Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable

This two-day intensive workshop will introduce participants to the practice of game design. It will explore the different ways that digital and analogue games are designed, particularly how you can design with intent to communicate a mood, theme or message. Participants will learn game design skills - such as boxing-in, design documents and prototyping – alongside opportunities to test them out by creating their own short games.

The sessions focus on game design, how to shape mechanics and play experiences, so no technical skills are needed. Participants will create their short games using both non-digital tools and simple, free software that will be taught in the session.

The course participants will be selected via an application process, once a provisional place is booked a call for application form will be issued for completion and return by 1 November 2019. Once the applications are reviewed, places will be confirmed directly in the week beginning 18 November 2019.

This two-day intensive workshop will introduce participants to the practice of game design. It will explore the different ways that digital and analogue games are designed, particularly how you can design with intent to communicate a mood, theme or message. Participants will learn game design skills - such as boxing-in, design documents and prototyping – alongside opportunities to test them out by creating their own short games.

The sessions focus on game design, how to shape mechanics and play experiences, so no technical skills are needed. Participants will create their short games using both non-digital tools and simple, free software that will be taught in the session.

The course participants will be selected via an application process, once a provisional place is booked a call for application form will be issued for completion and return by 1 November 2019. Once the applications are reviewed, places will be confirmed directly in the week beginning 18 November 2019.

This session explores the lifecycle of a digital research project, across the stages of design, data capture, transformation, analysis, presentation and preservation, and introduces tactics for embedding ethical research principles and practices at each stage of the research process. We discuss 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.

Please note: this session covers the same content as The Ethics of Data Collection and Use in the Social Sciences Research Methods Programme. Students eligible to attend SSRMP are therefore requested not to book this session (though they are welcome to attend other sessions in this course), and instead to book here https://www.training.cam.ac.uk/jsss/course/ssrmc-ethicdaus

This session addresses the technical and ethical aspects of digital data collection and wrangling – two fundamental stages in the lifecycle of a digital research project. Participants will be introduced to online data sources and practices of internet-mediated data collection, including retrieving data from social media platforms. As data collected from online sources is often dirty and messy, we will also provide a short practical introduction to the process of transforming raw data into a clean and structured dataset using free and open-source software.

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.

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).

The afterlife of your research data forms a vitally important part of your research project. Research funders and academic journal publishers are often strongly committed to the re-use of data and are reluctant to fund or publish research where datasets are not accessible for the purposes of peer review or further use. Yet the push for open data exists in tension with the expectations of data protection law which requires transparency from researchers about how long they will retain personal data. This session will explore good practice in data sharing and archiving as well as introducing sources of further information and advice within the University on this topic.

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 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.

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.

Tutors: Sarah McEvoy / Kostas Chondros

Are you curious about making a short documentary film?

This beginner’s filmmaking workshop will help you to start thinking visually and communicate using sound and film. Over two days you will be introduced to different camera shot types, how to construct a basic story, use digital video cameras and sound recorders to shoot your own footage, and then edit a short sequence for export.

The workshop assumes no or very little prior knowledge of filmmaking and no prior preparation is required for the workshop. This is a hands-on practical workshop, working in small teams of two or three people. We expect a willingness to be open to ideas and work in a team to jointly create a short film clip.

The workshop will give you the foundational skills to incorporate film and sound in your own future projects, for example short clips for social media, publicity about research projects as a way to engage wider audiences etc.

During the workshop you will work with dedicated video equipment, but the techniques you will learn can be adapted to film making with smartphones, tablets and other readily available personal electronic devices.

COURSE PROGRAMME

Day 1 – Monday 17th February

• 10.00 Welcome and introductions
• 10.30 Aims of the session
• 10.45 Introduction to shot types, camera movements, framing, telling a story, basic rules of camera use, rules of recording sound
• 11.45 Splitting into groups – interactive demonstration of how to use the cameras
• 13.00 Lunch
• 14.00 Filming around Cambridge, practical exercise working in groups
• 16.00 Return to room to look at footage from all groups
• 17.00 Feedback session and summary of day 1 intro to day 2

Day 2 – Tuesday 18th February

We will be working on apple macs and Final Cut X; however we do not expect any prior knowledge of working with either computer or software

• 10.00 Importing footage onto computers
• 10.15 Basic editing, creating a 2-minute clip, summary of creating a sequence
• 10.45 Adding clips to timeline, tools for manipulating clips, using second video track, transitions and filters, syncing audio
• 13.00 Lunch
• 14.00 Credits, titles, adjusting audio levels, adding music or narration, exporting footage, saving files
• 16.00 Looking at each other’s edited clips
• 16.45 Evaluation
• 17.00 Finish

Handouts will be emailed after the workshop, and include:

Presentation – shot types, how to construct a sequence Editing on Final Cut x Camera functions, audio recording, info about equipment and editing software and model release forms

What you need to take with you

Headphones – preferably the kind you can plug in rather than Bluetooth headphones

Storage device – if you want to take footage you shoot with you after the workshop, you will need a hard drive, USB or SD card that can hold at least 8GB. Video files are large. Please make sure that the device is formatted to FAT32 if you use it on a PC, as we will be using macs. You can check this by right clicking the device and checking the properties. If you prefer, you don’t need to save the footage that you film and can also upload the exported film to Dropbox.

Upon booking this workshop a questionnaire will be issued to participants which must be completed in order to satisfy the booking.

The workshop is led by:

Sarah McEvoy holds BA Hons Fine Art and an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths University of London and has most recently completed an MA in Art and Design in Education at UCL Institute of Education. Sarah has worked with arts organisations and charities creating short documentaries and has most recently filmed and edited a film working with a socially engaged artist in the community of South East London. As an artist-educator, Sarah works with youth groups and adults with learning disabilities in the community and museums and galleries.

Kostas Chondros holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He also holds an MA in Social Exclusion, Minorities & Gender from Panteion University and a BA in Social Anthropology & History from the University of the Aegean, Greece. Since joining the Personal Histories film production team in 2011, Kostas has filmed several events and taught camera & film production skills. Additionally, as a freelance filmmaker, Kostas documents improvised music performances and collaborates on film projects with other artists and performers. He is also a musician, poet and translator.

Tutors: Sarah McEvoy / Kostas Chondros

Are you curious about making a short documentary film?

This beginner’s filmmaking workshop will help you to start thinking visually and communicate using sound and film. Over two days you will be introduced to different camera shot types, how to construct a basic story, use digital video cameras and sound recorders to shoot your own footage, and then edit a short sequence for export.

The workshop assumes no or very little prior knowledge of filmmaking and no prior preparation is required for the workshop. This is a hands-on practical workshop, working in small teams of two or three people. We expect a willingness to be open to ideas and work in a team to jointly create a short film clip.

The workshop will give you the foundational skills to incorporate film and sound in your own future projects, for example short clips for social media, publicity about research projects as a way to engage wider audiences etc.

During the workshop you will work with dedicated video equipment, but the techniques you will learn can be adapted to film making with smartphones, tablets and other readily available personal electronic devices.

COURSE PROGRAMME

Day 1 – Monday 17th February

• 10.00 Welcome and introductions
• 10.30 Aims of the session
• 10.45 Introduction to shot types, camera movements, framing, telling a story, basic rules of camera use, rules of recording sound
• 11.45 Splitting into groups – interactive demonstration of how to use the cameras
• 13.00 Lunch
• 14.00 Filming around Cambridge, practical exercise working in groups
• 16.00 Return to room to look at footage from all groups
• 17.00 Feedback session and summary of day 1 intro to day 2

Day 2 – Tuesday 18th February

We will be working on apple macs and Final Cut X; however we do not expect any prior knowledge of working with either computer or software

• 10.00 Importing footage onto computers
• 10.15 Basic editing, creating a 2-minute clip, summary of creating a sequence
• 10.45 Adding clips to timeline, tools for manipulating clips, using second video track, transitions and filters, syncing audio
• 13.00 Lunch
• 14.00 Credits, titles, adjusting audio levels, adding music or narration, exporting footage, saving files
• 16.00 Looking at each other’s edited clips
• 16.45 Evaluation
• 17.00 Finish

Handouts will be emailed after the workshop, and include:

Presentation – shot types, how to construct a sequence Editing on Final Cut x Camera functions, audio recording, info about equipment and editing software and model release forms

What you need to take with you

Headphones – preferably the kind you can plug in rather than Bluetooth headphones

Storage device – if you want to take footage you shoot with you after the workshop, you will need a hard drive, USB or SD card that can hold at least 8GB. Video files are large. Please make sure that the device is formatted to FAT32 if you use it on a PC, as we will be using macs. You can check this by right clicking the device and checking the properties. If you prefer, you don’t need to save the footage that you film and can also upload the exported film to Dropbox.

Upon booking this workshop a questionnaire will be issued to participants which must be completed in order to satisfy the booking.

The workshop is led by:

Sarah McEvoy holds BA Hons Fine Art and an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths University of London and has most recently completed an MA in Art and Design in Education at UCL Institute of Education. Sarah has worked with arts organisations and charities creating short documentaries and has most recently filmed and edited a film working with a socially engaged artist in the community of South East London. As an artist-educator, Sarah works with youth groups and adults with learning disabilities in the community and museums and galleries.

Kostas Chondros holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He also holds an MA in Social Exclusion, Minorities & Gender from Panteion University and a BA in Social Anthropology & History from the University of the Aegean, Greece. Since joining the Personal Histories film production team in 2011, Kostas has filmed several events and taught camera & film production skills. Additionally, as a freelance filmmaker, Kostas documents improvised music performances and collaborates on film projects with other artists and performers. He is also a musician, poet and translator.

This programme is an opportunity to learn, through practical experience and shared investigation, how to apply digital methods for exploring and analysing a body of archival texts. The core of the programme will be 5 x 2 hour classroom based sessions supplemented by group and individual work on tasks related to the project design, delivery and documentation in between sessions. In addition to attending all five face-to-face sessions, participants should set aside an additional 8-10 hours over the duration of the course for work on project-related tasks.

During the programme we’ll work together on a particular topic: how insects were represented in books created for children in the 19th century. This question will help us to think about how children’s encounters with the natural world might have been framed and shaped by their reading. We’ll work on digital collections of 19th century children’s books exploring how such collections are built and how they can be used for machine reading. We’ll develop specific research questions and you’ll learn how to explore them using different tools for textual stylistic analysis. At the end, we’ll present findings and consider the implications of what we’ve discovered.

Topics covered include;

• The development of methods for machine reading the archive – ideas, motivations and ethics • Children’s books of the long 19th century – a beginner’s guide • Designing a small-scale investigation • Building a collection of digital texts • Transforming texts into searchable data • Analysing stylistic patterns in the data

This online session will introduce basic methods for reading and processing text files in Python with Jupyter Notebooks. We'll discuss why you might wish to do text-mining, and whether coding with Python is the right choice for you. We'll run through the 5 steps of text-mining, and start to walk through an example that reads in a text corpus, splits it into words and sentences (tokens), removes unwanted words (stopwords), counts the tokens (frequency analysis), and visualises results.

This initial session is one hour long and will be delivered remotely by video conferencing. During the session we will cover the essentials of working with the Jupyter Notebooks provided so that you can carry on working through the materials in your own time. The first session will be followed by a second, optional Q&A session for troubleshooting issues and recapping essentials.

Required preparation: A short internet-based exercise in working with variables and text in Python will be sent out one week prior to the session. You will also get instructions on how to find the materials we will be using and how to log onto the video conferencing platform. Please make sure you have some time to prepare properly so that we can concentrate on teaching during the remote session.

This programme is an opportunity to learn, through practical experience and shared investigation, how to apply digital methods for exploring and analysing a body of archival texts. The core of the programme will be 5 x 2 hour classroom based sessions supplemented by group and individual work on tasks related to the project design, delivery and documentation in between sessions. In addition to attending all five face-to-face sessions, participants should set aside an additional 8-10 hours over the duration of the course for work on project-related tasks.

During the programme we’ll work together on a particular topic: how insects were represented in books created for children in the 19th century. This question will help us to think about how children’s encounters with the natural world might have been framed and shaped by their reading. We’ll work on digital collections of 19th century children’s books exploring how such collections are built and how they can be used for machine reading. We’ll develop specific research questions and you’ll learn how to explore them using different tools for textual stylistic analysis. At the end, we’ll present findings and consider the implications of what we’ve discovered.

Topics covered include;

• The development of methods for machine reading the archive – ideas, motivations and ethics • Children’s books of the long 19th century – a beginner’s guide • Designing a small-scale investigation • Building a collection of digital texts • Transforming texts into searchable data • Analysing stylistic patterns in the data

This online session will introduce basic methods for reading and processing text files in Python with Jupyter Notebooks. We'll discuss why you might wish to do text-mining, and whether coding with Python is the right choice for you. We'll run through the 5 steps of text-mining, and start to walk through an example that reads in a text corpus, splits it into words and sentences (tokens), removes unwanted words (stopwords), counts the tokens (frequency analysis), and visualises results.

This initial session is one hour long and will be delivered remotely by video conferencing. During the session we will cover the essentials of working with the Jupyter Notebooks provided so that you can carry on working through the materials in your own time. The first session will be followed by a second, optional Q&A session for troubleshooting issues and recapping essentials.

Required preparation: A short internet-based exercise in working with variables and text in Python will be sent out one week prior to the session. You will also get instructions on how to find the materials we will be using and how to log onto the video conferencing platform. Please make sure you have some time to prepare properly so that we can concentrate on teaching during the remote session.

This programme is an opportunity to learn, through practical experience and shared investigation, how to apply digital methods for exploring and analysing a body of archival texts. The core of the programme will be 5 x 2 hour classroom based sessions supplemented by group and individual work on tasks related to the project design, delivery and documentation in between sessions. In addition to attending all five face-to-face sessions, participants should set aside an additional 8-10 hours over the duration of the course for work on project-related tasks.

During the programme we’ll work together on a particular topic: how insects were represented in books created for children in the 19th century. This question will help us to think about how children’s encounters with the natural world might have been framed and shaped by their reading. We’ll work on digital collections of 19th century children’s books exploring how such collections are built and how they can be used for machine reading. We’ll develop specific research questions and you’ll learn how to explore them using different tools for textual stylistic analysis. At the end, we’ll present findings and consider the implications of what we’ve discovered.

Topics covered include;

• The development of methods for machine reading the archive – ideas, motivations and ethics • Children’s books of the long 19th century – a beginner’s guide • Designing a small-scale investigation • Building a collection of digital texts • Transforming texts into searchable data • Analysing stylistic patterns in the data

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

This workshop will develop your coding practice from testing ideas to creating an efficient workflow for your code, data and analysis. If you are using Jupyter Notebooks (but even if you’re not) this workshop will demonstrate how to better manage your code using good programming practices, and package your code into a program that is easier and quicker to run for lots of data and more reliable.

Required preparation (instructions provided): Python 3 installed on laptop; a text editor or IDE installed on laptop; git installed on laptop and signed up for GitHub; a short internet-based exercise in working with the command line.

This intensive workshop is split into two online chats and two 1-hour sessions. Participants will first learn to collect and process geospatial data from historical sources and process it using geographical information systems from Google Earth to QGIS.

The first online session introduces research techniques for collecting, arranging and mapping geospatial data from historical sources, and is taught by Dr Oliver Dunn. His session is split into two parts: Part A will introduce both online sessions by showing some of our own research that makes use of Google Earth, 3D Maps in Excel, and historical GIS. In Part B you will be asked to locate a set of Scotland’s historical lighthouses on historical maps online and map their location and other attributes in Google earth and 3D Maps.

The second online session introduces students to mapping humanities data using Q-GIS which is a free GIS (Geographical Information System) software platform. Course participants will need to download and install QGIS on their laptops before 5th of June. On the 1st of June there will be further details concerning downloading QGIS, a chat forum where we can discuss why you might wish to use GIS, and whether GIS is the right choice for you, and a release of course teaching materials. On 5 June you will be taken through the map creation process step-by-step. This session will be taught by Max Satchell.

This programme is an opportunity to learn, through practical experience and shared investigation, how to apply digital methods for exploring and analysing a body of archival texts. The core of the programme will be 5 x 2 hour classroom based sessions supplemented by group and individual work on tasks related to the project design, delivery and documentation in between sessions. In addition to attending all five face-to-face sessions, participants should set aside an additional 8-10 hours over the duration of the course for work on project-related tasks.

During the programme we’ll work together on a particular topic: how insects were represented in books created for children in the 19th century. This question will help us to think about how children’s encounters with the natural world might have been framed and shaped by their reading. We’ll work on digital collections of 19th century children’s books exploring how such collections are built and how they can be used for machine reading. We’ll develop specific research questions and you’ll learn how to explore them using different tools for textual stylistic analysis. At the end, we’ll present findings and consider the implications of what we’ve discovered.

Topics covered include;

• The development of methods for machine reading the archive – ideas, motivations and ethics • Children’s books of the long 19th century – a beginner’s guide • Designing a small-scale investigation • Building a collection of digital texts • Transforming texts into searchable data • Analysing stylistic patterns in the data

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.