Online Workshops

          [This offering is two-thirds full (20 March 2023)]

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

Duration: 4-6 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is almost full (20 March 2023)]

This workshop will provide the foundation for the extended course “Text Mapping as Modelling”, that will be offered in 2023. First, we will give a theoretical introduction about one of the most important practices in Digital Humanities, the digital mapping of texts, and expand on the use of semantic annotation as a particular method for the collection of unstructured information from literary and visual sources. Participants will experiment with various methods for modeling and visualization of data, such as the use of folksonomic vocabularies, external schemas, Linked Open Data, and network visualization. In the exercise part of the workshop, participants will be able to look into the various tools, and create mini-projects using Recogito. Then, we will work together in a structured discussion of the results from the practical work, exploring how textual and cartographic information can be represented through different media, and what one can learn about the interpretative process of critical mapping, geographical re-contextualisation, and the modeling of ambiguity in textual research.

Duration: 7-12 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (20 March 2023)]

This course introduces current practices in encoding, analysing and presenting music information. It will be 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.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is one-quarter full (20 March 2023)]

University researchers are facing increasingly sophisticated security threats. Cyber security attacks against education and research sectors are growing faster than any other sector. Digital Humanities has brought historical and cultural research to a public audience like never before, thanks in large part to the web. Archives and applications are making rarefied cultural objects available almost anywhere on the globe, but they are also now exposed to risks associated with any online activity. This course will introduce attendees to many security best practices and policies by conducting a holistic risk assessment. We will rely on open standards like those produced by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Essentials tool kit. During the course of the week, we will develop a threat model for your project, lab, or centre. We will work to identify ways to limit your project’s attack surface and generate custom research security policies for you and your collaborators. This session will help you develop a security-first research practice that protects the safety of your data, your researchers, and your research subjects. A security-first research practice helps ensure data integrity for your project in a global political climate that can be antagonistic or even hostile to humanities research. // This is a hands-on course with some lecture components. Consider this offering to be built on by and/or in complement with Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods, Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements, DH For Department Chairs and Deans, Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches, Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Critiques & Praxis, and more!

Duration: 10 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is full (15 March 2023)]

This is a brief workshop, a subset of the fuller course that offers a basic introduction to the construction and analysis of networks. Participants will become familiar with the mathematical concepts that are foundational to networks as they learn to format network data, analyze and interpret networks structures, visualize network graphs, and integrate network analysis into their existing research workflows. They will also be introduced to popular cross-platform digital humanities tools for the visualization and analysis of networks, such as Palladio, Gephi, and Cytoscape. This course will be relevant to all humanities researchers who are interested in learning more about the potential of network analysis to support humanist research goals. Having completed this course, participants will have a better understanding of how to employ network analysis in their future research and pedagogy. No previous mathematical or programming experience is required.

Duration: 10 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (20 March 2023)]

Knowledge commons and academic social networking sites such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate have grown enormously in the last decade, enabling millions of researchers to share information and connect with others in digital spaces. These platforms can help researchers produce, publish, and share research within and beyond their existing academic networks using sharing features that are familiar to users of popular commercial social networking sites such as Facebook. However, their growth also raises important questions about privacy, the privatization and exploitation of researchers and research data, and community governance, among others. In this course, we will examine how open knowledge commons, in particular, address these questions in both theory and practice. After a brief discussion of these issues in relation to the history and evolution of knowledge commons, participants will be guided through hands-on explorations of open, not-for-profit platforms including Humanities Commons and the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons. Participants will also be given time to freely experiment with these platforms—and the knowledge mobilization opportunities they provide—in consultation with guest experts and instructors.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (20 March 2023)]

What is knowledge mobilization, and what does it mean for the digital humanities? This online workshop offers an overview of Knowledge Mobilization, the digital humanities context, and the current state of knowledge mobilization in the humanities. Drawing on evidence-based best practices, it guides participants through the process of developing and enacting a plan for mobilizing their research, including how to evaluate its impact.

Duration: TBA

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is one-quarter full (20 March 2023)]

Intended for university administrators who seek an understanding of the Digital Humanities that is both broad and deep, this offering [1] surveys pragmatic DH basics and chief administrative issues related to supporting DH and those who practice it at their institution and [2] individually engages with the instructors, who have served as deans and senior professors, center directors, and presidents and chairs of major national and international digital humanities organizations.

This short workshop is drawn from materials of the fuller DHSI course.

Duration: 4-6 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is two-thirds full (20 March 2023)]

What is our ethical imperative as teachers and scholars in the digital and public humanities? How might we identify and address the colonial histories, legacies, and discursive practices pervading the contemporary technoscape and our departmental curricula? How might we hone our individual and collective capacities to sustain communities of care and transform oppressive structures of knowledge-making in the neoliberal academy? Through engaging with and reflecting on these critical questions, this weeklong course invites scholars, creative practitioners, and off-campus community members to develop collective strategies for refusing the damaging colonialities of teaching, learning, and research practices. As co-participants, we will foreground an ethic of care and community building in identifying tactics that we can share and act upon to challenge and transform colonial ideologies and systems embedded within the increasingly interdisciplinary practices of digital humanities. Building upon Paulo Freire’s writings on the pedagogy of the oppressed and aligning with Global South, Indigenous, Black, and women of colour feminist, queer, and crip justice work, we will imagine and continue the ongoing process of bringing into being the anti-colonial possibilities of classroom teaching for a bolder and more affirming environment for digital humanists inside and outside the academy.

Duration: 10-12 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Not available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is one-quarter full (20 March 2023)]

This workshop explores historical and contemporary theories of knowledge construction and conveyance in an interdisciplinary context, balancing earlier thought and theory, via readings related to pertinent traditions, with direct engagement of current applications and active experimentation in the area, including via contribution to a live wikibook on the subject. Topics include: ways of knowing; inter/disciplinary and methodological foundations; digital scholarship; social knowledge production; knowledge construction and constriction; social media communities and collaboration; knowledge space design; gamification; tools and techniques.

This workshop is facilitated by Ray Siemens, with presentations and other contributions also from Alyssa Arbuckle (U Victoria), Gabriel Hankins (Clemson U), Matt Huculak (U Victoria), Sarah-Nelle Jackson (U British Columbia), Graham Jensen (U Victoria), and Amanda Madden (George Mason U).

Duration: 8-10 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is one-third full (20 March 2023)]

Scholarly media and institutional administrations often portray STEM and Humanities departments as competing with each other for students and resources. These messages often revolve around the challenges that both disciplines face, such as the lack of inclusion of gender minorities within STEM and the portrayal of Humanities and Liberal Arts majors as counterproductive to gainful employment. Often scholars and undergraduates view the work of other disciplines as non-compatible to their fields and goals. Intentionally designed Digital Humanities student programming provides an opportunity to address these challenges and create interdisciplinary research opportunities for faculty, the community, and undergraduates in all fields. This interactive course will guide attendees through the process of designing educational programming that meets institutional goals and the needs of diverse groups of faculty and students. Participants will discuss readings by leading technology studies scholars of gender and race on the challenges faced by undergraduates and faculty in STEM, Liberal Arts, and the Digital Humanities. Participants will collaborate and construct strategies for designing digital humanities labs and student programs that focus on advocacy and community-engaged research by writing program goals, examining funding opportunities, recruiting diverse students, partners, and faculty, modifying Scrum/Agile project management techniques to manage undergraduate teams, finding technical support through campus outreach, and developing program assessment. By the end of the course, attendees leave with an initial project plan that they can implement at their institutions.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is half full (17 March 2023)]

What would you like to do with your data in 3D? 3D visualization has been used in traditional scientific computing domains for the past several decades to visualize results of multidimensional numerical simulations. In humanities 3D visualizations have been mostly restricted to specialized areas such as game engines, architectural renderings, virtual environments, photogrammetric processing, and visualization of point cloud data — workflows that tend to use very specific tools. In this full-day course we will approach 3D visualization from a more general perspective, treating it as an extension of interactive 2D plotting into the third dimension. In the first 80% of the workshop we will teach you how to use 3D general-purpose scientific visualization tools for interactive 3D analysis of humanities data, walking through a series of simple hands-on problems designed specifically for this course. In the remaining 20% we will show you how to put these (and more general polygon-based) visualizations on the web, using state-of-the-start in-browser visualization techniques. No prior visualization experience is needed.

Duration: 4-6 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is two-thirds full (20 March 2023)]

This workshop is designed to help educators at institutions without a DH budget. This specifically considers educators at regional state schools, community colleges and other under-funded institutions and adjuncts, graduate students and other precarious members of our community. It is aimed at supporting those who desire to integrate DH into their classroom without institutional financial backing. This workshop will provide a brief overview of digital humanities technologies, how they can be integrated into the classroom, and why you would integrate them into a classroom. We will focus specifically on free or very low cost technologies that can be easily integrated into the classroom. The workshop aims to support classrooms and instructors which had not previously included significant DH content. This discussion will have two parts. One aspect will focus on finding free or low-budget DH solutions. The other part will be a discussion on how to gently ease students into these DH approaches and solutions touching on cross-campus partnerships that add depth to students’ understanding of the practical norms of the field. This part of the discussion will draw in particular on the collaborative experience of a librarian and an assistant professor.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is full (15 March 2023)]

This hands-on course will introduce neural networks, image preprocessing, and deep learning models for those who wish to explore deep learning for the digital humanities. This course will first focus on learning activation functions, loss functions, and gradient descent, then explore image processing and deep learning models. After that, we will train GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and cGANs (conditional Generative Adversarial Networks) models to colorize black-and-white images. Throughout this course, participants will be able to create their own datasets for deep learning then run deep learning models with them.

Duration: 7-12 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is full (15 March 2023)]

The 3-day workshop offers a quick and effective intro to natural language processing (NLP) and textual corpus network visualization and analysis. We will be doing coding in Python and learning how to use (and compare) certain relevant libraries such as Scikit-learn, NLTK, FastText, Gensim plus word2vec & doc2vec, SpaCy, TextStat, LexicalRichness, and NetworkX. We will apply those packages in computationally analyzing texts and textual corpora, representing the corpora as networks, and thus finding out unexpected if not amazing things about the texts they contain. The knowledge and skills acquired—alongside our in-class applications—will be useful in education and research in NLP, automated text and corpus analysis, network science and graph theory applications, computational literary analysis and criticism, computational linguistics, and vector space (and topic) modeling for the humanities. On the fourth day, everybody will have the opportunity to participate in the #GraphPoem event that will involve some of the Python scripts developed during the workshop. We will run those and other scripts live (on JupyterHub) on ready-made and individually/collaboratively assembled and expanded corpora, thus feeding into a hypermedia performance involving a Twitter bot and a cross-artform live stream.

Duration: 7-12 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

          [This offering is full (15 March 2023)]

This virtual workshop explores the combination/collision/collusion of storytelling techne with digital media to prompt storytelling projects as Digital Humanities scholarship, teaching, and creative practices.

The workshop will begin with an overview of traditional storytelling frameworks, asking how these various approaches to storytelling might be paired with and/or enhanced by a variety of digital media, including web design, video, audio, data-based, and ludic (game) storytelling. We will also discuss project planning/management for digital storytelling projects. Richard will then lead workshops on basic media integration for the web and choice-based storytelling with Twine. Twine is a digital storytelling format that builds on hypertext and includes ludic elements. We’ll discuss non-trivial work required of the user in ergodic media, as well as nonlinearity and multilinearity and some basic principles of game design.

The latter third of the workshop is reserved for the development and support of students’ specific project ideas and goals.

This workshop will make use of both Slack and Basecamp. At week’s end, participants are invited to show and discuss with other course participants their digital storytelling project, which may be in the form of a conceptual framework, a working prototype, or more.

This offering is co-sponsored by The Electronic Literature Organization.

Duration: 20-25 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

In this course, we will work on the definition of Open Knowledge and its commonalities, differences and relationship to Open Access and Open Data. We look through non-profit projects of Wikimedia and through other academic and non-academic projects, by focusing on technological, collaborative, legal and ethical questions.

Whereas legal and technological restrictions, and collaborative methods are mostly well defined by laws, user guidelines and the current state of the art, social restrictions often seem to be open to interpretation. We will find and discuss guidelines to let ethical questions find access into the guidelines of Open Access projects. There will also be room to discuss your own Open Knowledge projects, based on what we learnt, if you want to share them with the class. This course is aimed at students, academic stuff, non-academic and academic archivists and librarians, community members and anyone else with an interest in ethical, legal, collaborative and technological questions about Open Knowledge.

Duration: 5-6 hours

Proposed schedule: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This offering explores core, pragmatic issues related to collaborative teamwork in the digital humanities. Following a brief example-based discussion of DH teamwork, topics covered include: being a team, and being collaboration-ready; a look at types of teams and the ways they work; an outline of supportive policies and best practices; and beyond. Video materials are supplemented by a session for discussion and questions+answers.

This short workshop is drawn from materials of the fuller DHSI course; it was offered at DH Downunder in December 2020.

Duration: 4 hours

Office hours: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This offering provides a focused and practically-oriented introduction of key open scholarship concepts, approaches to tools and data, and open knowledge in situ. It consists of online training materials associated with the Open Knowledge Practicum at the University of Victoria, Canada — themselves encapsulation of longer courses offered in conjunction with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (dhsi.org). Video materials are supplemented by a session for discussion and questions+answers.

This short workshop is drawn from materials offered at DH Downunder in December 2020.

Duration: 4 hours

Office hours: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

So, you want to do a DH project? In this session, I will outline DH project management best practices and introduce resources for researchers wanting to get started. As Digital Humanities is a highly interdisciplinary field, projects almost always involved experts across many different fields, departments, campuses, and sometimes countries. Planning how all these people will work together throughout the life of the project is crucial to its success. This session will include introductions to the many invaluable resources out there for researchers.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021), plus DHSI discussion space with the workshop leaders.

Duration: 2 hours

Office hours: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

What do you do when your personal computer is no longer sufficient for your research needs? Do you need to run that web scrape for months at a time? Some DH tools are only available as web based services, and many run well when self hosted in cloud resources. In this workshop we will look at some web only tools, as well as how to host your own in the cloud. After a quick introduction to some tools and resources, we will work through a couple of examples, one web scrape and visualization, and one text analysis.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021), plus DHSI discussion space with the workshop leaders.

Duration: 2 hours

Office hours: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

Office hours: TBA

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

In this session, we will give an overview of what a cloud is generally, as well as the Compute Canada Federation cloud specifically. To demonstrate what may be accomplished with a cloud, different cloud usage cases for the Humanities and Social Sciences will be presented followed by a discussion of two common methods for website generation, a common use for the cloud. We will finish with a brief discussion of server security and the implications it has for the two methods presented for creating websites.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021).

Duration: 1 hour

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Need to create a map, but don’t know how? Have you been asked to analyze geospatial data and you are wondering where to start? This introduction is for you. We will use QGIS to explore the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and familiarize ourselves with the different steps of creating a simple map. We will perform some basic operations and we will discover the open data available within QGIS and elsewhere on the web.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Jeff Albert, team lead for the Compute Canada Federation clouds, is hosting this session. We will discuss how cloud technology intersects with your area of research, what use cases and platforms are most important for you, and what the future holds in terms of new cloud infrastructure, platforms and capabilities that cloudNT is developing for cloud researchers. Share the barriers and challenges you currently experience when it comes to accessing cloud technology.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Research data management, or RDM, is increasingly recognized as an important part of the research enterprise in all disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences. With the introduction of the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy, and the broad recognition of principles such as FAIR, CARE, and OCAP, it’s crucial for researchers to understand and adopt good RDM practices. You’ll be glad you did! This workshop will give you an overview of the essentials of RDM, with tips, resources, and tools that you can begin to incorporate into your work right away. Topics will include: What counts as research data; What a data management plan is, and how it can help you; What data curation is, and why it’s important; What to consider when sharing your data with other researchers; What to consider when preserving your data for the long term; What data might be considered sensitive, and how to ensure that these data are properly managed.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This online workshop is intended to orient complete beginners to the fundamentals of web scraping. By the end of this workshop participants will be able to articulate what web scraping is and when it may be a useful method to get information from the web; use one method to scrape content from the web; and do basic cleaning on scraped output.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021).

Duration: 1.5 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

In North America, the National Computing Infrastructures of the Compute Canada Federation and the Discovery Environment of the XSEDE provide user-fee compute resources and experienced technical support staff for the advancement of research in Humanities and Social Sciences. In this workshop, we will get to know the XSEDE and you will be able to see the power of these infrastructures for photogrammetry, with a Metashape tutorial.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021).

Duration: 1.5 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

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 a very specific use-case will be considered throughout the point of the workshop will be to highlight possible future applications that participants might be interested in.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021), plus DHSI discussion space with the workshop leaders.

Duration: 4 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

The landscape of digital tools applicable for Humanists and Social Scientists is wide, varied, and continuously evolving. It can be a difficult landscape to navigate, especially if you are new to it. Which tools are the most important? Which skills are necessary for which tools? Where do you start? What are the resources available to help you? This session seeks to guide participants towards answering these questions for their own situation, and advising them on their journey of digital skill development in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Are you curious about linked open data (LOD)? This workshop serves as an introduction to the semantic web for humanities researchers interested in exploring and disseminating existing research materials as LOD. We will begin with an overview of what it means to translate existing humanities data into LOD, including the use of external ontologies and vocabularies. We will provide an introduction to conversion tools that allow database, XML, and unstructured data to be transformed into linked data for use on the semantic web.

Available as a recording from DHSI@Congress (held 4 June 2021).

Duration: 3 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Learn about the national digital infrastructure that is free to access for Canadian academic researchers! This workshop will begin with a short overview of Compute Canada’s digital resources and user supports, including the expanding Humanities and Social Science specific supports. It will continue with a discussion with participants about current applications and usage cases for their research areas and explore potential projects. This part of the session will include consultation with Compute Canada’s experts and live demos of applicable technologies.

Available as a recording from DHSI@Congress (held 4 June 2021).

Duration: 3 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This workshop will introduce participants to computer assisted text analysis using Voyant (https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide). Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It’s designed to make it easy for you to work with your own text or collection of texts in a variety of formats. Given these benefits, this workshop will be of potential interest to a wide audience of people interested in using or teaching with Voyant Tools. This workshop will also serve to introduce Voyant Spyral Notebooks and highlight some new benefits, functionality, and learning and teaching materials. For more see https://sgsinclair.github.io/dialogica/

Available as a recording from DHSI@Congress (held 4 June 2021).

Duration: 3 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

In this session, we will give an overview of what a cloud is generally, as well as the Compute Canada Federation cloud specifically. To demonstrate what may be accomplished with a cloud, different cloud usage cases for the Humanities and Social Sciences will be presented followed by a discussion of two common methods for website generation, a common use for the cloud. We will finish with a brief discussion of server security and the implications it has for the two methods presented for creating websites.

Available as a recording from Compute Canada’s HSS Series (held February 2021).

Duration: 1 hour

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This is a workshop in stylometry, or the analysis of countable linguistic features of texts. While stylometry 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 and image. The statistics of such features as word, word n-gram or character n-gram frequencies, are not only a highly precise tool for identifying authorship, but can in fact reveal patterns of similarity and difference between various works by one author, works by various authors, finally between authors differing in terms of chronology, gender, genre or narrative styles, between translations of the same author or group of authors, or specific voices such as idiolects of characters in novels. This provides a new opening in literary studies, and the results of a stylometric analysis can be compared and confronted with the findings of traditional stylistics and interpretation. It also opens a new set of questions about style and its transfer, as well as the nature of particular features and language.

Auditors will learn major stylometric tools and methods, from simple keywords extraction to machine-learning classification based on text features, followed by visualization techniques ranging from dendrograms to networks. Auditors will learn how to identify the problem, define relevant research questions, and design an experiment.

We will use our own package written for the R statistical programming environment — ‘stylo’, which allows us to avoid R’s usually steep learning curve – we don’t expect advanced programming skills. We will provide text corpora to use for training purposes, but also hope and expect participants to bring their own data and problems to work on. In response to the pandemic, we offer an online and shortened version of the course. The focus will be on understanding basic stylometric methods and learning how to conduct simple experiments on one’s own. We still hope to provide a broad overview of the main stylometric problems and techniques, with some of the more detailed technical discussions moved to auxiliary materials.

Duration: 7-12 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

Digital Humanities scholars combine research and practice in digital forms that are quite removed from the traditional humanities. This presents a problem of where to publish born-digital research and multimodal writing. This online course focuses on the platforms, tools, production workflows and design strategies for researchers, scholars, teachers, and practitioners in the digital humanities who want to start an online academic journal, create an open education resource textbook or publish multimodal scholarly texts. With hands-on activities, participants will learn the basics of popular publishing platforms (Scalar and WordPress) and gain practical experience in how to use Markdown to easily turn text files or Word docs into HTML files, epub/Kindle files, PDFs and print-on-demand books. Class topics will also include open education resources (OER), peer-review, credentialing, digital object identifier system (DOI), copyright and open source practices, structured data, site design and social media promotion. We will also discuss practical issues relating to funding and institutional support (or the lack thereof) and the invisible labour of publishing.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies

This workshop offering is not available for active participation. The format of this offering has no registration limit.

This workshop will brainstorm ideas for new or ongoing eTextbook or Open Educational Resource (OER) projects proposed by participants in advance and discuss models, best practices, and platform options for these projects. The 2021 offering consisted of three two-hour discussions of our coursepack readings and examples of eTextbooks and OER that illustrate the readings, acting as a foundation for a coming in-person, hands-on course for those who want to author or compile an eTextbook that is multimodal, interactive, and usable on mobile phones and tablets as well as laptops and desktops. Course topics include writing for students and general audiences, obtaining and reusing content from OER, integrating and synchronizing multimedia assets, designing usable and accessible interfaces, licensing and copyrighting materials, choosing the right formats and distribution channels, marketing and promoting an eTextbook, and using eTextbooks for pedagogical purposes such as annotation, assessment, or conducting a class project in which students create their own eTextbook(s).

Duration: 2-3 hours

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials: instructor biographies