Month: October 2016

Dr. Kevin Fisher, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology

Archaeology aims to understand past societies through the discovery, recording and analysis of their material remains. This process is currently being revolutionized by new digital technologies. Dr. Kevin Fisher, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, will explore some of prospects and problems of this new terrain through two case studies.

The first examines the challenges of modeling a series of monumental stucco masks adorning the façade of a 1500-year old temple at the Maya site of El Zotz, deep in the rain forests of Guatemala. The second looks at current efforts of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project to integrate a number of new digital methods in its investigation of the social dynamics of the first cities that emerged on the island of Cyprus over 3000 years ago. This project is implementing a fully-digital workflow for recording excavations based on photogrammetric modeling and tablet-based data entry directly into a GIS. It also uses terrestrial laser scanning and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to produce 3D models at the scale of an entire urban landscape. He will also discuss his ongoing efforts to create an augmented reality app to enhance visitor experience at the site of Kalavasos.

Facilitator(s): Mark Christensen, Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Milena Constanda

Prof. Muhammad Abdul-Magged

With the increasing role social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumbler play in our lives today, the body of data generated by their users continues to grow phenomenally. Accordingly, searches and processing of social media data beyond the limiting level of surface words are becoming increasingly important to business and governmental bodies, as well as to lay web users. Detection of sentiment, emotion, deception, gender, sarcasm, age, perspective, topic, community, and personality are all valuable social meaning components that promise to be important elements of next generation search engines and web intelligence. The emerging area of extracting social meaning from social media data using computational methods is known as Social Media Mining (SMM).

This workshop is intended to introduce the core ideas of natural language processing (NLP) and then to provide the ideas and some hands-on instruction in mining social data using NLP and machine learning technologies. Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Assistant Professor of Information and Media in the iSchool@UBC, will address practical issues related to building tools to mine social media data and some of the primary computational methods employed for modeling social meaning as occurring in these data.

Facilitator(s): Mark Christensen, Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Milena Constanda

Eugene Barsky

In this session, we plan to cover a number of ways UBC Library is supporting DH community with RDM:

Data Management Repository — UBC Library has implemented robust data management software – Abacus Dataverse. The system is designed to manage and preserve data and it is opened to UBC researchers, labs and institutes.

Data Management Plans – We have implemented national DMP Assistant software – is a bilingual tool for preparing data management plans (DMPs). The tool follows best practices in data stewardship and walks researchers step-by-step through key questions about data management. DMP Assistant is designed to meet the anticipated Data Management Plan requirements (in English or French) of most Canadian funders.

Data Management Guidance — Research Data Management Website – is a valuable tool for researchers to learn about data management, specifically at UBC.  Open access materials were developed to provide training for UBC researchers, faculty and students. Please see our DataGuide to get started and data privacy and security best practices document that outlines key considerations for researchers when working with sensitive data and Personal Information.

Discoverability of Data – We are working to increase the visibility of research datasets already added to the UBC’s data repository.  These datasets can be discovered through many search interfaces, including Google and Summon. We have embarked on a project to assign DOI’s to all UBC Library digital assets including datasets, via our new Open Collections portal – https://open.library.ubc.ca/.  DOIs will increase the further visibility and discoverability of UBC research data.

Facilitator(s): Mark Christensen, Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Milena Constanda