All Cambridge Digital Humanities courses

This workshop will examine strategies for transforming a variety of sources into structured digital data, ranging from crumbling manuscripts to printed documents and books.

Leonardo Impett, Cambridge Digital Humanities

Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Friday 22 May 2020. Successful applicants will be notified by 26 May 2020.

This course will introduce graduate students, early-career researchers, and professionals in the humanities to the technologies of image recognition and machine vision, including recent developments in machine vision research in the past half-decade. The course will seek to combine a technical understanding of how machine vision systems work, with a detailed understanding of the possibilities they open to research and study in the humanities, and with a critical exploration of the social, political and ideological dimensions of machine vision.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Understand the basic tasks of machine vision, such as Image Classification, Object Detection, Image-to-Image Translation, Image Captioning, Image Segmentation etc.
• Understand the fundamental technical operations of image processing and machine vision: the pixel encoding of images, Gaussian and convolutional filters,
• Explore critical aspects of machine vision in a technically-informed way: e.g. the problems in algorithmic bias brought about by featureless convolutional networks
• Develop and run their own simple machine vision and image processing pipelines, in a visual programming language compiling to Python
• Understand the potential synergies and limitations of machine vision applications in humanities research and cultural heritage institutions

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.

Garbage in, garbage out! Your output is as good or as bad as your input. Data collected from online sources is often dirty and messy. Discover how to clean and organise your data. After transforming raw data into a structured dataset, you will be ready to perform data analysis.

Application forms https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/file/cdhdelvingintomassivedaapplicationdocx should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Tuesday 6 October 2020. Successful applicants will be notified by Thursday 8 October 2020.

Massive digital archives such as the Internet Archive offer researchers tantalising possibilities for the recovery of lost, forgotten and neglected literary texts. Yet the reality can be very frustrating due to limitations in the design of the archives and the tools available for exploring them. This programme supports researchers in understanding the issues they are likely to encounter and developing practical methods for delving into massive digital archives.

Following the introductory Methods Workshops, held on 21st November 2023, this session will focus on how to adopt the principles to the projects chosen by the participants. This will cover learning a practical approach to taking images fit for purpose in any conditions with available resources. It may also address any more advanced imaging topics such as image stitching, Optical Character Recognition, Multispectral Imaging, or photogrammetry if these are in the interest of the participants. It will also be an opportunity to visit the Digital Content Unit at Cambridge University Library.

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.

This session is a primer on digital data collection. The goal is to become familiar with online data sources and practices of internet-mediated data collection, including retrieving data from social media platforms.

The shelf-life of your dataset dictates the longevity of your findings. Sharing your data and assuring its integrity is a fundamental part of a digital research project. In this session we will discuss the principles of open data, channels for data dissemination and the fundamentals of data preservation.

This intensive workshop will provide an overview of a range of applications of digital mapping in historical research projects and introduce GIS tools and software.

This CDHBasics session explores the lifecycle of a digital research project across the stages of design;

• data capture
• transformation
• analysis
• presentation and preservation

it also introduces tactics for embedding ethical research principles and practices at each stage of the research process.

Find out how to shape a digital research project from scratch. This session will introduce the building blocks of online research design, from the several methodologies available to conduct the research to the ethical guidelines that should underpin our projects.

What happens to practices of qualitative research when interactions between researcher and research subject are largely mediated? From observations of users’ interactions on social media platforms, to interviews conducted through WhatsApp or Skype, digital communications offer both opportunities and challenges for qualitative research in a wide range of disciplines across the Social Sciences and Humanities. This methods workshop will explore a wide range of topics including:

• Establishing trust and credibility
• Engaging with digital gatekeepers
• Navigating blurred boundaries between ‘private’ and ‘public’
• Re-conceptualising ‘researchers’, the ‘research field’ and ‘ research subjects’
• Identity, anonymity and visibility - implications for research practice
• Mitigation strategies: from data parsimony to creative obfuscation
• Self-care for researchers in online research
• Embedding ethical research practice across the project lifecycle

The workshop will take place over two sessions, an introductory seminar and discussion led by Dr Anne Alexander on 1 February, after which participants will be asked to complete a short reflective piece of work assessing their own research design and identifying areas where they feel they need further help and advice. The second session on 8 February will be participant led including small group and plenary discussions exploring strategies for dealing with challenges identified by participants.

Participants should set aside around 1 hour between the two sessions to complete and submit their self-assessment.

Participants are strongly encouraged to attend the CDH Basics session Privacy, information security and consent: a guide for researchers with Dr Anne Alexander on 26 January in advance of the Methods Workshop.

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.

Dr Nathan Crilly and Chih-Chun Chen explore the challenges of communicating complex ideas to diverse audiences through a variety of digital media formats. Three case studies will be reported from an EPSRC-funded research project which sought to clarify and communicate the nature of complex system design and its relationship to emerging technologies. For example, the project studied the way in which technologists working in Synthetic Biology and Swarm Robotics conceptualise and address the complexity of the systems they are designing. Outputs from the project include: • A 35-page ‘primer’ on the subject of complexity (now with over 6000 downloads) • A three-minute animated movie discussing the subjectivity of complexity (now with 2500 views) • An interactive website (implemented by Dr Chen since she has programming skills) that generates annotated bibliographies for complexity resources tailored to a user’s interests (launched in March 2019) Dr Crilly and Dr Chih-Chun will discuss the process of engaging with media partners, including working with science communication agencies, animators and film-makers, reflect on what they learned from the process and what they would do differently in future.

Learn to think visually and communicate using sound and film: participants will be introduced to the language of film, shot types, camera movements, framing, basic rules of camera use, how to tell a story, and editing in the Phoenix Training Suite.

Learn to think visually and to communicate using sound and film. Participants will be introduced to the language of film, shot types, camera movements, framing, basic rules of camera use, how to tell a story, and editing. Some prior knowledge of filming is required. Please see the CDH website for more details (www.cdh.cam.ac.uk).

This CDH Basics session is aimed at researchers who have never done any coding before. We will explore basic principles and approaches to writing and adapting code, using the popular programming language Python as a case study. Participants will also gain familiarity with using Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application which allows users to create and share documents containing live code alongside visualisations and narrative text.

Convenor: Dr Estara Arrant (Cambridge University Library)

This session is aimed at researchers with minimal coding experience or who have not done any coding but have data they want to explore and visualise. However, you do not need to have a full set of data to benefit from this class. You will learn the fundamentals of conducting a basic analysis of Humanities-related data in the R language, including prepping and tidying data and generating useful graphs which communicate information about your research to others.  You will also gain a basic overview of the R programming language, which will provide you with principles that you can take forward to learn more advanced data analysis methods. The software we will use (RStudio) is free to download and is compatible with most computers. We will provide installation support and guidance. You will need your own laptop.

Please note this workshop has limited spaces, and an pre-course questionnaire is in place. Please complete before the session.

Version control helps you to write code for your research more sustainably and collaboratively, in line with best practices for open research. You might use code for collecting, analysing or visualising your data or something else. Everyone who codes in some way can benefit from learning about version control for their daily workflow.

This workshop will cover the importance of version control when developing code and foster a culture of best practices in FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) code development. We will take you through the basic use of GitHub to help you store, manage, and track changes to your code and develop code collaboratively with others.

Designed with beginners in mind, this workshop caters to those who have not yet delved into Git or GitHub. While prior knowledge of a programming language (e.g., R or Python) would be beneficial, it is not a prerequisite.

Blogging as a digital means of research communication seems so simple: with free, easy-to-use platforms we’re all just a few clicks away from setting one up. But having set a blog up, the difficult work begins. Who are you talking to? What are you trying to achieve? How will you generate your content? How will the people you want to talk to find it? How are you going to keep it going alongside your research and teaching commitments? Will it make any difference to anything? And will you ever be able to transform any of this work into a scholarly publication that ‘counts’?

This session will be an interactive conversation between Julie Blake, Cambridge Digital Humanities Methods Fellow and Connie Ruzich, University Professor of English at Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, USA. Connie’s Behind Their Lines blog started in 2014 during a Fulbright Scholarship at Exeter University to research First World War poetry in the context of the Centenary Commemorations. She became interested in the lost and neglected poetry of the First World War and began blogging about her ‘finds’. Five years later, she has had almost 400,000 visits to her blog, she maintains a lively dialogue with public and academic audiences including via Twitter and she is in the final stages of completing a monograph about this material with Bloomsbury Academic.

We’ll discuss the highs and lows of Connie’s research blogging experience, the surprises, the pitfalls and the lessons learned by hard won experience. We’ll try to answer all the questions listed above, and participants will be invited to join in with their own questions.

Speaker: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Stanford Literary Lab.

About this Methods workshop

At the heart of many of the current computational models of language usage, from generative A.I. to recommendation engines, are large language models that relate hundreds of thousands, or millions, of words to each other based on shared contexts. Mysterious products of complex modelling algorithms, these objects raise a number of practical (and ethical) questions for Humanities scholars: How are these language models created? What kinds of relationships does their math encode? How do biases in the corpus affect the model? And how can we effectively use them to answer humanities-based questions?

In this workshop, we will explore these questions using a medium-sized language embedding model trained on a corpus of novels. Using approachable code in the R software environment, participants will learn how to manipulate a model, assess similarities and difference within it, visualise relationships between words and even train their own embeddings.

Emma Reay is a third-year PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge and an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University. Her current project explores depictions of children in videogames, and her research interests include representation studies, children's digital media, gaming and education, and playful activism.

Adam Dixon is a game designer and writer who makes both physical and digital games. He has worked on everything from big public games that involve running around cities to narrative video games about learning scientific skills. Much of his work has involved working with museums and research organisations such as the Wellcome Trust, Science Museum, Nottingham Trent University and the V&A. This has included designing games, using play for public research engagement and most recently, teaching teenagers to create digital games for Wellcome Collection’s Play Well exhibition. Outside of that he works and releases his own games including roleplaying games, LARPs and interactive fiction.

Applications https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/file/cdhgamedesign201920applicationdocx-0 should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Wednesday 10 June 2020. Successful applicants will be notified by 15 June 2020.

This online course 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. Examples will focus on game design in research-related contexts, including using games as part of your research process and to communicate research outcomes to diverse audiences.

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 sessions.

Topics covered:

• Game design basics
• A chance to play and consider thoughtful games
• Boxing in
• Planning games
• Making games
• Bitsy and Twine
• Playtesting and iteration

Format

The course will be delivered online, with live teaching sessions taking place on Zoom.

• Weds 17 June, 4pm BST: Introduction (45 minutes)
• Weds 24 June, 4pm BST: Game play feedback (45 minutes)
• Weds 1 July, 4pm BST: Game design seminar (45 minutes)
• Weds 15 July, 4pm BST: Final session (60 minutes with break)

A CRASSH blog post was created for the originally scheduled session which may be of interest to read and can be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/Play-as-Research-Practice

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 workshop will discuss prospective methods and approaches for critically engaging with the images of people created through Generative Adversarial Networks, using design experiments as provocations to expand debate about notions of ‘realism’ and ‘authenticity’ in an era where human and machine vision are ever more systematically intertwined.