All Cambridge Digital Humanities courses

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.

'Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Tuesday 13 October 2020. Successful applicants will be notified by 15 October 2020.

This CDH Guided Project series which also includes a Methods Workshop will explore the generation of ‘synthetic’ texts using neural networks.

The release of OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models in 2019 and 2020 has shown that predictive algorithms trained on very large general datasets can generate ‘synthetic’ texts, perform machine translation tasks, rudimentary reading comprehension, question answering and summarisation automatically without needing large amounts of task-specific training. These ‘ghostwritten’ texts have provoked wide attention in the media.

Researchers have experimented with prompting GPT-3 to write short stories, answer philosophical questions and apparently propose potential medical treatments -although GPT-3 had some difficulty with the question “how many eyes does a horse have?”. The Guardian ‘commissioned’ op-ed from GPT-3.

Through interactive hands-on sessions and demonstrations we will explore synthetic text production and look at how ideas about the distinction between ‘fact’, ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ are shaping the reception of this emerging technology. Our aim is to stimulate deeper critical engagement with machine learning by humanities researchers and to encourage more public debate about the role of AI in culture and society.

We invite applications from early career researchers and others at the University of Cambridge to join a small project team for four online sessions during the Guided Project phase in Oct-November. Participants will need to commit to joining the live sessions and to set aside at least 3-4 hours work on a small-scale individual project during the course. We are interested in assembling an interdisciplinary group of researchers drawing on insights from across humanities, social science and technology disciplines .Prior knowledge of programming, computer science or Machine Learning is not required.

This CDHBasics session will explain what data is, and what ‘humanities data’ looks like (via a behind-the-scenes tour of the Digital Library). This session covers good practice around file formats, version control and the principles of data curation for individual researchers.

Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Thursday 7 January 2021. We will review applications on a rolling basis and applicants will be notified at the latest by the end of Monday 11 January.

This CDH Guided Project aims to provide humanities, arts and social science researchers with an overview of current theory and practice in the design of human-computer interaction in the age of AI and equip the participants with analytical tools necessary for a critical investigation of contemporary design with AI/ML. Looking closely at interactions between humans and emerging AI systems, the workshop will also explore the potential for interaction between humanities scholars and computer scientists in the process of development and assessment of new solutions.

Lectures and practical research design sessions in Interaction with Machine Learning taught by Professor Alan Blackwell and Advait Sarkar (Microsoft Research) as part of an optional course for Part III and MPhil Computer Science students will form the anchoring element of the Project. These will allow researchers without a Computer Science background to explore how key challenges in AI design are being addressed within the field of interaction design, as well as identify areas in which humanities methodologies and approaches could be adopted to improve the production process, by making it more fair, critical, and socially-aware.

Participants will also take part in three workshops specifically tailored to humanities and social science researchers and will be supported in developing a mini research project investigating how humans interact with systems based on computational models. The projects may include:

• probing an already existing dataset, system, or user interface from a critical perspective
• developing an idea for new interaction design based on critical applications of ML/AI.

Please note: no prior practical experience or knowledge of programming is required to take part in the Project, however some awareness of how AI systems work will be beneficial.

Minimum time commitment:

• 8 weekly online lectures led by Professor Alan Blackwell (Computer Science and Technology) and Advait Sarkar (Microsoft Research). Weekly from 26 January, 2-4pm (with the last hour as an optional session for Guided Project participants).
• 3 x 1.5 hour specialist workshops for humanities and social science participants led by Tomasz Hollanek and Anne Alexander (CDH)
• 1.5 hour project showcase and final discussion

Participants are encouraged to set aside additional time to work on their projects between sessions. A Moodle email forum and drop-in ‘clinic’ style support sessions will be available during the Guided Project.

Lecture topics and dates

• Current research themes in intelligent user interfaces (26 January, 2pm)
• Program synthesis (2 February, 2pm)
• Mixed initiative interaction (9 February, 2pm)
• Interpretability / explainable AI (16 February, 2pm)
• Labelling as a fundamental problem (23 February, 2pm)
• Machine learning risks and bias (2 March, 2pm)
• Visualisation and visual analytics (9 March, 2pm)
• Research presentations by Computer Science Students (16 March, 2pm)

Workshop themes

• AI critique, humanities methodologies and user interface design (1 February, 10-11.30am)
• Recommender systems (1 March 10-11.30am)
• Machine vision (8 March 10-11.30am)
• Project presentations and discussion (15 March 10-11.30am)

Objectives By the end of the course participants should:

• be familiar with current state of the art in intelligent interactive systems
• understand the human factors that are most critical in the design of such systems
• be able to evaluate evidence for and against the utility of novel systems
• be able to apply critical methodologies to current interaction design practices
• understand the interplay between ML/AI research and humanities approaches

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 session focusses on providing photography skills for those undertaking archival research. Dr Oliver Dunn has experience spanning more than 10 years digitising written and printed historical sources for major university research projects in the humanities and social sciences. The focus is very much on low-tech approaches and small budgets. We’ll consider best uses of smartphones, digital cameras and tripods.