Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable

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.

• Introduction to the digital project life cycle

• Ethics by design and EDI-informed data processing

• Data and metadata - definitions

• Basics of data curation (good practice in file naming, version control)

• Understanding files and folders

This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course.

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.

• Data collection methods

• Introduction to working with APIs

• Data brokerage

• Provenance and integrity

• Assessing intellectual property, copyright and Data Protection issues

• Documentation of collection methods

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.

• Structuring your data

• Cleaning messy textual data with OpenRefine

This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course

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

• EEBO,
• Github and
• The R Graph Gallery,

and coding languages and workspaces like

• R and
• R Studio.

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.

Convenor: Dr Anthony (Tony) Harris, Clare Hall

Workshop 1 – Wednesday 6 November

This workshop will cover:

• Introduction to AI Digital Tools: A history of AI (how did we get here).
• A very short introduction to neural networks and large language models (LLMS) such as ChatGPT and others. What LLMs are, how they work (and how they don’t). AI hallucinations and other stories. A survey of major AI tools in today’s humanities research space.
• Effective searching and digital researching: Effective use of Open AI ChatGPT, Google Gemini (tips & tricks) through ‘prompt engineering’. What is ‘hugging face’?
• Effective referencing and citation practices when using AI tools. A review of university guidelines/requirements.
• Hands-on practice.

About the convenor:

Anthony Harris returned to higher education in 2007 after founding and exiting from an international software business via a management buy-out. The company was the recipient of four Queen’s awards for industry and numerous other industry accolades. He subsequently read English at Oxford as a mature student, where he became interested in medieval literature and the application of the sciences to improve our understanding of early texts.

At Clare Hall Anthony is conducting research on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the humanities, further work on early mathematics and astronomy, and enhancing his publication record. He is extremely involved in the digital humanities and is a technical research officer for the Kemble Anglo-Saxon charters website on behalf of the British Academy & Royal Historical Society, is a technical research advisor for the Revised Regesta regni Hierosolymitani Database Project and has presented several conference papers in digital humanities related fields. For academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26 he will be a British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund Award Holder progressing a digital humanities manuscript research project at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In Q1 2025 he is a Fulbright all-disciplines scholar at Harvard University progressing another manuscript related digital humanities project.

This workshop is part of the Cambridge Digital Humanities events programme. View the complete programme of events here.

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.

• Principles and good practice in data visualisation

• Basic introduction to quantitative methods of data analysis

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.

This Methods Workshop will introduce advanced techniques used for the digitisation and preservation of archival material. The first workshop will introduce the following topics:

• Copyrights and sensitive data considerations
• Understanding Photography basics
• Digitisation Imaging Standards
• Scene and capture calibration
• Image post-processing
• Taking usable images in any conditions
• Principles and Digital Preservation good practice

Completing the workshop will give participants a good understanding of archival photography best practices. You will gain a strong professional vocabulary to discuss imaging and a toolkit to assess image quality.

A second session, bookable separately, will focus on how to adopt those 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.

Convenor: Dr Anthony (Tony) Harris, Clare Hall

Workshop 2 – Wednesday 13 November

This workshop will cover:

• Optimal approaches with digital resources: Hathi, Google Books, Internet Archive (if it still exists!), ChatGPT/Gemini and other AI digital resources.
• Digital capture, tips and techniques, and first steps in digital imaging. Introduction to DALL·E image creation.
• A quick look at other AI image generation and recognition tools.
• More discussions on AI Tools and websites including AI Programming tools.
• Integrating Zotero into your search and capture methodologies and avoiding ‘AI plagiarism’.
• A few notes on LLM programming tools/frameworks (PyTorch and Llama).
• Hands-on practice.

About the convenor:

Anthony Harris returned to higher education in 2007 after founding and exiting from an international software business via a management buy-out. The company was the recipient of four Queen’s awards for industry and numerous other industry accolades. He subsequently read English at Oxford as a mature student, where he became interested in medieval literature and the application of the sciences to improve our understanding of early texts.

At Clare Hall Anthony is conducting research on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the humanities, further work on early mathematics and astronomy, and enhancing his publication record. He is extremely involved in the digital humanities and is a technical research officer for the Kemble Anglo-Saxon charters website on behalf of the British Academy & Royal Historical Society, is a technical research advisor for the Revised Regesta regni Hierosolymitani Database Project and has presented several conference papers in digital humanities related fields. For academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26 he will be a British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund Award Holder progressing a digital humanities manuscript research project at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In Q1 2025 he is a Fulbright all-disciplines scholar at Harvard University progressing another manuscript related digital humanities project.

This workshop is part of the Cambridge Digital Humanities events programme. View the complete programme of events here.

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.

• Data and code sustainability

• Retention, archiving and re-use

• Data destruction

• Recap on the project life-cycle

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.

Programming Historian in English, en español, en français, and em português are four multilingual, Diamond Open Access journals of article-length lessons on digital techniques and workflows. Our lessons support students and academics to learn effective research methods, and also help educators to teach tomorrow’s researchers. This workshop will introduce you to the journals, explaining how our lessons can empower your next steps in learning the practical skills you’ll need to work with data. We'll highlight lessons that could help you practice the skills you've learned during previous sessions in the Basics series, discuss troubleshooting strategies for overcoming obstacles, and think together about the value of peer-to-peer support and building a community around you as you work. This can be attended as a standalone session or as part of the DH Basics course.

Convenor: Ali Abbas, RSE Methods Fellow

This workshop introduces students to open research practices, reproducibility using Git, and code and data publishing via GitHub. Students learn best practices for organising projects, writing clean, well-documented code, and creating reproducible analyses. Examples will be given in R and Python, but the techniques are generalisable to other languages. The importance of data transparency and sharing is highlighted, encouraging students to adopt an open research mindset.

Git will be introduced as a powerful tool for version control and collaboration. Students will learn to track changes in their code, create branches for experimentation, and merge updates. Git's role in ensuring reproducibility will be emphasised, showing how it allows researchers to maintain a complete history of their work.

Throughout the course, reproducibility is a key focus. Students learn to create self-contained project structures, use relative file paths, and document their analysis process. Using an open-source publishing system Quarto, participants will create dynamic reports that combine code, results, and narrative.

The course concludes with strategies for publishing and sharing research projects. Students learn to create GitHub Pages to showcase their work, use Zenodo to create DOIs for their code, and explore options for deploying interactive applications using tools such as Shiny.

This workshop will be most suitable for those with a bit of programming experience and who have some code and data they would like to organise and publish.

About the convenor:

Ali is a Senior Researcher at the Public Health Modelling group, which is part of the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University. He holds a doctorate in Computer Science, focusing on modelling. He has been engaged in data-driven research and development for over two decades. This encompasses exploratory data analysis (EDA), statistical modelling (or machine learning), and interactive visualisation, with a particular emphasis on collaborative, transparent, and reproducible research. His research interests include the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable transport systems that also have a positive impact on public health. Additionally, he assumes responsibility for project management, as well as the management, training, and guidance of junior staff within his unit. Moreover, he advocates for open and reproducible research, the results of which can be accessed on his GitHub page linked below.

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.

Following the introductory Methods Workshops, held on 12 November 2024, 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 participants' interest. Visiting the Cultural Heritage Image Laboratory at Cambridge University Library will also be an opportunity.

This workshop, organised in collaboration with Dr Ann Borda (Alan Turing Institute) and Semeli Hadjiloizou (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:

• Address the hidden assumptions, abilities, knowledges, and interpretations that shape how AI is represented in images and is used in image generation;
• Explore ways to make AI more accessible to different human capabilities;
• Investigate how to make AI outputs more representative of diverse populations, reflecting a broader range of lived experiences.

Convenor: Dr Estara Arrant (Cambridge University Library)

This session is aimed at researchers who have never done any coding before. We will explore basic principles and approaches to navigating and working with code, using the popular programming language Python. Participants will use the Jupyter Notebooks platform to learn how to analyse texts. This will provide participants with a working foundation in the fundamentals of coding in Humanities research. The software we will use is free to download and compatible with most computers, and we will provide support in installation and setup before the class.

Convenor: Jacob Forward, CDH Methods Fellow

Jacob will offer hands-on experience of a full research pipeline in this methods workshop, from data collection and cleaning to deploying large language models (LLMs) to uncover new insights from our textual sources.

The session will cover:

• An overview of how digital neural networks operate and how they can be effectively used in LLMs to grasp the patterns in language.
• Discover how to web-scrape text to create a dataset of primary sources you want to explore.
• Use LLMs to help generate and debug the code necessary to clean your dataset and convert it into an appropriate file type,
• Discus best practices when working with AI to produce code.
• Explore our sources by deploying LLMs in a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Discuss the merits of ‘fine-tuning’ vs RAG.

If you don’t have any experience of coding, Jacob hopes to show you just how much you are capable of, and if you have a technical background, you can look forward to pushing the boundaries of your skill.

About the convenor: Jacob is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. His research focuses on the discourse of crisis in post-Cold War American politics, specifically the language and metaphors politicians use in connection with terrorism, immigration, natural disasters, and financial shocks. His method involves fine-tuning language models on distinct corpora of political speeches, and then querying the fine-tuned models to augment his discourse analysis.

More broadly, his research interests include the dynamic between terrorism and federal authority, the debate over national security and civil liberties since 9/11, the psychology of non-literal language, and the ethics and opportunities of leveraging AI tools for humanities research.

Jacob previously read for an MPhil in American History at Cambridge (King’s College), and a BA in History at Oxford (Keble College). He has worked for History and Policy at the Institute for Historical Research and consulted on research projects at the School of Advanced Study.

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.

Convenor: Dr Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk

Do you find yourself ‘stuck’ in your research or practice because the websites that you need are not working anymore? Perhaps you’ve heard about the Internet Archive and the Wayback machine, but not sure how to use them? Are you worried about the ethics of using archived websites in your research or practice? Or are you a keen enthusiast of web preservation and a fan of the early Internet and web archives?

If any of these apply to you, or you just want to learn and share more on the topic, come and join one of the limited places to discuss the positives and challenges one can encounter when turning to media archaeology. This workshop is aimed at the beginners. Together, we will:

• Learn about /share experiences using early Internet platforms or archived websites for research or practice.
• Discuss the ethics of working with the early Internet platforms, the benefits that media archaeology can bring to different communities, as well as its limitations and the dangers.
• Discover strategies for using early Internet platforms in research and processes of anonymising users and minimising resource visibility in the dissemination of research.
• Practice analysing the data gathered using different tools.

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.