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, equipping you with the commands to perform tasks such as authorship attribution and statistical analyses of literary materials. For example, the creation of topic models and execution of word frequency analyses along with other similar methods of investigation. You will have 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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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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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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