All courses

Mentoring Guide: Bitesize

PPD bitesize resources are short and high impact; including videos, quick tips guides and interactive bitesize modules. Develop your skills and knowledge quickly, easily, when you need. They complement face to face events and more in-depth online modules.

A mentoring relationship could help you to progress in your professional life/career and build your networks. It can also support your mental health by increasing confidence and reducing anxiety.

If you are interested in hearing about mentoring and its effects on mental health, join the ourcambridge Self-Match Mentoring Scheme' team for an informal session and discussion.

“(Mentoring) supported my mental health through a period of work-related anxiety/stress”.

In this module students will be introduced to meta-analysis, a powerful statistical technique allowing researchers to synthesize the available evidence for a given research question using standardized (comparable) effect sizes across studies. The sessions teach students how to compute treatment effects, how to compute effect sizes based on correlational studies, how to address questions such as what is the association of bullying victimization with depression? The module will be useful for students who seek to draw statistical conclusions in a standardized manner from literature reviews they are conducting.

Metabolic Conditioning is a method of training that involves a very high work rate, usuing exercises designed to burn more calories during your workout and maximise calories burned, after your workout. These routines are intended to increase your body's storage and delivery of energy for any activity.

Do you need a database for your data? Or could you store the data in standalone files? Which database paradigm should you consider? What are the consequences of these choices on your work routine? How to navigate all of this with minimal or no programming experience?

These and more are the questions we will address in the course. We aim to provide a gentle introduction to databases and database paradigms, with examples that help explain the differences between the most common database packages and guide researchers to design suitable solutions for their data problems.

These workshops will offer participants the ability to re-think the graphic design of a musical score and will work with a novel set of principles to modify the spacing, layout, and position of its notes and signs for intelligibility purposes and/or artistic purposes.

In previous experimental research, Arild has found that musical scores with modified engraving, spacing, and layout rules can —at least in certain practices and for certain repertoires— elicit more fluent and precise readings than conventional scores. The abstraction of informational units and of discourse structure from a score seems to be enhanced by his approach of separating and redistributing notation symbols and other visual materials using a digital (quantifiable, taxonomic) hierarchy of divisions comparable to what is nowadays conventionally applied in (Western) language texts. This seems to be facilitating the decoding and apprehension of information, affecting the conversion of notation into performance; it is also being investigated at present in terms of academic and artistic impact.

Participants will be able to use the flexibility and manageability of digital production to introduce a radically new conception of the visual structuring of a musical score: Arild proposes to go beyond the mere reproduction of analogical models with digital tools; for that, participants will be experimenting with novel flexible spacing, layout and visual structuring cues that could be enhancing, in music reading, the integrative and abstractive processes that fluent readers already use in language (we do not read sequentially letter by letter; good readers group, prioritise and predict the symbols presented to them). This approach is intrinsically digital, as it is based on being able to use the symbols of a score in a modular, movable, and experimental manner —and in this context 'experimental' would naturally include heuristic or intuitive manipulations by the score users. Arild's view is that a novel conception of music notation should include the possibility of re-organising the materials, allowing the user at either end (creator or reader) to group, separate, highlight and grade visually the symbols present in a score.

Isabelle Higgins, Methods Fellow - Cambridge Digital Humanities

This Methods Fellows' Workshop Series event aims to encourage participants to think critically and reflexively about the nature of digital humanities research. It will explore (both individually and collectively) the function and effect of critical, intersectional and decolonial research methods and their impact on research fields, participants and research outputs.

For each seminar, participants will be provided with a reading list that will contain both core introductory texts and additional readings. They will be expected to do 30 minutes of reading ahead of each seminar. The seminars themselves will be a mix of presentations, small group discussion and the study of specific empirical cases.

Throughout the seminars we will collectively assemble a shared bibliography of academic texts and other digital resources. Participants will also be encouraged to bring and share examples and challenges from their own research.

To increase space for discussion and critical reflection, participants will be encouraged to form small working groups, focused on the seminar theme they find most productive, and to connect with their working group for a 30-minute call to reflect on their chosen seminar outside of the scheduled four hours of teaching. There will be the option to feed back on these discussions to the wider group, deepening our shared understanding of the content covered in the course. Isabelle will also hold virtual office hours following the seminar series. In these ways and others, the series will aim to cater for those new to this area of research, as well as for scholars who are already working in digital humanities.

Key topics covered in the sessions will include:

• Seminar 1: Digital Humanities in Social and Historical

Context: Considering what and how we research

We will focus on placing digital humanities, as a discipline, in the context of its emergence. Disciplinary Sociology, for example, is increasingly grappling with its colonial past (Meghji, 2020). What happens when we examine the history and context of digital humanities? McIlwain (2020) reminds us of the historical ties between the development of computational technology and the surveillance of Black bodies. Yet digital humanities research has also sought to challenge the legal, social and political power exercised through digital systems (Selwyn, 2019). Does contextualising our methods change how we approach them?

• Seminar 2: Critical approaches to Digital Environments: Affordances, Interfaces, AI, Algorithms

We will draw on the vast range of work produced by race critical code scholars, which help us to explore the assumptions and inequalities that are coded into the software we study (or use to conduct our studies). Ruha Benjamin (2016a:150) reminds us to ask of digital technology: 'who and what is fixed in place – classified, corralled, and/or coerced, to enable innovation?' How does a consideration of encoded digital inequalities affect our methodologies?

• Seminar 3: Critical Engagement with User Generated

Content: Beyond content & discourse analysis

We will draw on critical theories that draw attention to the digital and social constructs and conventions that shape the production of user-generated content, with Brock's (2018) Critical Techno-Cultural Discourse Analysis as one such methodological contribution. We'll explore what happens to our research when we broaden our methodological framing, considering the type of content produced by users and how it is produced, who is producing it, and what governs this production.

• Seminar 4: Looking forward: Our roles as researchers in Digital Humanities

We will pay attention to the growing calls from a range of cross-disciplinary scholars who invite us to actively consider the impact of our methods on the future. We'll explore different notions of methodological responsibility and innovation, from the speculative (Benjamin, 2016b), to the caring (de la Bellacasa, 2011), to the adaptive and inductive (Markham & Buchanan, 2012). What happens when we place our research into its broader context and consider how our methods will shape the future of our discipline?

This course demystifies principles of data visualisation and practices of graph creation in Python to help trainees better understand and reflect how Good Data Visualisation under “5 Principles” can be achieved, and develop Python’s application in data visualisation beyond analysis. This course is aimed at students/staff who are interested in and/or use data visualisation in research or outreach and hope to explore data visualisation in Python with basic Python knowledge. It is delivered in a format of 4-hr workshop (on Zoom) + c. 2hr self-paced preparation and post-class exercises+ 1hr asynchronous question-shooting, combining theories, case learning, peer interactions and practical: we first present an introduction on key concepts of and problems in data visualisation, before case studies and group discussion on data visualisation principles and how to visualise data better in practices; then under a demonstration, we employ Python to visualise data and go through types of graphs.

Itamar Shatz - Methods Fellow CDH

This course will introduce participants to key concepts in statistical analyses, including statistical significance, effect sizes, and linear models. The goal is to give participants the basic tools that they need in order to understand the use of statistical methods by others and to use these methods effectively in their own research. We will focus on an intuitive and practical understanding of statistical analyses, rather than on the mathematical details underlying them. As such, the course will be accessible for those without a quantitative background, although it will help to have knowledge of basic descriptive statistics (e.g., mean and standard deviation).

The course will cover (approximately) the following topics:

• Session 1: statistical significance and statistical tests (including hypothesis testing, p-values, statistical power, t-test, and chi-square test).
• Session 2: effect sizes, correlation, confidence intervals, and outliers.
• Session 3: linear regression (including simple/multiple regression, residuals, beta coefficients, and R-Squared).
• Session 4: linear regression continued (including test statistics, standard errors, centering, interaction, categorical predictors, linear models, and assumption testing).

This course looks at how modern computational techniques in logic can be used to approach historical questions in the history of logic while also reflecting on the differences and similarities between historical and modern approaches to logic.

Historically, the course will focus on two authors’ approaches to modal logic, the branch of logic that deals with possibility, necessity, and contingency. Ibn Sina (9th century) and John Buridan (14th century). Using these two authors and their discussions of logic as a starting place, we will look at how their logical systems can be represented and formalised using contemporary computational methods, as well as reflecting on the similarities and differences between historical approaches to analysing validity and its relationship to modern notions of algorithms.

The overarching aim of the course is to develop the framework that allows us to computationally show that Buridan and Ibn Sina are working with the same modal logic under two different presentations.

This course will be of interest to academics at all levels (including PhD students) who travel to remote locations (including small libraries worldwide) to access their primary material (often pamphlets and hand-written ephemera) which they are interested in digitising not only for their own scholarly appraisal, but also as a means of enabling access to the wider academic community. We will go step-by-step through preparation of materials, cataloguing systems, rigs and illumination, tethered photography using Lightroom, smartphone lenses and Halide, and packaging and checksums. We will also be discussing theoretical and ethical questions around decolonisation, reparation, and handling of Black and Indigenous heritage.

Thomas Cowhitt, Methods Fellow - Cambridge Digital Humanities

This Methods Fellow's Workshop Series event will introduce users to social network analysis in R. Participants will be asked to generate their own relational dataset. We will then use several R packages to visualize and interpret relational data. By the conclusion of this course, users will be able to construct a relational dataset, load and clean this dataset in R, and generate static network diagrams and reports on descriptive network statistics.

If you've ever collected some data but weren't sure how to go about visualising it in a way that could help you uncover new insights, or if you've struggled to present data in a way that helped others understand your findings, this course is intended for you.

We'll talk about how to select the right visualisation for your data, discuss the pros and cons of different approaches, and get hands-on experience displaying information in clear and compelling ways. We'll also discuss broader issues surrounding visualisation science, such as common ways that visualisations are misinterpreted and how to avoid them, and controversies around what counts as best practice in visual communication.

In addition to the weekly online sessions, participants are expected to spend around two hours per week applying the skills learnt to gain greater fluency and enable us to 'workshop' each other's visualisations.

Your participation will also benefit if you have the chance to take our "Give me 5! Principles of Data Visualisation", which is scheduled for 23rd & 30th March. However, attending this workshop is not a prerequisite, so please do not be deterred if you miss the dates.

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.

Applications for this workshop have now closed.

As religious services and communities have shifted online so too have scholars of religion. But at what cost? These sessions raise some of the epistemological and ethical issues of doing fieldwork in a digital environment from an inclusive anthropological perspective with a close-up on a particular case study in each session.

The first session considers conducting virtual ethnography, what is gained and what is lost, with a focus on ethnography with Orthodox Jewish populations; the second session assesses digital surveys of religious communities and their attitudes e.g. what the 'bean-counters' might miss (and strategies not to) and finally in the third session we problematize the ethical tensions in online studies of community media with a particular focus on French Muslim media, already heavily surveilled.

The sessions are intended to develop researcher knowledge and explore cross-cutting issues that concern a broad spectrum of humanities and social science-based scholarship serving as;

• a forum for the critical discussion of digital methods and epistemologies,

• a place to learn more about specific case studies particularly in the UK and France, and

• an assembly of early research minds in the throes of a related or relevant project themselves who wish to share and learn from one another

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:

• To provide an introduction to corpus linguistics in relation to digital humanities approaches;
• To develop critical understanding of how data representativeness used in quantitative research may influence results;
• To critically examine the relationship between quantitative and qualitative textual analyses;
• To provide a practical toolkit for computational textual analysis.

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

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.

Methods Workshop: Best Practices in Coding for Digital Humanities

Mary Chester-Kadwell (CDH Research Software Engineering Coordinator)

Please note this workshop has limited spaces and an application process in place. Application forms should be completed by noon Wednesday, 4 May 2022 (you can only access this form by signing into your University Google Account). Successful applicants will be notified by end-of-day Monday, 9 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 complete the application form.

Jessica M. Parr, PhD (Simmons University and The Programming Historian)

We welcome Jessica Parr as a guest lecturer for this Methods Workshop, where we will discuss mapping techniques for scholars of the transatlantic slave trade. It will open with a discussion of addressing the Eurocentricity of geospatial techniques and the archives. We will then discuss strategies for reading against the archive to locate Black voices and strategies for determining geospatial coordinates from primary sources. Finally, the workshop will conclude with a demonstration of how to create maps in Tableau and some discussion of data ethics.

Please apply for a place if you would like to attend, on registration, you will be asked to complete and submit an information form (which will remain open until 10 am Monday, 14 February 2022), places are limited and selected on a rolling basis, we would suggest early completion.  We will confirm participation week commencing Monday, 21 February 2022.

Text-mining is extracting information from unstructured text, such as books, newspapers, and manuscript transcriptions. This foundational course is aimed at students and staff new to text-mining. It 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 request a place and complete the application form, submitting it by the end of Monday, 7 March 2022. Successful applicants will be notified by the end-of-day Thursday, 10 March 2022. Preparatory materials will be released on Thursday, 17 March 2022. Places will be prioritised for students and staff in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences, libraries and museums. However, if you study or work in a STEM department and use humanities or social sciences approaches, you are also welcome to apply.

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.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Ann Borda as a guest lecturer for this CDH Methods Workshop. Ann is the Participatory Health Lead in the Co-design Living Lab for Digital Health in the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health at the University of Melbourne. She is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London, and sits on the policy committee of the Climate and Health Alliance. Ann formerly held collaborative positions in JISC and at the Science Museum London. Her research spans living lab and citizen science methods, and emerging participatory practices in digital health and culture.

There is an increasing presence in research incorporating participatory approaches to the production of knowledge. Participatory research is a range of methods framed within ideological perspectives. Its fundamental principles are that the subjects of the research become involved as partners in the process of the enquiry, and enacted through a set of social values. Participation can be classified by various degrees of involvement. Participatory activities can be expressed through various methods and approaches, such as co-design, citizen science, crowdsourcing, living labs, participatory action research and community-based participatory research, among others.

The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative https://tei-c.org/) is a standard for the transcription and description of text bearing objects, and is very widely used in the digital humanities – from digital editions and manuscript catalogues to text mining and linguistic analysis. This course will take you through the basics of the TEI – what it is and what it can be used for – with a particular focus on uses in research, paths to publication (both web and print) and the use of TEI documents as a dataset for analysis. There will be a chance to create some TEI yourself as well as looking at existing projects and examples. The course will take place over two sessions a week apart – with an introductory taught session, then a chance to work on TEI records yourself, followed by a review and discussion session.

Professor Tamsin Ford CBE, will explore the evidence impacts of the upheavals of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions on children and young people – is there a Tsunami of mental health conditions or are the kids alright?

Tamsin is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. She is an internationally renowned Child Psychiatric Epidemiologist who researches the organisation, delivery, and effectiveness of services and interventions for children and young people’s mental health.