The dates and topics for the Digital Tools and Technologies workshops from the Centre for Digital Humanities are now available. These workshops will take part in Hilary Term 2022, and continue the Centre’s series of free workshops for the wider DH community within TCD and beyond.
The Hilary Term 2022 series will combine tool-based and theory-based workshops, moving beyond the simple ‘how-to’ format in software training from the Michaelmas Term workshops to look at some of the challenges and issues that can arise in using tools with digital data, and the theoretical basis for digital humanities research.
As in Michaelmas Term, these workshops will be delivered online, so registration will be required to participate. Registration will open in January. For now, though, we invite you to look at the workshops on offer, and mark your calendars!
The Workshops
Legal, Ethical and Practical issues of data scraping in the humanities
Date: Weds 16th Feb 2022
Instructor: Dr. Erik Ketzan
Description: This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of obtaining text and data for humanistic research. Where to find datasets and corpora (collections of texts)? How can you scrape hundreds or thousands of web pages using the Python programming language, specifically via the user-friendly interface of Jupyter Notebooks? As scraping from the web involves important legal and ethical considerations, we will provide a foundational overview of copyright and personal data protection in humanistic research. No prior knowledge of coding is required.
Training Machines to enable automatic transcription of hand-written documents
Date: Weds 2nd March 2022
Instructor: Dr. David Brown and Dr. Ciaran Wallace
Description: Using new software can be as frustrating as it is exciting. This practical workshop will look at the Transkribus tool and take the participants through the stages of producing automatic transcriptions of hand-written texts from digital images, the potential issues that can arise, and how to overcome them.
Digital Scholarly Editing
Date: Weds 16th March 2022
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Doran
Description: This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the theories, practices and methods for encoding digital text in the Humanities. It provides an introduction to markup languages, XML, the infrastructure of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, and the encoding of common textual phenomena. Participants will have an opportunity to apply the basic elements of TEI-XML to encode a literary text using the oXygen XML Editor. The workshop combines lectures and discussion with practical hands-on exercises. No previous experience with digital text is assumed.
Participants are requested to bring a laptop with the latest version of oXygen XML Editor. You can download a free 30 day trial of oXygen here.
Defining the Digital Humanities
Date: Weds 30th March 2022
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Doran
Description: What constitutes digital humanities (or what constitutes the digital humanities) is a question to which the multiplicity of answers now comprises a genre. The answer to this question largely depends on how we define the relationships between digital humanities and the traditional humanities disciplines, as well as the emerging humanities disciplines and the natural sciences (including computational science). Exploratory rather than prescriptive in style, this workshop will ask participants to define digital humanities as it relates to their own scholarly identities, disciplines, sources and research methodologies. Participants will also be introduced to the landscape of digital humanities at Trinity College Dublin.
Registration for all workshops will open in January 2022