Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable
October 2024
| Thu 17 |
This CDH Basics session explores the lifecycle of a digital research project across the stages of design, data capture, transformation, and analysis, presentation and preservation. It introduces tactics for embedding ethical research principles and practices at each stage of the research process.
This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course. |
| Thu 24 |
This session provides a brief introduction to different methods for capturing bulk data from online sources or via agreement with data collection holders, including Application Programme Interfaces (APIs). We will address issues of data provenance, exceptions to copyright for text and data-mining, and discuss good practice in managing and working with data that others have created.
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| Thu 31 |
CDH Basics: Transforming your data
[Places]
Data which you have captured rather than created yourself is likely to need cleaning up before you can use it effectively. This short session will introduce you to the basic principles of creating structured datasets and walk you through some case studies in data cleaning with OpenRefine, a powerful open source tool for working with messy data.
This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course |
November 2024
| Mon 4 |
Convenor: Liz Stevenson, CDH Methods Fellow 2024/25 Are you a humanities researcher or scholar with no coding experience who would like to begin using digital analysis tools productively, manageably, and in a way that meets your needs? Come and join one of the limited places to create a toolbox of basic text mining skills and methods that you can apply to your own humanities research and a simple but clear understanding of online resources with which you can do this, such as
and coding languages and workspaces like
We will cover the underlying basic theory and philosophy behind text mining, and then equip you with the commands you need to perform tasks such as authorship attribution and statistical analyses of literary materials. This will include the basic creation of topic models, and execution of word frequency analyses, along with other similar methods of investigation. You will leave with the coding tools to create simple but attractive visualisations and graphs of your results. About the convenor: Liz is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Renaissance English at Darwin College, having studied English at Stanford University, USA, where she also completed a BA (2016) and MA (2017). Liz’s work revolves around the relationship between digital analysis and subjective understandings of meaning and physicality in Renaissance literature. She is currently completing her dissertation using R-based topic modelling, MFW & MDW analyses, and language field volume analyses to argue for the categorisation of Shakespeare’s plays according to linguistic fields on the basis of the plays’ atypical generic behaviour compared to broader Elizabeth and Jacobean stage works of literature. This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here. |
| Thu 7 |
The impact of well-crafted data visualisations has been well-documented historically. Florence Nightingale famously used charts to make her case for hospital hygiene in the Crimean War, while Dr John Snow’s bar charts of cholera deaths in London helped convince the authorities of the water-borne nature of the disease. However, as information designer Alberto Cairo notes, charts can also lie. This introductory Basics session presents the basic principles of data visualisation for researchers who are new to working with quantitative data.
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| Mon 11 |
Methods Fellows Series | From Disk to Digital: Techniques for Imaging and Analysing Floppy Disks
[Places]
Convenor: Leontien Talboom, CDH Methods Fellow 2024/25 This session is designed for staff interested in imaging obsolete media and students or researchers looking to use disk images in their work. By attending this session, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of both the technical process of creating disk images and the analytical techniques for interpreting them. This dual focus ensures that both researchers and archivists supporting researchers can derive significant value, whether they are concerned with preserving data or uncovering historical insights. The session will be divided into two parts. Part 1 will provide an overview of the different types of floppy disks, their development, and their historical context. It will also cover the process of creating disk images, which are bit-for-bit copies of the content on a floppy disk. Attendees will learn about the equipment needed to create these images, including both hardware and software tools. Part 2 will explore how disk images can be used in research. With more memory institutions offering digital collections, including disk images, understanding how to access and analyse these images is crucial. The session will cover emulators as the primary tool for accessing disk images, as well as other methods like analysing raw flux streams and interpreting hex values to identify the correct system for reading the image. During the session disk drives and floppy controllers will be brought to demonstrate the transferring process. HxC floppy disk emulator and a HxD Hex Editor will be used to demonstrate how to analyse disk images. About the convenor: Leontien has extensive experience in the field of digital preservation. Beginning as a digital archivist at the Archaeology Data Service, she then pursued a collaborative PhD with University College London and The National Archives UK, focusing on access to born-digital materials. Her research includes co-authoring the Computational Access Guide for the Digital Preservation Coalition and exploring the UK Government Web Archive using Jupyter Notebooks. As a web archivist on the Archive of Tomorrow project, she worked to enhance accessibility to online health discourse. Currently, she works as a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries where she looks after the Transfer Service and works with obsolete media across the collections. Recently she has been awarded a British Academy Grant to further her research interest in safeguarding floppy disk knowledge for future practitioners and researchers. This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here. |
| Thu 14 |
CDH Basics: Sustaining your data
[Places]
Ensuring long-term access to digital data is often a difficult task: both hardware and code decay much more rapidly than many other means of information storage. Digital data created in the 1980s is frequently unreadable, whereas books and manuscripts written in the 980s are still legible. This session explores good practice in data preservation and software sustainability and looks at what you need to do to ensure that the data you don’t want to keep is destroyed.
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| Mon 18 |
Convenor: Dr Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk Do you consider yourself a beginner and have an interest in working with early Internet platforms and archives? Come and join one of the limited places to learn more about platforms such as the Internet Archive for research and discuss the challenges one can encounter when turning to media archaeology. Together, we will:
About the convenor: Syaivo received their PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Their work focuses on Ukraine and is located at the crossing of social movements studies, the histories and theories of sexuality and gender, and visual culture studies. Their current research aims to understand better the Internet's role in sustaining or limiting sexual and gender dissent in Ukraine. They are a co-editor of the Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies journal and collaborate with the Invisible University For Ukraine. They work as a History of Art librarian but prefer doing research at home in the company of a cat called Soya. This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here. |
| Thu 21 |
The Programming Historian publishes novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. This workshop will help you plan your next steps in learning the skills you’ll need to work with data. We’ll highlight PH lessons which will put into practice skills related to the previous sessions in the Basics series, discuss common problems and how to overcome obstacles, sources of peer-to-peer support and how to build a community around you as you work. This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course. |
December 2024
| Mon 2 |
This workshop, organised in collaboration with Dr Ann Borda (Alan Turing Institute), will provide an accessible, non-technical introduction to AI systems for working with images (such as image classification, analysis and generation) and discuss sources of bias and problems of interpretation. Through discussion and hands-on exercises, we will demonstrate some of the ways in which image-generation models reproduce bias and stereotypes. We will use a data justice lens to:
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