DHSI 2013 offerings include the following. Fees for the 2013 DHSI are available here.
Important Notes:
- A DHSI course runs daily for the duration of the week, so only one course can be taken at a time.
- If you are unsure of which course would be best suited to your strengths and interests, please contact the DHSI coordinator.
- In order to be eligible for a tuition scholarship, you must complete
the scholarship application and receive your acceptance before
registering for a course. (We regret that we are unable to offer
tuition reimbursements to participants who register before receiving
the results of their scholarship application.)
** Check Availability Below, & Register Now By Clicking Here **
Unless otherwise noted, all courses have spots available for registration.
Fundamentals / Introductory Courses
Courses in this section are introductory and hands-on in nature. Students in these courses should have a basic knowledge of computing tools and methods.
Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application
Julia Flanders and Constance Crompton[This class is now full (30 April)] 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.
NOTE: A more specialised foundational approach to TEI is available in course #4, Transcribing and Describing Primary Sources in TEI.
Digitisation Fundamentals and their Application
Robin Davies and Michael Nixon[This class is now full (16 March)] For those new to the digitization field, this offering conveys skills necessary to bring real-world objects -- text, image, sound, video -- into a digital space, and then employ digital tools to further explore and strengthen those objects. Participants are encouraged to incorporate their own interests and materials into the workshops and lab activities of the course, and will build a personalized online document to house their newly digitized media. Assuming only basic computing competency, a hands-on format will quickly introduce participants to digitization project planning and management, data storage requirements, archival standards, and best practices in digitization and distribution.
Tools & Methods / Intermediate Courses
Courses in this section are aimed at students who have completed the relevant fundamentals course at the DHSI or otherwise have similar foundational experience with digital humanities tools and methods.
Introduction to XSLT for Digital Humanists
Syd Bauman and Martin Holmes[This class has 5 spot left (13 May)] XSLT is the power tool of the XML world. It is a computer programming language intended to transform one XML document (e.g., in TEI) to another XML document (e.g., in XHTML); furthermore, it is expressed in XML itself. For digital humanists familiar with XML languages like TEI, EAD, METS, MODS, or DocBook, and XHTML, SVG, KML, or MathML, XSLT makes it possible to transform, manipulate, and publish your data in extraordinarily flexible ways. This hands-on course will introduce participants to the essential concepts of XSLT in a digital humanities context, dealing with real-world textual data. Participants will explore the basic capacities of XSLT for TEI-to-TEI and TEI-to-XHTML transformations, writing basic transforms of their own.
Prerequisites: Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application or equivalent. That is, fluency in XML and TEI is assumed. Familiarity with XHTML very helpful. Familiarity with CSS or JavaScript helpful.
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Transcribing and Describing Primary Sources in TEI
Matthew Driscoll, with Laura Estill[This class is now full (9 April)] How much of the information in an original source, be it a manuscript, charter or early printed book, should be included in a transcription or edition? Is the distinction between the 'substantives', the actual words of the text, and the 'accidentals', features such as spelling, punctuation etc., a useful one? Are the 'accidentals' really of no interest or value? Traditionally, editors have had to decide at the outside what to include and what to ignore. With TEI-conformant XML encoding one can postpone this decision, as it were, recording as much information as possible and then leaving it to the user to choose how much of it he or she wishes to see. In addition to covering the fundamentals of transcription and description using TEI, the course will expose students to methods by which the encoded text may be presented and/or published electronically.
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Multimedia Design for Research Creation, Community Engagement, and Knowledge Mobilization
Aimée Morrison[This class is now full (22 Nov)] This workshop takes seriously the injunction, first articulated at SSHRC in 1999, to “go public or perish.” We will work to leverage new media and digital humanities tools to broaden the reach and increase the impact of our research activities, at all stages from the germination of initial ideas to the publication of scholarly books, both within the academy and without. We will explore the uses of social media, images, video, podcasting, and more to generate initial leads, collect and share research materials, and publicize and disseminate results in a variety of formats and venues. We will consider new ways of communicating with new audiences as well as the usual academic suspects. The course strongly emphasizes user-centred principles of design, and will have students create full and rich outreach and knowledge dissemination plans for their own scholarly or community work, as well as experiment with designing outreach objects.
Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities
Ian Gregory, with Norma Serra[This class is now full (7 May)] The course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to research the past. It will be primarily based on using the ArcGIS software package, the use of Google Earth to disseminate humanities data will also be explored. The course will be relevant to historians, historical geographers, demographers, and others with an interest in the geographies of the past. Quantitative and qualitative approaches will both be explored. We would welcome attendees bringing their own data so that we can explore how to get it into GIS form and what can then be done with it. (There may be a small additional charge for software for this course.)
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
Diane Jakacki[This class is now full (30 Nov)] Intended for teaching faculty, instructors, librarians, and graduate students, this course provides a "best practices" approach to using digital humanities tools and processes in humanities courses for the purposes of communication, collaboration and facility of research. The course will unfold along two parallel tracks, [1] an overview of how best to incorporate DH tools into a given syllabus --- how to harness DH tools to support larger pedagogical objectives, set goals, and manage expectations, and [2] a practical examination of a variety of DH tools, from those serving the needs of a particular course (e.g., "home-built" digital editions, wikis, blogs, websites, GIS/Google Maps, and content management systems such as Moodle) to more general purpose, web 2.0 tools (e.g., Zotero, Prezi, Twitter, YouTube, and Dipity). Across the five days of DHSI, the course will move from a theoretical to a practical framework. It will be tool- and method-centric, and we will be invested in experimenting with an array of options (e.g., actually building model wikis or blogs, as well as live demo'ing approaches such as peer evaluation through a Twitter backchannel). Participants are asked to bring their own computers, together with at least one sample syllabus (for a course already taught or to be taught), which will be used as the basis for much of the work we do as the week progresses. By the course's conclusion, participants should leave with (at a minimum) an existing syllabus revised to better meet their own expectations of digital pedagogy in the humanities.
Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication for Humanists
William J. Turkel, Jentery Sayers, and Devon Elliott[This class has 1 spot left (19 April)] This course is a hands-on introduction to desktop rapid fabrication and physical computing for humanists. It is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty. The first part of the course will involve digitizing three-dimensional objects to create computer models, then printing them in plastic with a 3D printer. The second part of the course will involve learning to build simple interactive and tangible devices that use the open source Arduino microcontroller, the Kinect scanner and basic electronic sensors and actuators. Students will need to provide their own laptops.
Creating Digital Humanities Projects for the Mobile Environment
Dene Grigar, Brett Oppegaard, John Barber, Will Luers, Brenda Grell, Nicholas Schiller, and Greg Philbrook[This class has 1 spot (19 April)] A growing area of interest in the digital humanities is the mobile environment, especially projects that take advantage of the affordances of smart phones and tablets. This course, derived from the Mobile Tech Research Initiative of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver (http://van-dtc356.vancouver.wsu.edu/appcamp/), is aimed at assisting participants to: 1) conceptualize the space and special features of mobile devices; 2) develop the architecture, design, and multimedia content production for a mobile project; and 3) understand the coding and programming requirements for mobile devices. By the end of the course, participants will have the information they need for creating projects for the mobile environment and will have completed steps toward the development of their own projects. Please visit the course homepage.
Digital Humanities Databases
Harvey Quamen, Jon Bath, and John Yobb[This class is now full (25 Jan)] Databases are the driving engine behind a large number of classic and cutting-edge digital humanities applications. DH tasks -- such as wielding enormous GIS maps, aggregating the social media of wikis and blogs, building large archival repositories and even generating the semantic web -- all depend on some form of database. This course will introduce the inner workings of databases and demonstrate hands-on work with participants' own data sets to learn more about concepts like data normalization, relational table design, Structured Query Language (SQL), and effective long-term data management. Students need no prior experience with databases or programming.
Augmented Reality: An Introduction
Markus Wust[This class has 1 spot (9 April)] This workshop serves as a theoretical and practical introduction to Augmented Reality (AR), intended for participants who have not actively worked with AR but are interested in exploring how it might be applied to their areas of endeavour. While we have been exposed to depictions of Augmented Reality through literature, TV and movies for many years, the emergence of mobile platforms such as the Apple iPhone or Android-based smartphones have brought many of these seemingly futuristic ideas closer to becoming part of our every-day reality.
This is a hands-on workshop: after a brief theoretical introduction to AR and a demonstration and discussion of various approaches to augmenting reality, participants will work on a small AR project of their choosing (e.g., a tour of the University of Victoria campus), either individually or in small groups. Although basic HTML and CSS skills would be a plus and helpful for the creation of more customized projects, they are not prerequisites for the course; no programming skills are required. Participants will want to bring a mobile device (e.g., iPhone or Android-based smartphones) capable of running the Layar Augmented Reality Browser (http://www.layar.com/) for the purposes of viewing and testing their project as well as a laptop computer.-
Games for Digital Humanists
Matt Bouchard and Andy Keenan[This class has 4 spots left (26 Feb)] Games are a popular and quickly growing area of study in humanist disciplines. This course combines treatments of game criticism, game theory and game development toward understanding how to approach this new medium as an object of research. Part of the course will provide instruction about creating a game as part of game-first research -- ultimately combining theoretical aspects of game studies with the practical application of game building for both newcomers to games and experienced game scholars.
Visual Design for Digital Humanists
Milena Radzikowska, with Jennifer Windsor and Gerry Derksen[This class is now full (3 Jan)] This offering provides an introduction to the theory and practical application of the fundamentals of visual communication design, in the context of digital humanities projects. Emphasis will be placed on conceptualization, iteration, principles and elements of design, grid-based layouts, and typography. Instruction will be a combination of lecture format, demonstration, in-class critiques, hands-on exercises, and a project component derived from student materials. Participants are asked to bring their own computers with Illustrator, Photoshop, and/or InDesign (as well as basic knowledge of the software), plus at least one static or interactive project (in progress) is needed. We will explore how your project can be improved using the material discussed and demonstrated in the course. This course is appropriate for anyone who has ever been or ever expects to be tasked with using layout software to produce some kind of visual material, either print-based or interactive. Information presented applies to the design of conference posters, brochures, conference presentation slides, web sites, or web tools.
Seminars & Consultations / Advanced Courses
These offerings are more seminar-style and consultative in nature.
Large Project Planning and Development
Jennifer Guiliano[This class is now full (1 Feb)] This course will explore the fundamentals of project planning and design including, but not limited to: formulating appropriate disciplinary questions for digital humanities research, investigating digital humanities tools and resources, structuring your first project, understanding roles and responsibilities, designing publicity and websites for your project, documenting your project work, writing your first grant proposal, and managing your budget.
Digital Editions
Alan Stanley, Tanya Clement, and Dean Irvine[This class has 5 spots left (7 Feb)] This course is designed for individuals and groups who are interested in creating scholarly digital editions. Topics covered will include an overview of planning and project management, workflow and labour issues, and tools available for edition production. We will be working with the Modernist Commons (http://modernistcommons.ca), a collaborative digital editing environment and repository designed by the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project in collaboration with Islandora and its software-services company DiscoveryGarden. We will work on both text- and image-based editions, following a modularized edition-production workflow--from ingesting images, processing texts with optical-character-recognition software, uploading born-digital content, performing markup on transcriptions and images, collating variant texts, and displaying text and apparatus in different viewers. By the end of the course, participants will have worked through the practical implementation of a modular, small-scale edition prototype. Basic knowledge of TEI and some familiarity with RDF (specifically the standards of the Open Annotation Collaboration) is strongly recommended but not required. The seminar is open to everyone, although it is specifically tailored to participants of the EMiC project. Participants need not be modernists or Canadianists to take advantage of using open-source software and learning best practices for scholarly editing in digital media.
Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities
David Hoover[This class is now full (26 Feb)] 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 style, 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, finding/creating and preparing the texts for analysis. We will begin with some prepared text corpora for guided investigation as a group, so that we can concentrate on general problems, issues, and opportunities. Because my background is in literature, most of 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. Most also require texts of substantial size (preferably at least several texts of 1000 words or more). Students who have (groups of) texts or kinds of problems in mind that they would like to work on in the class are encouraged to contact the instructor before enrolling to discuss any potential difficulties or challenges.
SEASR Analytics
Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu[This class has 3 spots left (9 April)] This course focuses on introducing participants to text analysis through the use of the Meandre environment which was initially created as part of the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) project. We will be exploring a variety of text analysis techniques like topic modeling, entity extraction and concept mapping. We will demonstrate how the original text is transformed through the natural language processing steps to achieve the desired output.
Through the use of a transformational cyberinfrastructure technology, the SEASR project enables researchers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences to design, build, and share software applications that support research and collaboration. SEASR eases scholars' access to digital research materials and enhances scholars' use of them through analytics that can uncover hidden information and connections. SEASR fosters collaboration, too, through empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual work environments. Developers can tailor applications both in whole and part to fit scholars' research needs---from changing the visualization landscapes that provide them with views of analytical results, to inserting new analytics that support their linguistic analysis for different time periods or languages, to readjusting entire steps in the work process so that researchers can validate results and alter their queries.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn about SEASR through a comprehensive set of presentations and hands-on exercises meant to outline the key aspects of the technology and how it can be applied to solve real-world research problems. The course will incorporate a variety of learning activities ranging from presentations to structured application sessions to designing specialized analyses. Topics will include: Overview of SEASR infrastructure (components, flows, applications), Introduction to text mining tools, and using and creating Zotero flows. Bring a laptop for hands-on exercises (with admin privileges or install the following Java 1.6+, and Firefox 3+ with these plugins: Zotero and SEASR Analytics for Zotero).Versioning & Collation in the Digital Environment
Stephen Ross and Matt Huculak[This class has 5 spots left (18 March)] This course will take those interested in using computational methods to compare texts from a standing start through to their first completed versioning exercise with a visualization output. Moving the study of textual variation from the labour-intensive work of manual collation into the sphere of digital methods means much faster and comprehensive results. Students in this course will learn about the theory behind versioning approaches, create digital iterations of texts to version, use state-of-the-art software (i.e. Juxta and Versioning Machine) to compare and collate those iterations, and generate visualizations of the output with Voyant, D3, and the Mandala Browser. We will discuss the challenges posed by particular genres, as well as the possibilities and limitations of specific tools currently available.
3D Modelling for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
John Bonnett[This class has 5 spots left (26 Feb)] This course has three aims. The first is to introduce participants to the world of 3D modelling. What methods and software are available to generate 3D content? What languages are used to support their expression and dissemination over the Internet? The second purpose is practical: it will provide an introduction to 3D modelling, and show how such an activity can be integrated into courses devoted to digital history, virtual heritage, architectural history and theatre history, and related disciplines in archaeology and anthropology. Here participants will be introduced to Sketchup, an 3D modelling software package developed by Google that can be procured for free, or for minimal cost in an education institution. They will also be introduced to the 3D Virtual Buildings Project 2.0, a free on-line tutorial that will provide instruction in Sketchup, and in the use of historical sources to produce 3D models. The third aim of the course will be to explore the pedagogical benefit of 3D modelling. How can such activities support student learning, and in particular the development of their constructive and critical thinking skills?
Cultural Codes and Protocols for Indigenous Digital Heritage Management
Connor Rowe, Michael Ashley, Chach Sikes[This class has 2 spots left (5 May)] An increasing number of digital humanities projects grow from collaborations among indigenous communities, scholars and technologists. These projects must deal with not just technology, but also with diverse cultural systems, historical situations and collaborative expectations. This course will take participants through an overview of indigenous heritage management emphasizing the unique needs, challenges and opportunities tied to indigenous digital heritage. This course focuses on the implementation and integration of cultural protocols and diverse ethical systems into content management systems, digital archives and online exhibitions through the lessons learned developing and implementing Mukurtu CMS. Built from the ground up with the needs of indigenous communities in mind, Mukurtu CMS provides a flexible, free and open source Drupal7-based platform for creating, managing, sharing and preserving digital cultural heritage, associated traditional knowledge and educational materials. Participants will receive hands on training with Mukurtu CMS and its core features including: Creating cultural and sharing protocols through community engagement; Integrating traditional knowledge into architecture, display and management; Metadata, standards, free tagging, multi-authored commenting; Digital heritage preservation standards and issues; Rich media management, syndication, archiving and sharing; Building interactive, co-curated exhibitions; Mobile digital heritage collection and presentation; Mapping; Educational modules for student engagement; Community Agile Development methods; Drupal 7 integration: Organic Groups, Panels and Views, Dashboards.
Documentary Editing
Jennifer Stertzer, Holly C. Shulman, with Bob Oeste[Please look for this offering in 2014!] This course will explore all aspects of creating a digital documentary edition in the field of history, from editing to final digital publication. Approaching a digital edition means taking time to think about the relationship between editorial strategies and visualization -- do you want an online book or something else? We would like to engage the participants in this conversation so they can plan the best course given their content and resources. We expect participants to be involved in a variety of projects, so we will ask them to submit a brief project explanation and Institute goals beforehand.
Understanding the Pre-Digital Book
Helene Cazes, Iain Higgins, Erin Kelly, Lisa Surridge, and Mary Elisabeth Leighton[This class has 4 spots left (26 Feb)] This seminar is aimed at literary scholars, historians, archivists, librarians, booklovers, and others -- whether or not they have a digital humanities project in mind -- who wish to learn more about book culture in history and contexts from the medieval through early modern periods. Each class session will combine intensive lectures with individual and small group hands-on work with items from UVic's special collections to focus on the circumstances of production and the continuous reception of objects that were "unique reproductions" (manuscripts) and "repetitive reproductions" (printed books). By providing an overview of textual creation, transmission, and conservation, this seminar will offer digital humanists an introduction to the methodologies and reference tools (historical, codicological, and contemporary) necessary to understand a book in its original contexts and thus to make informed encoding decisions. All will receive a toolkit that enables them to analyze and describe archival materials, facsimiles, and editions in a variety of ways and thus will leave the class ready to read, understand, and produce a bibliographical entry that could accompany a digital edition. Consultations on the bibliographical issues related to individual projects will be available; students who have a particular book (or type of book) they would like to work on are encouraged to contact the instructor before enrolling.
