On Campus Courses

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 be making use of the TAPAS Project (http://tapasproject.org/) application in order to provide a hands-on space for the practical application of project planning and technical knowledge acquired throughout the course.

Auditor Option: Available

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; 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; and more!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

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: Conceptualising & Creating a Digital Documentary Edition; Understanding the Pre-Digital Book; Online Collaborative Scholarship: Principles and Practices (A CWRCShop); Sound and Digital Humanities; Digital Documentation and Imaging for Humanists; Open Source OCR Tools for Early Modern Printed Documents; and more!

          [Please look for this course in the future! Instructional materials will be made available for those auditing for 2023.]

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. 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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This course will have lecture, demo, and hands-on components. It is a good foundation for all tool- and technology-oriented DHSI offerings.

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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!

          [This offering is two-thirds full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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.

          [This offering is one-third full (3 May 2023)]

This course will survey pertinent research in Open Access (OA) methods, theory, and implementation, and it will look forward to open social scholarship. Overall, we will consider the role of OA knowledge dissemination in academia and at large. We’ll focus on the history, evolution, forms, and impact of OA within the domain of scholarly communication. Specific topics of discussion include advocacy, infrastructure, intellectual property rights, research evaluation metrics, online journals, databases, and peer review methods and limitations in this context. Using OA as a foundation, we will discuss the rising trend and potential impact of open social scholarship, which involves the creation and dissemination of research and technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists. This course will be geared toward students, librarians, scholars, publishers, government representatives, and others who are invested in the open development and sharing of research output.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); course overview (video); instructor biographies

This is, primarily, a lecture- and discussion-based course. Consider this offering in complement with: DH For Department Chairs and Deans; Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; Text Processing – Techniques and Traditions; eTextBook Publishing and Open Educational Resources on the Web and Mobile Devices; and more!

          [This offering is full (28 April 2023)]

“I have some stuff that I want to do a DH project with. How do I get started?” Answering this question (and getting started doing DH) involves several related questions about data: What data/materials do you work with? What format are your data/materials in? What does the format of your data allow you to do? How can you transform your data to do different things with it? What are the stakes of the choices that you make? This course guides participants through answering these questions in relation to their own research areas, datasets, and materials. You will start by introducing your classmates to your data — and will spend the week exploring what you can do with that data, and the ways that you might develop it further. What do you gain, or lose, by thinking about your subject matter as data? How do you balance between making your data as useful as possible, while still acknowledging its limitations? This course provides an introduction to different types and formats of data (structured, unstructured, etc.), to the work associated with data (building and using vocabularies, working with data models, normalization, cleaning); and best practices for documenting and sharing that work. We’ll look at a few different platforms & tools that you could work with your data in, and think about the full range of things you might do with your data, from analyzing it to making it available for other people to use.”

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

This is a hands-on course. Consider this offering in complement with most other DHSI courses.

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

For those new to programming, this course will provide an introduction to creating web-based data visualizations using the D3.js (d3js.org) Javascript library. We will begin by learning Javascript, the browser-based scripting language. We will then use this knowledge to begin working in D3 in order to create interactive graphics, and finally to integrate to data sources to create interactive visualizations. No previous programming experience is required.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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; Digital Humanities Databases; Ethical Data Visualization: Taming Treacherous Data; and more!

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

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: Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities; Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities; Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication; Data Mining for Digital Humanists; Understanding Topic Modelling; Stylometry with R: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Literary Texts; RDF and Linked Open Data; 3D Modelling for DH and Social Sciences; DH Databases; Creating LAMP Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Projects; XPath for Processing XML and Managing Projects; Information Security for Digital Researchers; and more!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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.

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier related course 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: Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application, Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities, Text Processing – Techniques & Traditions, XML Applications for Historical and Literary Research; Parsing and Writing XML with Python; and more! No advanced knowledge of XML processing is necessary but those with interests in document processing who have taken Digital Documentation and Imaging for Humanists; Advanced TEI Concepts / TEI Customization; A Collaborative Approach to XSLT; or Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities will certainly benefit.

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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 in this course will work to create a curriculum for their own humanities classrooms that introduces game analysis and theory. Specifically, we’ll look at how to develop a class that uses video games and tabletop/board games as objects of analysis. Students will end the course with a syllabus for a class of their own design. Taught by Jeff Lawler and Sean Smith co-directors of the Center for the History of Video Games 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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials:  instructor biographies

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.

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

Digital games are often studied as texts, as objects of research. However, given that games can function as simulations, models, arguments, and creative collaboratories, game-based inquiry can be used as a method of humanities research, communication, and pedagogy, and can also function as a political intervention into humanities theories and practices. Merging these two approaches, this course explores how simple game environments and tools can be used to encourage builders, players, and publics to pursue broader social, cultural, and interpersonal understandings. Understanding digital games through factors such as computational bias, disruptive and interactive play, ethics, complicity, and user awareness, participants in this course will approach games as methods of critical intervention, advocacy, and activism. In particular, participants will learn ways that game experiences can be used as tools that disrupt and defamiliarize research, reporting, teaching, spaces, objects, purposes, embodiment, and habits of perception and practice. Course outcomes will involve exploring existing examples, discussing realistic design, development, and outcome logistics, critically reflecting on the implications of game-based engagement, and working towards the creation of individual prototypes (which need not be exclusively digital).

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering to build on: Race, Social Justice, and DH; Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities; Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed; Queer Digital Humanities; Accessibility & Digital Environments; Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis; Engaging Play/Playing to Engage; Digital Storytelling; Digital Fictions, Electronic Literature, Literary Gaming; and more.

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); course overview (video); instructor biographies

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!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

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. 

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

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.

          [This offering is full (20 March 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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!

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

This course will focus on building community in collaborative digital learning environments and will interrogate notions of outcomes, best practices, and instructional design. Our work together will be productive, grounded in praxis, and driven by learner experiences.

Digital Humanities, with its deep reliance on technological tools, is replete with courses about those tools. This course offers an alternative: It is an exploration of pedagogy, challenging teachers to re-think how they approach their classes and interact with their students. We will discuss critical pedagogy and the importance of letting students define, control, and take responsibility for, their learning environment. This course will also serve as a playground, letting participants experiment with critical digital pedagogy in a class-created open-access online course that we co-design, build, deploy, promote, and assess, all within the one-week seminar. Participants will leave with a better understanding of their approaches to teaching and how critical digital pedagogy applies to DH courses.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: earlier syllabus and supporting materials (large document); instructor biographies

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; Models for DH at Liberal Arts Colleges (& 4 Yr Institutions); Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; Professionalizing the Early Career Digital Humanist: Strategies and Skills; Anti-Colonial DH Pedagogy; and more!

          [Please look for this course in the future!]

This course offers an introduction to working with medieval and early modern manuscripts in the digital context, providing an overview of the possibilities and challenges associated with applications of XML-TEI in manuscript studies. It focuses on both building an XML-TEI-based edition of a manuscript text (with or without apparatus criticus) and creating XML-TEI-based manuscript descriptions. The course is mainly aimed at those who are newcomers to DH methods, i.e., humanists who have a particular, manuscript-oriented project in mind and who want to learn how to bring it into a digital world. No familiarity with scripting or encoding is assumed. Previous experience in working with manuscripts is desirable (basic training in codicology, paleography, and bibliography). Participants are encouraged to bring in material relating to their own projects, but sample data sets will be provided for hands-on assignments.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is almost full (15 May 2023)]

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.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (15 May 2023)]

This course introduces fundamental web and DH skills using CollectionBuilder, an open source project 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 scanning and metadata creation to 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. This is a hands-on course that will cover basics of digitization, metadata, and web programming fundamentals. 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. Optionally, participants are invited to bring along a small collection of physical items to digitize, digital files (images, pdfs, audio) to feature in a digital collection, or metadata exported from an existing collection hosted on CONTENTdm.

This offering is co-sponsored by U Idaho Libraries.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This course will complement “[Foundations] Digitisation Fundamentals and their Application,” “Creating LAMP Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Projects,” “[Foundations] Developing a Digital Project (With Omeka),” and can be built on by “The Frontend: Modern JavaScript & CSS Development.”

          [This offering is one-quarter full (15 May 2023)]

This course will explore all aspects of conceptualizing, planning for, and creating a digital edition. It provides a basic introduction to the various types of digital editions, the practice of editing in the digital age, and a survey of the many digital tools available to serve project goals. Approaching a digital edition means taking time to think about how end-users will want to work with a particular edition. Beginning with the research and analytical needs of end-users in mind, editors are better able to develop effective editorial strategies that will result in a dynamic, useful, and usable, digital edition. In this course, participants will engage in hands-on learning and group discussions related to project conceptualization, editorial policies and processes, and the selection and use of digital tools that can serve the needs of researchers and other end-users. Participants will bring a few sample materials they are working with. We will use these in a class project – creating a digital edition over the course of the week using skills learned in each session. Our goal is for participants to return to their home institutions ready and able to build upon, enhance, and transform these initial ideas into robust digital editions.

This offering is co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Editing at UVa.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This course combines lecture and hands-on activities. Consider this offering to build on: Digitisation Fundamentals and their Application; Understanding the Pre-Digital Book. Consider this offering in complement with and / or to be built on by: Digital Documentation and Imaging for Humanists; Pragmatic Publishing Workflows; XPath for Processing XML and Managing Projects; and more!