The workshop series is open to faculty, staff, researchers and postgraduate students and may be attended as either ‘a la carte’ (where participants have a particular interest in a single or multiple sessions), or as a 5 ECTS module to be applied to the taught course requirements in a structured PhD. Please note, ECTS credits for this module can only be claimed by students registered at Trinity College Dublin. Assessment details are available here.
All four of the workshops scheduled for the Michaelmas Term 2021 / Semester 1 2021 will be available for online participation. Participants will be forwarded a link upon completion of the online registration form. The registration form is available at the bottom of the page.
The Workshops
DSS 1 – Web technologies: HTML, CSS and PHP
Instructor: Prof. Jennifer Edmond
Date: 23 Sept 2021
Time: 1-4pm (IST)
One of the most common activities in digital humanities is the presentation of sources, texts, documents or arguments via the world wide web. While there are now many user-friendly content management systems enabling this to be done with little or no understanding of the technical underpinnings of the Internet, it is both practically useful and methodologically important to understand how the protocols and standards that underpin the websites we use and create actually work. The aim of this workshop will therefore be to explore the Internet and the Worldwide Web and the foundation technologies that underlie both. The workshop will give an introduction to the history of the web, including the emergence of hypertext and web technologies such as HTML and XML. Participants will work with HTML and CSS and will learn introductory approaches to web site development. The workshop will be of interest to those who are curious about the impact of the web on all aspects of society, with a particular focus on the Humanities, and on the delivery of humanities research projects.
DSS 2 – Social Network Data Analysis & Visualisation via Gephi
Instructor: Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn
Date: 30 Sept 2021
Time: 1-4pm (IST)
This workshop is designed to present the general theoretical framework behind network analysis and its applications within the Humanities. The workshop will provide a practical introduction to carrying out network analysis – we will work with datasets to a) use Gephi to create network graphs, and b) spatially map our network graphs using Gephi and Google Maps.
Networks have been a key framework and concept for mapping and understanding reality and knowledge. We are said to live in a ‘networked’ age, with examples of Social Networking and network analysis surrounding us (e.g. social media, supply chain networks). Participants will be given an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method and introduced to examples of how SNA has been applied in research.
As to the practical section, we will work with two pre-prepared datasets that demonstrate how SNA can be adapted and used. No previous technical skills are required. Participants will work with Gephi (free to download here) and we’ll use Gephi to make simple maps that can be exported for use in Geographic Information Systems/GIS and Google Maps. For the manipulation of datasets, a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or equivalent will be employed. Participants are requested to download and install Gephi beforehand.
DSS 3 – Data Visualisation via Geographic Information Systems
Instructor: Vicky Garnett
Date: 7 Oct 2021
Time: 1-4pm (IST)
The ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities in recent years has seen an upswing in the application of tools based on geospatial principles as more humanities scholars turn to software such as GIS to visualise and explore spatial data within their work. QGIS, a free open-source GIS tool offers similar levels of functionality without the cost or baggage of some of the more well known GIS software, making it an attractive alternative. This workshop will demonstrate and give hands-on experience of some of the basic functions in QGIS that the novice spatial humanist might need to visualise their data, which will enable participants to explore the software further with more confidence.
Participants are asked to have QGIS installed on their laptops in advance of the workshop. Download QGIS 3.16 here (opens new tab): https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
DSS 4 – Working with Digital Text Corpora using TXM and LancsBox
Instructor: Dr Erik Ketzan
Date: 14 Oct 2021
Time: 1-4pm (IST)
Digital Humanities research often involves large corpora, or collections of texts, and this workshop will introduce two well-developed, free, easy to use, XML & TEI compatible text/corpus analysis environments: TXM, developed at ENS Lyon, and LancsBox, developed by Vaclav Brezina and colleagues at Lancaster University. TXM and LancsBox include powerful features for working with large corpora that can be useful in a wide variety of digital humanities projects: corpus creation, reference corpus downloading, word frequency lists, and word query based on string, type, lemma, part of speech, and semantic tag, which users can inspect in a convenient and an easy-to-use KWIC (keyword-in-context) format. The workshop lecturer, Erik Ketzan, will show how he used TXM for most of the experiments in his upcoming book from Bloomsbury Academic, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style. We will then learn how to use LancsBox’s graphical collocation tool to investigate words appearing in proximity, as well as LancsBox’s built-in statistical features, to determine whether your claims about the frequency of words or other textual features are statistically significant, an important step in publishing your results or defending the work in your masters or PhD dissertation. We will also provide an introduction on practical steps to obtain texts for research, including legal, ethical, and technical issues.
Where to learn more:
– LancsBox: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/index.php
– LancsBox User Guide: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/help.php#tabs1
– TXM (Textometrie): http://textometrie.ens-lyon.fr/?lang=en