All Cambridge Digital Humanities courses

The aim of this course is to support students, researchers, and professionals interested in exploring the changing nature of the English vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. We will focus on computational methods for representing word meaning and word meaning change from large-scale historical text corpora. The corpus used will consist of Darwin’s letters from the (Darwin Project https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) at Cambridge University Library. All code will be in online Python notebooks.

If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form

Methods Workshop: Best Practices in Coding for Digital Humanities

Mary Chester-Kadwell (CDH Methods Fellow)

Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by Tuesday, 11 May 2021. Successful applicants will be notified by end-of-day Wednesday, 12 May 2021.

This course introduces best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow for research.

Developing your coding practice is an ongoing process throughout your career. This intermediate course is aimed at students and staff who use coding in research, or plan on starting such a project soon. We present an introduction to a range of best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow. All the examples and exercises will be in Python.

If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply.

If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form.

Methods Workshop: Best Practices in Coding for Digital Humanities

Mary Chester-Kadwell (CDH Research Software Engineering Coordinator)

Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by noon Wednesday, 4 May 2022 (you can only access this form by signing into your University Google Account). Successful applicants will be notified by end-of-day Monday, 9 May 2021.

This course introduces best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow for research.

Developing your coding practice is an ongoing process throughout your career. This intermediate course is aimed at students and staff who use coding in research, or plan on starting such a project soon. We present an introduction to a range of best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow. All the examples and exercises will be in Python.

If you are interested in attending this course, please complete the application form.

Jessica M. Parr, PhD (Simmons University and The Programming Historian)

We welcome Jessica Parr as a guest lecturer for this Methods Workshop, where we will discuss mapping techniques for scholars of the transatlantic slave trade. It will open with a discussion of addressing the Eurocentricity of geospatial techniques and the archives. We will then discuss strategies for reading against the archive to locate Black voices and strategies for determining geospatial coordinates from primary sources. Finally, the workshop will conclude with a demonstration of how to create maps in Tableau and some discussion of data ethics.

Please apply for a place if you would like to attend, on registration, you will be asked to complete and submit an information form (which will remain open until 10 am Monday, 14 February 2022), places are limited and selected on a rolling basis, we would suggest early completion.  We will confirm participation week commencing Monday, 21 February 2022.

Text-mining is extracting information from unstructured text, such as books, newspapers, and manuscript transcriptions. This foundational course is aimed at students and staff new to text-mining. It presents a basic introduction to text-mining principles and methods, with coding examples and exercises in Python. To discuss the process, we will walk through a simple example of collecting, cleaning and analysing a text.

If you are interested in attending this course, please request a place and complete the application form, submitting it by the end of Monday, 7 March 2022. Successful applicants will be notified by the end-of-day Thursday, 10 March 2022. Preparatory materials will be released on Thursday, 17 March 2022. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. However, if you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches, you are also welcome to apply.

Text-mining is extracting information from unstructured text, such as books, newspapers, and manuscript transcriptions. This foundational course is aimed at students and staff who are new to text-mining, and presents a basic introduction to text-mining principles and methods, with coding examples and exercises in Python. To discuss the process, we will walk through a simple example of collecting, cleaning and analysing a text.

If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in, and return, the application form by Monday, 22 February 2021. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Ann Borda as a guest lecturer for this CDH Methods Workshop. Ann is the Participatory Health Lead in the Co-design Living Lab for Digital Health in the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health at the University of Melbourne. She is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London, and sits on the policy committee of the Climate and Health Alliance. Ann formerly held collaborative positions in JISC and at the Science Museum London. Her research spans living lab and citizen science methods, and emerging participatory practices in digital health and culture.

There is an increasing presence in research incorporating participatory approaches to the production of knowledge. Participatory research is a range of methods framed within ideological perspectives. Its fundamental principles are that the subjects of the research become involved as partners in the process of the enquiry, and enacted through a set of social values. Participation can be classified by various degrees of involvement. Participatory activities can be expressed through various methods and approaches, such as co-design, citizen science, crowdsourcing, living labs, participatory action research and community-based participatory research, among others.

The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative https://tei-c.org/) is a standard for the transcription and description of text bearing objects, and is very widely used in the digital humanities – from digital editions and manuscript catalogues to text mining and linguistic analysis. This course will take you through the basics of the TEI – what it is and what it can be used for – with a particular focus on uses in research, paths to publication (both web and print) and the use of TEI documents as a dataset for analysis. There will be a chance to create some TEI yourself as well as looking at existing projects and examples. The course will take place over two sessions a week apart – with an introductory taught session, then a chance to work on TEI records yourself, followed by a review and discussion session.

Code in research helps to automate the collection, analysis or visualisation of data. Although the code may fulfil your research objective, you might have wondered how to improve it, code more efficiently, or make it ready for collaboration and sharing. Perhaps you have experienced challenges with debugging or understanding it.

In this intermediate workshop, we will introduce several coding design principles and practices that ensure code is reliable, reusable and understandable, enabling participants to take their code to the next level.

The workshop will begin by introducing the key concepts using ample examples. Participants will then work in groups to apply the concepts either to code provided by the convenor or to their existing projects, with guidance from the convenor. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss their project goals with the convenor to demonstrate how the best practices can be implemented during the coding process.

This workshop is for individuals who have some prior experience with Python and who, ideally, have a coding project that they wish to work on. Participants are encouraged to arrive with a specific objective or desired output for their coding project. For example, you might wish to pre-process your data, add a specific analysis to your project, or make your code publicly available.

This workshop is a very basic introduction to network analysis for humanities scholars. It will introduce the concepts of networks, nodes, edges, directed and weighted networks, bi- and multi-partite networks. It will give an overview of the kinds of things that can be thought about through a network framework, as well as some things that can’t. And it will introduce key theories, including weak ties, and small worlds. There will be an activity where participants will build their own test data set that they can then visualise. In the second half of the workshop we will cover some networks metrics including various centrality measures, clustering coefficient, community detection algorithms. It will include an activity introducing one basic web-based tool that allows you to run some of these algorithms and will provide suggestions for routes forward with other tools and coding libraries that allows quantitative analysis.

Attendees should bring their own laptops.

Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History & Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, and is currently leading two large AHRC-funded projects: Living with Machines, and Networking Archives. She is author of The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (2013), and co-author of Tudor Networks of Power, and The Network Turn (both forthcoming).

We are running a focus group to try out Gale Digital Scholar Lab, an online platform of Digital Humanities tools for organising and analysing the historical texts in their archive. Gale representatives will demo the capabilities of the Lab and give you a practical opportunity to build your own corpus and do some analysis and visualisation (without writing a line of code). You will have a chance to feedback your opinions and research needs, and discuss broader issues of how these sorts of tools might fit in with your Digital Humanities research, and the role of private sector providers in the provision of tools and resources to researchers.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab will be available to participants in advance of the focus group. A link will be sent to participants by email. Refreshments and light lunch will be provided. Please bring your own laptop.

Optical Character Recognition is a term used to describe techniques for converting images containing printed or handwritten text into a format that can be searched and analysed computationally. This workshop will introduce several such tools along with some practical techniques for using them, and will also highlight OCR and related services offered by the Digital Content Unit at the Cambridge University Library.

After the fantastic success of our last Wikipedia edit-a-thon in May, we are once again calling on the expertise of students and staff here at Cambridge to bring underrepresented histories ‘out of the shadows’ and into the light on Wikipedia.

No prior Wiki experience is required! We will host an online training session at 11am on 15 November to get you set up.

On 22 November we will host our edit-a-thon at the University Library. This will be a drop-in event where you can access support throughout the day to help improve and expand Wikipedia’s content. Hosted jointly by Doing History in Public, Cambridge University Libraries, and Cambridge Digital Humanities, with the assistance of Wikimedia UK's 'Connected Heritage Team', we hope to get as many new pages created and edits made as possible. Those who can join us for the day on 22 November will receive a free voucher to use in the UL Tea Room on the day!

If you cannot be in Cambridge on 22 November, we will do our best to enable you to interact remotely. You can also follow updates on Twitter via the hashtag #OOTSwiki.

An introduction to audio recording and editing aimed at students and staff interested in learning how podcasting can help disseminate research.

This CDH Basics session will see discussion on how to assess the impact of relevant legal frameworks, including data protection, intellectual property and media law, on your digital research project and consider what approach researchers should take to the terms of service of third-party digital platforms. We will explore the challenge of informed consent in a highly-networked world and look at a range of strategies for dealing with this problem.

What happens to the practice of qualitative research when interactions between researcher and research subject are largely mediated. This session will explore a wide range of topics including the challenge of consent, researcher presence and ‘lurking’ in mediated settings, how to engage with digital gatekeepers, information security for researchers, and understanding the impact of digital platform architecture on qualitative research design.

Across two sessions, participants will be introduced to the ancient yet evolving practices of commonplace-book keeping and the ‘modernised’ digital tools and methods for extracting, indexing, sustaining and networking knowledge fragments from personal notes, anthologies and archives for idea generation. Commonplacing—manifest as the classical vade mecums (‘come with me’ book of phrases for rhetors), the early-modern scholar’s indexed bodies of learnings, the eighteenth-century domestic commonplace books of culinary and medicinal recipes and nineteenth-century collaborative records of readings—is as much a method for knowledge compilation as a way to structure collective (and ‘re-collected’) thoughts. The commonplace book’s modern afterlife may be traced in the Zettelkasten method and micro-blogging sites like Tumblr, which facilitate the systematic storage and dispersal of quotations and other media.

The interactive sessions will draw upon the theoretical underpinning of commonplacing as a productive ideation approach as well as new digital tools of translating atomised ‘commonplaces’ (and metadata) into network graphs and databases for visualising potentially hidden connections for research and pedagogy.

This CDHBasics session looks at how searching and finding technologies structure scholarship. It also covers

• an introduction to search engines, both for web search and custom search functions within collections;
• discussion about OCR errors and blindspots in digital search in historical collections
• problems of fragmentation of the source text, and the legacy of pre-digital formats such as microfilm.

Convenor: Dr Giulia Grisot (Cambridge Digital Humanities)

This workshop will delve into the intricacies of sentiment analysis using R, offering participants a comprehensive understanding of this text mining technique and a chance to gain hands-on experience with sentiment scoring methodologies and advanced sentiment visualisation. Designed for intermediate R users, this session aims to equip attendees with the requisite skills to extract nuanced insights from textual data through the lens of R programming. You will need your own laptop.

Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk).

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an exciting and rapidly growing methodology. You will find researchers in almost every faculty at the University of Cambridge applying SNA methods within their research. However, SNA researchers can only go so far before they must learn a coding language. Many SNA tools- descriptive metrics, visualisation techniques, and mathematical models- require researchers to use R. This session is for those researchers interested in SNA methods, but lack experience in the R environment.

While network visualisation is just one component of SNA, data visualisation can be a great gateway into a new programming language. This session will introduce you to the R environment by leading you through the creation of static network diagrams. The session is directed at beginners and basic R users that want to explore SNA tools in R.

This course will provide a hands-on introduction to the field of Social Network Analysis, giving participants the opportunity to “learn by doing” the process of network data collection and analysis. After being introduced to the basic concepts, the participants will have the opportunity to explore all stages of a social network analysis project, including research design, essential measures, data collection and data analysis. The focus will be on the retrieval of electronic archival data (e.g. websites, digital archives and social media platforms) for non-programmers and on the production of network analysis with specialised software (e.g. Gephi). At the end, the participants will be equipped with the basic tools to perform meaningful visualisations and analyses of network data.

This CDHBasics session focuses on the importance of metadata (‘data about data’), examining the crucial role played by classification systems and standards in shaping how scholars interact with historical and cultural records.

We are currently reformatting our Learning programme for remote teaching; this will require some rescheduling so bookings will reopen and new sessions will be created for online courses as soon as possible. In the interim we would encourage you to register your interest so as to be notified of the new schedule. Please be aware that we hope to run many of our courses online, but that this is dependent on staff availability and resources so please be aware we may have to postpone or cancel some sessions

Archives typically hold records containing enormous quantities of data presented in a variety of scribal and print formats. Extracting this information has traditionally involved long hours of expensive manual data-entry work. Nowadays this work can be automated to a large degree and could soon open archives and allow for unprecedentedly large structured data sets for curators, researchers, and the public alike. This workshop will examine new methods for collecting historical data from manuscript and printed documents. We will look at archival photography, OCR, page structure recognition, and new handwritten text recognition systems. Cutting-edge Cambridge research in this field will be demonstrated.

This workshop will examine database creation from historical documents. Extracting data from these can be hard work and involves quite unusual skill combinations. You may need to digitise and transcribe from primary sources, and then design and build a database from scratch with the information. Other sources you use could already be digitised but may be arranged or filed in an unsuitable way for your project and therefore need conversion. We will look at techniques used when employing crumbling manuscripts, printed documents, books, or text searchable images, to harvest historical data. Techniques include manual data-entry, scanning and OCR, and handwritten text recognition systems.

Letters have been for centuries the main form of communication between scientists. Correspondence collections are a unique window into the social networks of prominent historical figures. What can digital social sciences and humanities reveal about the correspondence networks of 19th century scientists? This two-session intensive workshop will give participants the opportunity to explore possible answers to this question.

With the digitisation and encoding of personal letters, researchers have at their disposal a wealth of relational data, which we propose to study through social network analysis (SNA). The workshop will be divided in two sessions during which participants will “learn by doing” how to apply SNA to personal correspondence datasets. Following a guided project framework, participants will work on the correspondence collections of John Herschel and Charles Darwin. After a contextual introduction to the datasets, the sessions will focus on the basic concepts of SNA, data transformation and preparation, data visualisation and data analysis, with particular emphasis on “ego network” measures.

The two demonstration datasets used during the workshop will be provided by the Epsilon project, a research consortium between Cambridge Digital Library, The Royal Institution and The Royal Society of London aimed at building a collaborative digital framework for 19th century letters of science. The first dataset, the “Calendar of the Correspondence of Sir John Hershel Database at the Adler Planetarium”, is a collection of the personal correspondence of John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871), a polymath celebrated for his contributions to the field of astronomy. Its curation process started in the 50s at the Royal Society and currently comprises 14.815 digitised letters encoded in extensible markup language (.xml) format. The second dataset, the “Darwin Correspondence Project” has been locating, researching, editing and publishing Charles Darwin’s letters since 1974. In addition to a 30-volume print edition, the project has also made letters available in .xml format.

The workshop will provide a step-by-step guide to analysing correspondence networks from these collections, which will cover:

About the speakers and course facilitators:

Anne Alexander is Director of Learning at Cambridge Digital Humanities

Hugo Leal is Methods Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities and Co-ordinator of the Cambridge Data School

Louisiane Ferlier is Digital Resources Manager at the Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. In her current role she facilitates research collaborations with the Royal Society collections, curates digital and physical exhibitions, as well as augmenting its portfolio of digital assets. A historian of ideas by training, her research investigates the material and intellectual circulation of ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Elizabeth Smith is the Associate Editor for Digital Development at the Darwin Correspondence Project, where she contributed to the conversion of the Project’s work into TEI several years ago, and has since been collaborating with the technical director in enhancing the Darwin Project’s data. She is one of the co-ordinators of Epsilon, a TEI-based portal for nineteenth-century science letters.

No knowledge of prior knowledge of programming is required, instructions on software to install will be sent out before the workshop. Some exercises and preparation for the second session will be set during the first and participants should allow 2-3 hours for this. Please note, priority will be given to staff and students at the University of Cambridge for booking onto this workshop.

CDH Learning gratefully acknowledges the support of the Isaac Newton Trust and the Faculty of History for this workshop.