Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable
March 2021
| Thu 4 |
Applications for this workshop have now closed. Corpus linguistic approach to language is based on collections of electronic texts. It uses software to search and quantify various linguistic phenomena that make up patterns, which it then compares within and across texts based on their frequency. Corpus stylistics applies tools and methods from corpus linguistics to stylistic research. Corpus stylistics mainly focuses on literary texts, individual or corpora. Corpora are here, usually, principled collections of texts, for example a collection of texts by one author, or texts from a specific period. It focuses both on more general patterns and meanings that are observable across corpora and patterns and meanings in one individual text. In terms of quantitative approaches that corpus stylistics employs, it is in many ways similar to work that is referred to as ‘distant reading’ and also ‘cultural analytics’. These approaches emphasise the gains that we get from looking at texts from “distance”, i.e., in large quantities. For corpus stylistics, it is the relationship between quantitative and qualitative that is central. Therefore, research in corpus stylistics often deals with much smaller “cleaner” data sets, so that the qualitative step in the analysis is more manageable. This workshop aims to introduce the basic corpus linguistic techniques and methods for working with literary and other texts. It aims:
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| Mon 8 |
Interaction with Machine Learning
Finished
Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Thursday 7 January 2021. We will review applications on a rolling basis and applicants will be notified at the latest by the end of Monday 11 January. This CDH Guided Project aims to provide humanities, arts and social science researchers with an overview of current theory and practice in the design of human-computer interaction in the age of AI and equip the participants with analytical tools necessary for a critical investigation of contemporary design with AI/ML. Looking closely at interactions between humans and emerging AI systems, the workshop will also explore the potential for interaction between humanities scholars and computer scientists in the process of development and assessment of new solutions. Lectures and practical research design sessions in Interaction with Machine Learning taught by Professor Alan Blackwell and Advait Sarkar (Microsoft Research) as part of an optional course for Part III and MPhil Computer Science students will form the anchoring element of the Project. These will allow researchers without a Computer Science background to explore how key challenges in AI design are being addressed within the field of interaction design, as well as identify areas in which humanities methodologies and approaches could be adopted to improve the production process, by making it more fair, critical, and socially-aware. Participants will also take part in three workshops specifically tailored to humanities and social science researchers and will be supported in developing a mini research project investigating how humans interact with systems based on computational models. The projects may include:
Please note: no prior practical experience or knowledge of programming is required to take part in the Project, however some awareness of how AI systems work will be beneficial. Minimum time commitment:
Participants are encouraged to set aside additional time to work on their projects between sessions. A Moodle email forum and drop-in ‘clinic’ style support sessions will be available during the Guided Project. Lecture topics and dates
Workshop themes
Objectives By the end of the course participants should:
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Applications for this workshop have now closed. Corpus linguistic approach to language is based on collections of electronic texts. It uses software to search and quantify various linguistic phenomena that make up patterns, which it then compares within and across texts based on their frequency. Corpus stylistics applies tools and methods from corpus linguistics to stylistic research. Corpus stylistics mainly focuses on literary texts, individual or corpora. Corpora are here, usually, principled collections of texts, for example a collection of texts by one author, or texts from a specific period. It focuses both on more general patterns and meanings that are observable across corpora and patterns and meanings in one individual text. In terms of quantitative approaches that corpus stylistics employs, it is in many ways similar to work that is referred to as ‘distant reading’ and also ‘cultural analytics’. These approaches emphasise the gains that we get from looking at texts from “distance”, i.e., in large quantities. For corpus stylistics, it is the relationship between quantitative and qualitative that is central. Therefore, research in corpus stylistics often deals with much smaller “cleaner” data sets, so that the qualitative step in the analysis is more manageable. This workshop aims to introduce the basic corpus linguistic techniques and methods for working with literary and other texts. It aims:
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| Thu 11 |
Text-mining is extracting information from unstructured text, such as books, newspapers, and manuscript transcriptions. This foundational course is aimed at students and staff who are new to text-mining, and presents a basic introduction to text-mining principles and methods, with coding examples and exercises in Python. To discuss the process, we will walk through a simple example of collecting, cleaning and analysing a text. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in, and return, the application form by Monday, 22 February 2021. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply. |
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Applications for this workshop have now closed. Corpus linguistic approach to language is based on collections of electronic texts. It uses software to search and quantify various linguistic phenomena that make up patterns, which it then compares within and across texts based on their frequency. Corpus stylistics applies tools and methods from corpus linguistics to stylistic research. Corpus stylistics mainly focuses on literary texts, individual or corpora. Corpora are here, usually, principled collections of texts, for example a collection of texts by one author, or texts from a specific period. It focuses both on more general patterns and meanings that are observable across corpora and patterns and meanings in one individual text. In terms of quantitative approaches that corpus stylistics employs, it is in many ways similar to work that is referred to as ‘distant reading’ and also ‘cultural analytics’. These approaches emphasise the gains that we get from looking at texts from “distance”, i.e., in large quantities. For corpus stylistics, it is the relationship between quantitative and qualitative that is central. Therefore, research in corpus stylistics often deals with much smaller “cleaner” data sets, so that the qualitative step in the analysis is more manageable. This workshop aims to introduce the basic corpus linguistic techniques and methods for working with literary and other texts. It aims:
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| Mon 15 |
Interaction with Machine Learning
Finished
Application forms should be returned to CDH Learning (learning@cdh.cam.ac.uk) by Thursday 7 January 2021. We will review applications on a rolling basis and applicants will be notified at the latest by the end of Monday 11 January. This CDH Guided Project aims to provide humanities, arts and social science researchers with an overview of current theory and practice in the design of human-computer interaction in the age of AI and equip the participants with analytical tools necessary for a critical investigation of contemporary design with AI/ML. Looking closely at interactions between humans and emerging AI systems, the workshop will also explore the potential for interaction between humanities scholars and computer scientists in the process of development and assessment of new solutions. Lectures and practical research design sessions in Interaction with Machine Learning taught by Professor Alan Blackwell and Advait Sarkar (Microsoft Research) as part of an optional course for Part III and MPhil Computer Science students will form the anchoring element of the Project. These will allow researchers without a Computer Science background to explore how key challenges in AI design are being addressed within the field of interaction design, as well as identify areas in which humanities methodologies and approaches could be adopted to improve the production process, by making it more fair, critical, and socially-aware. Participants will also take part in three workshops specifically tailored to humanities and social science researchers and will be supported in developing a mini research project investigating how humans interact with systems based on computational models. The projects may include:
Please note: no prior practical experience or knowledge of programming is required to take part in the Project, however some awareness of how AI systems work will be beneficial. Minimum time commitment:
Participants are encouraged to set aside additional time to work on their projects between sessions. A Moodle email forum and drop-in ‘clinic’ style support sessions will be available during the Guided Project. Lecture topics and dates
Workshop themes
Objectives By the end of the course participants should:
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| Thu 18 |
Text-mining is extracting information from unstructured text, such as books, newspapers, and manuscript transcriptions. This foundational course is aimed at students and staff who are new to text-mining, and presents a basic introduction to text-mining principles and methods, with coding examples and exercises in Python. To discuss the process, we will walk through a simple example of collecting, cleaning and analysing a text. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in, and return, the application form by Monday, 22 February 2021. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply. |
May 2021
| Thu 6 |
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. |
| Fri 7 |
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. |
| Mon 10 |
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. |
| Tue 11 |
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 methods of access to image collections including the collections of Cambridge University Digital Library. We will also discuss a range of methods using IIIF image data in humanities research. |
| Thu 13 |
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. |
| Thu 20 |
Methods Workshop: Best Practices in Coding for Digital Humanities Mary Chester-Kadwell (CDH Methods Fellow) Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by Tuesday, 11 May 2021. Successful applicants will be notified by end-of-day Wednesday, 12 May 2021. 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. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form. |
| Tue 25 |
Machine vision systems can potentially help humanities researchers see historical and cultural image collections differently, and could provide tools to answer new research questions. This CDH Basics session provides an introductory overview of basic tasks in machine vision, such as Image Classification, Object Detection and Image Captioning within a critical framework highlighting the challenges of algorithmic bias and the limits of automation as a method for humanistic enquiry. |
| Thu 27 |
Methods Workshop: Best Practices in Coding for Digital Humanities Mary Chester-Kadwell (CDH Methods Fellow) Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by Tuesday, 11 May 2021. Successful applicants will be notified by end-of-day Wednesday, 12 May 2021. 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. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. If you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches you are also welcome to apply. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form. |
June 2021
| Tue 8 |
The aim of this course is to support students, researchers, and professionals interested in exploring the changing nature of the English vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. We will focus on computational methods for representing word meaning and word meaning change from large-scale historical text corpora. The corpus used will consist of Darwin’s letters from the (Darwin Project https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) at Cambridge University Library. All code will be in online Python notebooks. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form |
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The aim of this course is to support students, researchers, and professionals interested in exploring the changing nature of the English vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. We will focus on computational methods for representing word meaning and word meaning change from large-scale historical text corpora. The corpus used will consist of Darwin’s letters from the (Darwin Project https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) at Cambridge University Library. All code will be in online Python notebooks. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form |
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| Wed 9 |
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship
Finished
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship Dr Peter McMurray (CDH Methods Fellow) With the rise of web-based scholarship and affordable digital audio equipment, artists and researchers are increasingly turning to audio formats as way to share their work with a larger audience and to cultivate new forms of knowledge rooted in listening. This workshop will offer an introduction to digital audio recording and editing (using Reaper, a digital audio workstation which can be downloaded/used for free on an extended trial basis). We will focus particularly on the editing choices for soundscape composition and podcasting, and participants will have the opportunity to produce a short audio piece over the course of the workshop. |
| Fri 11 |
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship
Finished
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship Dr Peter McMurray (CDH Methods Fellow) With the rise of web-based scholarship and affordable digital audio equipment, artists and researchers are increasingly turning to audio formats as way to share their work with a larger audience and to cultivate new forms of knowledge rooted in listening. This workshop will offer an introduction to digital audio recording and editing (using Reaper, a digital audio workstation which can be downloaded/used for free on an extended trial basis). We will focus particularly on the editing choices for soundscape composition and podcasting, and participants will have the opportunity to produce a short audio piece over the course of the workshop. |
| Mon 14 |
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship
Finished
Methods Fellow Workshop: Audible knowledge: soundscapes, podcasts and digital audio scholarship Dr Peter McMurray (CDH Methods Fellow) With the rise of web-based scholarship and affordable digital audio equipment, artists and researchers are increasingly turning to audio formats as way to share their work with a larger audience and to cultivate new forms of knowledge rooted in listening. This workshop will offer an introduction to digital audio recording and editing (using Reaper, a digital audio workstation which can be downloaded/used for free on an extended trial basis). We will focus particularly on the editing choices for soundscape composition and podcasting, and participants will have the opportunity to produce a short audio piece over the course of the workshop. |
| Tue 15 |
The aim of this course is to support students, researchers, and professionals interested in exploring the changing nature of the English vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. We will focus on computational methods for representing word meaning and word meaning change from large-scale historical text corpora. The corpus used will consist of Darwin’s letters from the (Darwin Project https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) at Cambridge University Library. All code will be in online Python notebooks. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form |
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The aim of this course is to support students, researchers, and professionals interested in exploring the changing nature of the English vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. We will focus on computational methods for representing word meaning and word meaning change from large-scale historical text corpora. The corpus used will consist of Darwin’s letters from the (Darwin Project https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) at Cambridge University Library. All code will be in online Python notebooks. If you are interested in attending this course, please fill in the application form |
October 2021
| Mon 11 |
Dr Anne Alexander, Cambridge Digital Humanities Places are limited and participants must complete this form in order to participate in addition to booking online. We will write and confirm your participation by email. Bookings will remain open until 10am, 11 October 2021; However, participants are encouraged to apply early as demand is likely to be high. This online 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. It is designed as a preparatory session for potential applicants to our Interaction with Machine Learning Guided Project which will run in Lent Term 2022 in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and Technology. However, it can also be booked as a standalone session. |
| Tue 12 |
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. |
| Thu 14 |
Dr Anne Alexander, Cambridge Digital Humanities Places are limited and participants must complete this form in order to participate in addition to booking online. We will write and confirm your participation by email. Bookings will remain open until 10am, 11 October 2021; However, participants are encouraged to apply early as demand is likely to be high. This online 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. It is designed as a preparatory session for potential applicants to our Interaction with Machine Learning Guided Project which will run in Lent Term 2022 in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and Technology. However, it can also be booked as a standalone session. |