networks? How can any of this help me with my work? And how? Which tools do I need to make use of the transformative advances happening in that field? This workshop will answer these questions in a non-technical manner to give you a high level overview of a discipline that has become crucial in all fields of research.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/introduction-to-machine-learning-tickets-510836615067
Most introductions to a command line interface are targeted at using the interface as a gateway to some other tool that it doesn’t make sense to access in any other way. This workshop will be different because it will introduce you to using the command line interface to actually do work directly on the command line. Why would anyone want to do this you ask? In many cases the command line is faster and offers abilities that other tools do not, especially when working with raw text files. This will be a hands-on workshop that assumes no previous knowledge. While specific examples will be considered throughout, the point of the workshop will be to highlight possible future applications that participants might be interested in.
R is a free and open-source programming language for statistical computing, modelling, and graphics, with an unbeatable collection of statistical packages. It is extremely popular in some academic fields such as statistics, biology, bioinformatics, data mining, data analysis, and linguistics. This introductory course does not assume any prior knowledge: it will take you through the first steps of importing, cleaning, and visualizing your data. Along the way, we will get familiar with R data types, writing functions, and control flow.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/introduction-to-programming-in-r-tickets-511818692487
This Library Carpentry adapted lesson introduces people working in Humanities, Social Sciences, and library- and information-related roles to working with data in OpenRefine. OpenRefine can be used to standardize and clean data across your file, and is most useful when working with a comma separated values file (csv) or a tab delimited file (tsv). It can help you get an overview of a data set; resolve inconsistencies in a data set; help you split data up into more granular parts; and more. At the conclusion of the lesson you will understand what the OpenRefine software does and how to use the OpenRefine software to work with data files. No previous experience with OpenRefine is required.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/introduction-to-openrefine-tickets-510901348687
In this very short introduction to Python, we will cover the basics of running Python inside Jupyter notebooks, basic use of variables, lists, dictionaries, talk about defining functions and using external libraries. We will provide Python in the cloud, so there is no need to install it on your own computer for this session.
This introductory workshop will discuss the progress of the Federated Research Data Repository's (FRDR) Sensitive Data Pilot Project. The goal of this pilot project is to augment the capabilities of FRDR to allow for deposit and sharing of sensitive data, and to support institutions and other repositories with sensitive data sharing and management.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-sensitive-data-project-tickets-515025724807
In this hands-on and discussion-centered workshop we will discuss and identify unique considerations for managing “humanities and social sciences research data”. We will introduce you to the basic lifecycle of data, including your own personal data. We will learn about different formats (proprietary vs. open), software, and metadata for your data. Finally, through discussion, we will think through the question: what state of your data will be most useful for you to share with the community?
This session will serve as a walk-through demonstration of how to use the Data Management Plan (DMP) Assistant tool. A high-level overview of research data management and the role of DMPs will be provided, as well as concrete examples, resources, and best practices in the creation of a data management plan for humanities and social sciences related research.
In this workshop we provide participants a chance to perform hands-on textual analysis with Voyant Tools, a web-based tool for digital textual analysis. The workshop will also feature Spyral Notebooks, a new companion notebook environment that works in tandem with Voyant Tools. Participants will bring their own corpus of digital texts for analysis and we will walk through using Voyant with your text. We will demonstrate how to use Spyral Notebooks to save, share, and enhance your Voyant analysis.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-using-voyant-and-spyral-tickets-514394887957
Machine Learning is without a doubt one of the biggest buzzwords in tech in recent times. No wonder - it is what powers many of the innovations we have all grown to love in this last decade, from the autocomplete function and the virtual assistant on your phone, to self-parking cars and the recommender system on your favorite streaming service. What many people don’t know is that machine learning is not new. In fact, it can be seen as nothing more than a change of perspective on a much older field that is well known to the HSS community: good old statistics. In this workshop, we will look beyond the computer-science-centric jargon of machine learning and show, with examples, how your existing knowledge of statistics translates into Machine Learning and provides all you need to learn more about this exciting field.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-machine-learning-for-hss-tickets-515048001437
The internet is a trove of information. A lot of it is publicly available and thus suitable for use in research. Extracting that information and putting it in an organized format for analysis can, however, be extremely tedious. Web scraping tools allow to automate parts of that process and R is a popular language for the task. In this workshop, we will guide you through a simple example using the package rvest. REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-web-scraping-with-r-tickets-512943125697
This workshop will show you how to easily create beautiful scientific documents (html, pdf, websites, books…), complete with formatted text, dynamic code and figures with Quarto - an open-source tool combining the powers of Jupyter or knitr with Pandoc - to turn your text and code blocks into fully dynamic and formatted documents.
Do you have a research project with which you are struggling and need some programming help? Do you want to try out programming but aren’t sure where to start or what you would use it for? In this session you can receive help with programming projects you bring, or work through some pre-made code projects with an instructor. Note that English and French language Alliance staff members will be available.
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hss-winter-series-2023-bring-your-own-project-tickets-510994557477
"The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software."
The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative has a broad list of DH tools for various types of applications such as data cleaning, wireframing, timeline tools, mapping tools and network analysis, among others.
MIT Libraries
“Based on the Introduction to Digital Humanities (DH101) course at UCLA, taught by Johanna Drucker (with David Kim) in 2011 and 2012, this online coursebook (and related collection of resources) is meant to provide introductory materials to digital approaches relevant to a wide range of disciplines.
Available at: http://dh101.humanities.ucla.edu/
TEI By Example offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Besides a general introduction to text encoding, step-by-step tutorial modules provide example-based introductions to eight different aspects of electronic text markup for the humanities.
Available at: http://teibyexample.org/
“This is the first stop on your way to mastering the essentials of data curation for the humanities. The Guide offers concise, expert introductions to key topics, including annotated links to important standards, articles, projects, and other resources.”
Available at: https://archive.mith.umd.edu/dhcuration-guide/guide.dhcuration.org/
“The Programming Historian offers novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research.”
Available at: https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/
MIT Libraries provide links to an array of training. Some are free online materials, others are offered by institutes that you might register for.
Site was “built to respond to the growing demand for digital humanities training in that area but also as an online repository of training materials, lectures, exemplars, and links that offer best practices to beginner, intermediate, and advanced digital humanists.”
The Digital Humanities Summer Institute is an ETCL-led pedagogical partnership of some 30 institutions and academic organizations plus an expanding international training network. DHSI provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach.
An umbrella organization that coordinates the activities of three digital humanities-related organizations: the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs.
CSDH/SCHN brings together humanists who are engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, and creation. The society fosters work in the digital humanities in Canada's two official languages.
A nationwide "unconference" series that is a great place to get to know digital humanists and to learn about new technologies and projects.
An interdisciplinary scholarly network that organizes conferences and other community building events for digital humanists.
A social networking site where digital humanists can connect and collaborate on projects. Includes a Blog and links to the KU Leuven Library DH Commons