Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable

This session explores the lifecycle of a digital research project, across the stages of design, data capture, transformation, analysis, presentation and preservation, and introduces tactics for embedding ethical research principles and practices at each stage of the research process. We discuss how to assess the impact of relevant legal frameworks, including data protection, intellectual property and media law, on your digital research project and consider what approach researchers should take to the terms of service of third-party digital platforms.

Please note: this session covers the same content as The Ethics of Data Collection and Use in the Social Sciences Research Methods Programme. Students eligible to attend SSRMP are therefore requested not to book this session (though they are welcome to attend other sessions in this course), and instead to book here https://www.training.cam.ac.uk/jsss/course/ssrmc-ethicdaus

This session addresses the technical and ethical aspects of digital data collection and wrangling – two fundamental stages in the lifecycle of a digital research project. Participants will be introduced to online data sources and practices of internet-mediated data collection, including retrieving data from social media platforms. As data collected from online sources is often dirty and messy, we will also provide a short practical introduction to the process of transforming raw data into a clean and structured dataset using free and open-source software.

What happens to the practice of qualitative research when interactions between researcher and research subject are largely mediated. This session will explore a wide range of topics including the challenge of consent, researcher presence and ‘lurking’ in mediated settings, how to engage with digital gatekeepers, information security for researchers, and understanding the impact of digital platform architecture on qualitative research design.

This workshop is a very basic introduction to network analysis for humanities scholars. It will introduce the concepts of networks, nodes, edges, directed and weighted networks, bi- and multi-partite networks. It will give an overview of the kinds of things that can be thought about through a network framework, as well as some things that can’t. And it will introduce key theories, including weak ties, and small worlds. There will be an activity where participants will build their own test data set that they can then visualise. In the second half of the workshop we will cover some networks metrics including various centrality measures, clustering coefficient, community detection algorithms. It will include an activity introducing one basic web-based tool that allows you to run some of these algorithms and will provide suggestions for routes forward with other tools and coding libraries that allows quantitative analysis.

Attendees should bring their own laptops.

Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History & Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, and is currently leading two large AHRC-funded projects: Living with Machines, and Networking Archives. She is author of The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (2013), and co-author of Tudor Networks of Power, and The Network Turn (both forthcoming).

The afterlife of your research data forms a vitally important part of your research project. Research funders and academic journal publishers are often strongly committed to the re-use of data and are reluctant to fund or publish research where datasets are not accessible for the purposes of peer review or further use. Yet the push for open data exists in tension with the expectations of data protection law which requires transparency from researchers about how long they will retain personal data. This session will explore good practice in data sharing and archiving as well as introducing sources of further information and advice within the University on this topic.