Digital Scholarship and Skills Workshop Series, Hilary 2019

Registration is now open for the forthcoming Digital Scholarship and Skills Workshop Series.  All workshops will be hosted at the Trinity Long Room Hub and will take place in the Neill Lecture Theatre.  You can find workshop details for the Hilary Term 2019 below, and a registration form further down:

Workshop One: Identifying and Managing Humanities Research Data

Facilitators: The Staff of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities
Date: 7th February 2019
Time: 9:00-13:00

In this workshop, participants will be encouraged to examine their own scholarly practices and those of others, refining our responses to the fundamental question: “what are Humanities research data?” Participants will be asked to consider the relationships between computer-readable data and the objects of Humanities research. The modes by which the digital disrupts traditional methodologies in the Humanities will be explored in detail, as will the ways in which Humanities methods and practices have changed to respond to digital research data. The session will combine lecture and discussion with a hands-on exercise in evaluating diverse Humanities sources, testing our ability to identify and to extract Humanities research data, and to respond to such objects in a way that reflects their digital nature. Additionally, the workshop content will cover practical solutions and tips for those who want to work with Humanities research data.  The workshop will include sessions on the following:

  • The problem with the word “data”
  • How to understand the data component of humanities research
  • Data Management Plans
  • Ethics in Research: How to Protect your Data, your Participants, and Yourself
  • Open research data
  • Data citation
  • Data-driven research in the Humanities

Workshop Two: Building and Using Digital Research Environments

Facilitators: Staff at the Library of Trinity College Dublin
Date: 28th February 2019
Time: 9:00-13:00

In this workshop, staff at the Library of Trinity College Dublin will introduce participants to the methods of planning and organisation to ensure successful online publication and archiving of digital projects. Participants will learn about best practices in, as well as pragmatic tips and tricks for such key topics as: digitisation; lifecycle management of digital objects; descriptive metadata; and copyright identification.  In addition, researchers from multiple disciplines will present examples of their latest research in this area.

Guest Speakers

Shane McGarry is currently a final year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Maynooth University. Shane’s thesis, entitled Escaping the Book: Investigating Engagement with Humanities-based Visualisations to Promote Knowledge Acquisition in Digital Research Environments, focuses on the use of interactive data visualisations as an alternative to standard search mechanisms to facilitate engagement with a software system and its source material. Shane‘s research aims to show that alternative methods of engagement with digital artefacts increase learning and serve as a viable pedagogical approach for both research and learning tools. Throughout his research Shane has conducted numerous experiments related to Interactivity and User Experience Design and has published articles on the importance of Interaction Design within the field of Digital Humanities. Additionally, Shane has been involved in the creation of 3 different humanities-focused digital projects during his research, serving as both designer and developer and driving each project’s timeline under tight time constraints. You can read more about Shane‘s work at www.shanemcgarry.com.

James L. Smith is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow based in the department of geography at Trinity College Dublin. He focuses on intellectual history, medieval abstractions and visualisation schemata, digital humanities, environmental humanities, neurohumanities, spatial humanities and water history. His first monograph is Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism (Brepols, 2018). James is the editor of The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (punctum books, 2017), and co-editor of the Open Library of the Humanities collection ‘New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies’.  His 2018-20 postdoctoral project is entitled ‘Deep Mapping the Spiritual Waterscape of Ireland’s Lakes: The Case of Lough Derg, Donegal’. James is also the convener of a spatial humanities reading group based at the Long Room Hub.  You can read more about James’ research at https://digitalderg.hcommons.org/2018/10/02/deep-mapping-the-spiritual-waterscape-of-irelands-lakes/

Workshop Three: Theory and Practice of Distant Reading: An Introductory Workshop 

Facilitator: Dr Michelle Doran, Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities
Date: 7th March 2019
Time: 9:00-13:00

This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the theories, practices and methods of Distant Reading.  In the first half of the presentation participants will be provided with an introduction to the theories of Distant Reading and the debates surrounding the approach, including arguments against data visualisation.  During this session participants will also be introduced to some commonly used analytical tools in the Digital Humanities including MALLET, Google Books Ngram Viewer and Voyant Tools.  After the introductory session, researchers from multiple disciplines will present examples of their latest research in this area.

Guest Speakers:

Nicole Basaraba is a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and is supported by the world-class ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technologies, and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on the evaluation of and best practices for creating multimodal, interactive digital narratives in non-fiction genres. Her PhD research involves examining how participatory digital culture impacts and influences digital storytelling through the co-creation of a shared cultural heritage. With over eight years of international experience in digital communications and marketing, she values opportunities for forming collaborations between academia and creative industries. Nicole holds a Master of Arts in Communications and Technology and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta, Canada. Nicole is an invited lecturer of digital narrative and interactive media in universities in Ireland and England, and has presented at academic conferences in Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Germany, and Ireland. Her research is published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies and Logos: Journal for the World Publishing Community.

Emma Clarke is a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities and Linguistics in the School of Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin. Her main research focus is on cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer, but she is also interested in text analysis and persuasive language in political speech.  Since completing an M.Phil in Digital Humanities in 2013, Emma has worked on a number of Digital Humanities projects. These include ‘Letters 1916-1923‘, ‘Drawn to the Page: Irish Artist Illustrations 1830 – 1930‘ and ‘The 1916 Diary of Dorothy Price‘. In her free time, Emma runs dublinghostsigns.com, an ever-growing collection of Dublin’s old and fading signs.

Workshop Four:  Using Ontologies and Qualitative Data Analysis for Digital Humanities Research

Facilitator: Prof. Costis Dallas, Visiting Research Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub
Date: 21st March 2019
Time: 9:00-13:00

This workshop introduces an innovative ontology-based approach to designing and performing qualitative meta-research on the information and communication practices and attitudes of humanities researchers in the digital environment. After an introduction to relevant concepts from the fields of practice studies, activity theory, and practical argumentation, participants will engage with fundamental notions of conceptual modeling and ontologies, scholarly process modeling and the NeDIMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO), as well as with core aspects of interviewing research design and qualitative data analysis, focusing on the processes of developing an appropriate code system, as well as coding and analysing transcribed data. Based on their own experience, participants may develop research questions and a thematic guide suitable for scholarly activity mapping, plan and conduct a brief episodic interview, and perform ontology-based coding and analysis of interviewing data using the MaxQDA qualitative data analysis software. No prior technical experience is assumed.

Costis Dallas is an Associate Professor in the Museum Studies program, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, and a founding Research Fellow of the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMSI-Athena Research Centre in Athens, Greece. In his research, he investigates the relationship between people, things, and information in contemporary practices of cultural heritage curation, social interpretation and scholarly research, and the digital infrastructures, methods and tools that mediate this relationship.  He is the Principal Investigator of E-CURATORS – Pervasive Digital Curation Activities, Objects and Infrastructures in Archaeological Research and Communication (SSHRC Insight Grant, Canada). Also, he is Vice-Chair of the Archaeological Practices and Knowledge Work in the Digital Environment (ARKWORK) COST Action where he conducts scoping and qualitative research on archaeology and social media, and Chair of the DARIAH-EU Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group (DiMPO) where he coordinates a longitudinal European Survey on Scholarly Practices and Digital Needs in the Arts and Humanities across Europe. By synthesizing evidence from these studies, he aims to establish a pragmatic theoretical framework for curation “in the wild”, shaped by increasingly pervasive digital infrastructures such as mobile capture devices, Application Programming Interfaces, and online communication tools in scholarly work, and by participatory online information practices such as cultural memory and affiliative interactions between communities, amateurs and professionals on social media.  He holds a BA in History from the University of Ioannina, Greece, as well as MPhil and DPhil degrees in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford.