All Cambridge Digital Humanities courses

Ensuring long-term access to digital data is often a difficult task: both hardware and code decay much more rapidly than many other means of information storage. Digital data created in the 1980s is frequently unreadable, whereas books and manuscripts written in the 980s are still legible. This session explores good practice in data preservation and software sustainability and looks at what you need to do to ensure that the data you don’t want to keep is destroyed.

• Data and code sustainability

• Retention, archiving and re-use

• Data destruction

• Recap on the project life-cycle

Data which you have captured rather than created yourself is likely to need cleaning up before you can use it effectively. This short session will introduce you to the basic principles of creating structured datasets and walk you through some case studies in data cleaning with OpenRefine, a powerful open source tool for working with messy data.

• Structuring your data

• Cleaning messy textual data with OpenRefine

• Batch processing file names

This CDH Basics session provides a basic introduction to good practice around understanding file formats, version control and the principles of data curation for individual researchers. We will examine the importance of metadata (‘data about data’), exploring the crucial role played by classification systems and standards in shaping how scholars interact with historical and cultural records. Rather than accepting data as a ‘given’, we will discuss the creation and curation of data as interpretative practices and analyse their relationship to other traditions of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

This CDH Basics session introduces the IIIF image data framework, which has been developed by a consortium of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories and demonstrates a range of different machine learning-based methods for exploring digital image collections.

Places are limited, and participants must complete this form to participate in addition to booking online. We will write and confirm your participation by email. Bookings will remain open until 10 am, Wednesday 20 October; however, participants are encouraged to apply early as demand is likely to be high, and we will not be able to guarantee that your ArcGis Online account will be activated for the first session.

This CDH Guided Project series will offer an overview of GIS techniques applied to digitising historical material, from basic manual digitisation to using platforms for crowd-sourced digitisation. It will introduce GIS best practices and terminology and enable participants to design and launch their own projects. Each session will offer a 20-minute presentation, followed by 10 minutes of Q&A and one hour of practice, using ArcGis Online and a range of other GIS solutions. The teaching will be delivered by a team composed of a geospatial analyst, an architect and a historian, giving participants from all fields a broad range of views and expertise to draw on.

Participation in this guided project will also contribute to an ongoing research project led by Dr Alexis Litvine and Dr Isabelle Séguy (anrcommunes.fr), which is (among other things) reconstructing historical transport networks for France. During the sessions, participants will help digitise nineteenth-century French roads using military maps. The work will ultimately be part of a journey planner (aka a "Google Maps") of the past for France.

Applications are invited from early career researchers and others at the University of Cambridge to join this project for four online sessions during the Guided Project phase in Oct-November. The project concludes with a live “mapathon” session on International GIS day, i.e. November 17. On this day, participants will all meet (in person preferably but online will be possible) for a friendly but competitive digitisation challenge against participants in a similar guided project held in France — pizza and refreshments will be provided.

Participants will need to commit to joining the live sessions and to set aside at least 3-4 hours of individual digitisation work. Participation in the final “mapathon” (online or in-person) is also expected, but no prior GIS knowledge is required.

Chris Houghton (Head of Digital Scholarship for Gale) joins us to deliver this suite of CDH Labs sessions. Chris collaborates globally with scholars, in the digital humanities community, ensuring the development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab continues to meet their needs.

Are you interested in looking at primary sources in new ways? Would you like to learn how to analyse large sets of historical and contemporary materials to provide a different perspective on your research?

In this session we will introduce Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a cloud hosted text and data mining platform available to the University. The Lab combines the text from Gale’s archive collections available at Cambridge, including Times Digital Archive and Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), with powerful text mining tools that enable sophisticated, wide-ranging analysis.

You don’t need any previous experience in text and data mining, and you don’t have to have any interest in coding or algorithms – this session will explain how absolutely anyone can run these analyses and enhance their research accordingly.

Chris Houghton (Head of Digital Scholarship for Gale) joins us to deliver this suite of CDH Labs sessions. Chris collaborates globally with scholars, in the digital humanities community, ensuring the development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab continues to meet their needs.

Are you interested in looking at primary sources in new ways? Would you like to learn how to analyse large sets of historical and contemporary materials to provide a different perspective on your research?

In this session we will introduce Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a cloud hosted text and data mining platform available to the University. The Lab combines the text from Gale’s archive collections available at Cambridge, including Times Digital Archive and Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), with powerful text mining tools that enable sophisticated, wide-ranging analysis.

You don’t need any previous experience in text and data mining, and you don’t have to have any interest in coding or algorithms – this session will explain how absolutely anyone can run these analyses and enhance their research accordingly.

Chris Houghton (Head of Digital Scholarship for Gale) joins us to deliver this suite of CDH Labs sessions. Chris collaborates globally with scholars, in the digital humanities community, ensuring the development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab continues to meet their needs.

Chris Houghton (Head of Digital Scholarship for Gale) joins us to deliver this suite of CDH Labs sessions. Chris collaborates globally with scholars, in the digital humanities community, ensuring the development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab continues to meet their needs.

This in-person workshop will provide an accessible, non-technical introduction to Machine Learning systems, aimed primarily at graduate students and researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences. No prior knowledge of programming is required.

We will focus on the technical, ethical and societal implications of embedding Machine Learning systems for classifying and generating texts and images into the world of work, with a particular emphasis on the impact of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. We will explore these text generation systems in the context of longer histories of AI, including the ‘deep learning revolution’ in image-based Machine Learning systems which laid the foundations for popular text-to-image generation models such as StableDiffusion.

Participants will have the chance to both learn more about how AI works and also discuss what the embedding of such systems into labour processes, management structures, resource allocation systems may mean for how society works.

Convenor: Mary Chester-Kadwell -  Lead Research Software Engineer, Cambridge Digital Humanities

Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by noon, Sunday, 12 March 2023. Successful applicants will be notified by the end-of-day Tuesday, 14 March 2023. 

This course introduces best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow for research.

Developing your coding practice is an ongoing process throughout your career. This intermediate course is aimed at students and staff who use coding in research, or plan on starting such a project soon. We present an introduction to a range of best practices and techniques to help you better manage your code and data, and develop your project into a usable, sustainable, and reproducible workflow. All the examples and exercises will be in Python.

If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form. Please ensure you are logged onto your University Google account to access the form further help here

Convenor: Dita N. Love (CDH Methods Fellow)

Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey wrote that “speaking out about injustice, trauma, pain and grief have become crucial aspects of contemporary life which have transformed notions of what it means to be a subject, what it means to speak, and how we can understand the formation of communities and collectives” (p.2, 2001) in the introduction of the special issue Testimonial Cultures. These workshops ask therefore: what does it mean to centre survivor-knowledge, and witness together the aftermath of intersecting violence, when language and traditional methods often fail to re-present the experience of trauma? How can we avoid tokenising creative-digital research under the pressures of a precarious academy and creative sector?

It is often said we live in a society saturated with data. Visualisation methods can play a crucial role in helping to cut through the information overload. Badly designed charts, graphs and diagrams, on the other hand, can confuse or deceive. This session will introduce and contextualise graphical communication practices historically and culturally, helping you to think more critically about your own work and that of others.

We will focus on graphical display as an interpretative and persuasive practice which requires as much attention to detail as writing. A hands-on collaborative exercise using historical data will give you the chance to put your visualisation skills to work. Coding skills are not required for this workshop but a basic familiarity with creating graphs and charts will be helpful. If you need to refresh your skills before the session, please use this open access workbook: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wtwqIsWVGcsQ6rvXAzdpfNL5f7mUqV5k_Rr7ZrQCnbo/edit. (if the link doesn't work from UTBS, please copy and paste into your browser).

This Methods Workshop will introduce advanced techniques used for the digitisation and preservation of archival material. The first workshop will introduce the following topics:

• Copyrights and sensitive data considerations
• Understanding Photography basics
• Digitisation Imaging Standards
• Scene and capture calibration
• Image post-processing
• Taking usable images in any conditions
• Principles and Digital Preservation good practice

Completing the workshop will give participants a good understanding of archival photography best practices. You will gain a strong professional vocabulary to discuss imaging and a toolkit to assess image quality.

A second session, bookable separately, will focus on how to adopt those principles to the projects chosen by the participants. This will cover learning a practical approach to taking images fit for purpose in any conditions with available resources. It may also address any more advanced imaging topics such as image stitching, Optical Character Recognition, Multispectral Imaging, or photogrammetry if these are in the interest of the participants. It will also be an opportunity to visit the Digital Content Unit at Cambridge University Library.

This Methods Workshop will introduce advanced techniques used for the digitisation and preservation of archival material. The first workshop will introduce the following topics:

• Copyrights and sensitive data considerations
• Understanding Photography basics
• Digitisation Imaging Standards
• Scene and capture calibration
• Image post-processing
• Taking usable images in any conditions
• Principles and Digital Preservation good practice

Completing the workshop will give participants a good understanding of archival photography best practices. You will gain a strong professional vocabulary to discuss imaging and a toolkit to assess image quality.

A second session, bookable separately, will focus on how to adopt those principles to the projects chosen by the participants. This will cover learning a practical approach to taking images fit for purpose in any conditions with available resources. It may also address any more advanced imaging topics such as image stitching, Optical Character Recognition, Multispectral Imaging, or photogrammetry if these are in the interest of the participants. It will also be an opportunity to visit the Digital Content Unit at Cambridge University Library.

This Methods Workshop will introduce advanced techniques used for the digitisation and preservation of archival material. The first workshop will introduce the following topics:

• Copyrights and sensitive data considerations
• Understanding Photography basics
• Digitisation Imaging Standards
• Scene and capture calibration
• Image post-processing
• Taking usable images in any conditions
• Principles and Digital Preservation good practice

Completing the workshop will give participants a good understanding of archival photography best practices. You will gain a strong professional vocabulary to discuss imaging and a toolkit to assess image quality.

A second session, bookable separately, will focus on how to adopt those principles to the projects chosen by the participants. This will cover learning a practical approach to taking images fit for purpose in any conditions with available resources. It may also address any more advanced imaging topics such as image stitching, Optical Character Recognition, Multispectral Imaging, or photogrammetry if these are in the interest of the participants. It will also be an opportunity to visit the Digital Content Unit at Cambridge University Library.

Following the introductory session, this second session will focus on how to adopt the principles to the projects chosen by the participants. This will cover learning a practical approach to taking images fit for purpose in any conditions with available resources. It may also address more advanced imaging topics such as image stitching, Optical Character Recognition, Multispectral Imaging, or photogrammetry if these are in the interest of the participants. It will also be an opportunity to visit the Digital Content Unit at Cambridge University Library.

Convenor: Dr Estara Arrant (Cambridge University Library)

This session is aimed at researchers who have never done any coding before. We will explore basic principles and approaches to navigating and working with code, using the popular programming language Python. Participants will use the Jupyter Notebooks platform to learn how to analyse texts. This will provide participants with a working foundation in the fundamentals of coding in Humanities research. The software we will use is free to download and compatible with most computers, and we will provide support in installation and setup before the class.

Convenors: Leah Brainerd & Alex Gushurst-Moore (CDH Methods Fellow)

Centuries of ceramics. Millenia of maquettes. How do we grapple with large datasets? Join archaeologist Leah Brainerd and art historian Alex Gushurst-Moore to increase your computational literacy, learn how to scrape data from collections databases, and interpret that data through visual means.

Over two, two-hour sessions, you will be introduced to:

• Collections databases: what they are, how they are built, and how to navigate them
• Web-scraping: how do you go from a webpage on the internet to a dataset on your computer? A basic introduction to how web-scraping with R *Statistics works with a worked example, ethics of data, and learn how to evaluate a website for future data collection
• Data visualisation software: what options are available and how to use the open-source, online system mapping tool, Kumu
• Cultural evolutionary theory: cultural evolution is the change of culture over time; explore a theoretical perspective that views cultural information as an evolutionary process which teaches us, through cultural transmission, more about human decision making

The workshop will take place over two sessions. The first session (30 January) will cover collections databases and web-scraping. The second session (6 February) will cover data visualisation and cultural evolutionary theory. These sessions will consist of practical tutorials and discussion with the course leads. After each session, participants will be given an optional task to try out new skills acquired, on which they can receive feedback from the course organisers.

Convenor: Giulia Grisot (CDH Methods Fellow and a Visiting Academic)

This Methods Workshop will deliver an introduction to R Studio and R Markdown; the workshop will run through the functionalities and advantages of using R Studio and related tools for organising and analysing data, as well as for writing and referencing.

About the convenor: Giulia has a mixed background in Literary Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Digital Humanities and has gained experience in both qualitative and quantitative approaches to texts and language in general, becoming familiar with several coding languages (R, python) essential for statistical as well as corpus investigations.

Giulia is currently working with large corpora of Swiss German fictional texts, looking at sentiments in relation to represented spatial locations, using both lexicon-based methods and machine learning.

This in-person workshop will provide an accessible, non-technical introduction to Machine Learning systems, aimed primarily at graduate students and researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences.

Key topics covered in the sessions will include:

• Situating Machine Learning in the longer history of Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning system architectures
• The challenges of dimension reduction, classification and generalisation
• Sources of bias and problems of interpretation
• Machine Learning applications and their societal consequences

During the session participants will be encouraged to work through practical exercises in image classification. No prior knowledge of programming is required. Participants wishing to run the experiments for themselves will need access to a laptop, but no special software is required, just an up-to-date web browser and an internet connection. We will be using Google Colab for the text generation experiments which you have access to via your Raven log-in. The image classification experiments will require a GitHub account ([sign up here https://github.com/])

Convenor: Estara Arrant (CDH Methods Fellow)

This methods workshop will teach students three powerful machine learning algorithms appropriate for Humanities research projects. These algorithms are designed to help you identify and explore meaningful patterns and correlations in your research material and are appropriate for descriptive, qualitative data sets of almost any size. These algorithms are applicable to virtually any Humanities field or research question.

• Multiple Correspondence Analysis: automatically identifies correlations and differences between specific data elements. This helps one to understand how different features (‘variables’ or ‘characteristics’) of one’s data are related to each other, and how strong their relationships are. This can be useful in almost any research project. For example, in a sociological dataset, this analysis could help clarify relationships between specific demographic characteristics (race, gender, political affiliation) and socioeconomic status (working class, education level, income bracket).
• K-modes clustering and hierarchical clustering: finding groups of similarity and relationship within the entirety of your data. Clustering helps one to identify which variables/characteristics group together, and which do not, and the degree of difference between groups. For example, such clustering could allow an art historian to see how paintings from one decade are characterised by style and artist, as contrasted to paintings from another decade (thus tracking shifts in artistic trends over time)

This workshop will specifically cover the following: Determining when your research could benefit from machine learning analysis. Designing a good methodology and running the analysis. Interpreting the results and determining if they are meaningful. Producing a useful visualisation (graphic) of the results. Communicating the findings to other scholars in the Humanities in an accessible way. Students will actively implement a small research project using a practice dataset and are encouraged to try out the methods in their current research. They will learn the basics of running the analysis in R’s powerful programming language.

This Methods Workshop explores primary data collection using digital and online qualitative methods. Teaching methods for detailed assessment of the suitability of online platforms for the collection of research data. Considering not only general ethical issues, privacy, encryption, terms and conditions but also inclusivity for neurodivergent and vulnerable participants.

Convenor: Orla Delaney (CDH Methods Fellow)

What does it mean to prioritise small data over big data?

Cultural heritage datasets, such as museum databases and digital archives, seem to resist the quantitative methods we usually associate with data science work, asking to be read and explored rather than aggregated and analysed. This workshop provides participants with a non-statistical toolkit that will enable them to approach, critique, and tell the story of a cultural heritage dataset.

Together we will consider approaches to the database from the history of science and technology, media archaeology, and digital ethnography. This will be done alongside an overview of practical considerations relevant to databasing in the sector, such as standards like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics), specific technologies like linked data, and the results of recent projects aiming to criticise and diversify the underpinning technologies of cultural heritage databases. This workshop is aimed both at cultural heritage professionals and students, and at data science researchers interested in introducing a qualitative approach to their work.

This project begins from the premise that ‘transparency’ is not clear at all. Transparency is historically mediated, culturally constructed, and ideologically complex. Understood expansively, transparency is enmeshed with a variety of functions and associations, having been mobilised as a political call to action; a design methodology; a radical practice of digital disruption; an ideological tool of surveillance; a corporate strategy of diversion; an aesthetics of obfuscation; a cultural paradigm; a programming protocol; a celebration of Enlightenment rationality; a tactic for spatialising data; an antidote to computational black boxing; an ethical cliché; and more.

Across two workshops, we will explore the multidimensionality and intractability of transparency and investigate how the demand for more of it—in our algorithms, computational systems, and culture more broadly—can encode assumptions about the liberational capacity of restoring representation to the invisible. As a group we will conduct a survey of transparency and its political ramifications to digital culture by learning about its conceptual genealogies; interrogating its relevance to art and architecture; questioning its limits as an ethical imperative; and mapping it as a contemporary strategy of anti/mediation. Drawing on a combination of artworks, historical texts, cultural touchstones, and moving images, these workshops will give participants an opportunity to attend to transparency’s complex configurations within contemporary culture through a media theoretical lens. This project is designed to facilitate collaborative study; foster inter-disciplinary discourse; promote experimental learning; and develop a more theoretically nuanced and historically grounded starting point for critiquing transparency and its operations within digital culture.