Author: carolamigo

This session of Pixelating is a recorded ALA webinar on Engaging the Digital Humanities: Collaborating Throughout the Research Lifecycle. The webinar will present first-hand experiences with tools and platforms utilized in DH research to provide strategies that can be cross-purposed to a wide range of institutional contexts. For the full description please see the ALA page.

This is an open event – drop in and out as your schedule allows., and please feel free to bring your lunch.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Susan Atkey

In this session, we’ll look at Text Analysis using Voyant Tools. Voyant is a text reading and analysis environment for digital texts that lets you dive in and do some light analysis of texts without needing to code. We’ll introduce the core ideas of text mining and provide some hands-on instruction in text analysis, utilizing a user-friendly, web-based tool.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Johanna Fulda

Want to make a visual timeline, but don’t have the time to draw one manually? Or maybe you have some documents, but you’re not sure if the events they depict form a compelling timeline?

TimeLineCurator is an online tool that lets you quickly and automatically find temporal references in freeform text to generate a visual timeline. You can then interactively curate the events in this timeline, or create a mashup of multiple documents against each other to compare their temporal structure.

In this session, Johanna Fulda of the UBC Computer Science InfoVis Group group will give a demo of the tool and show a few projects that were built with it.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Willis Monroe

In this session, Willis Monroe, Managing Editor of the Database of Religious History (DRH) will present on the creation and behind the scenes work of the DRH. The Database of Religious History is an online collaborative project to collect aspects of religious history throughout time and space. The project relies on entries created by experts in fields of history overseen by a group of editors. All the data is stored in a relational database and made available through a accessible website. Data is primarily recorded on a quantitative level allowing for insight and analysis on the data otherwise not possible. However, every field within the entries has room for qualitative data as well, giving each entry a depth akin to encyclopedia entries. In addition, each entry can serve as its own nexus for scholarly dialog preserving the consensus of the field within the history of the answers.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Susan Atkey

This week we will be exploring the JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer. This tool allows you to use your own document (or text or image) to find suggested matches in the JSTOR archives. The tool analyses the text within the document for key topics and terms, then uses the ones it prioritizes to suggest citations. You can then adjust the results by changing the weights for each term, adding new terms, and deleting irrelevant ones.

We’ll be exploring this tool starting at 1pm. Please join us for this informal session! Bring a variety of documents to test out: an image, a newspaper article, a scholarly article, etc.

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

Dr. Andrew Martindale

CARD has become the world’s leading data platform for archaeological radiocarbon dates, a data set of increasing importance in heritage management, history, and statistical explorations of human demography. It did not start out this way. Developed as a local resource at the Canadian Museum of History, CARD languished after the retirement of its principal researcher, Dr. Richard Morlan. In 2014 CARD was transferred to UBC’s Laboratory of Archaeology (LOA) and was re-launched with a revised interface and improved functionality in 2015. Within 6 months, CARD had expanded across the world and now houses over 75% of the on line 14C data.

Dr. Andrew Martindale will discuss how this transformation was unexpected and how it raises important and as yet unresolved issues about data security, researcher access, descent community participation, funding, and data management, processing capacity, and administration. As CARD transforms from small to big data, we are developing a decentralized administrative model that we hope will provide the greatest value for users, the most responsive relationships, and the most enduring legacy. As anthropologists we recognize that much of what we do is necessarily ad hoc and emergent from practice; as archaeologists we understand that only time will tell if our plans are successful.

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

Leah P. Macfadyen

Learning analytics, as defined by the Society for Learning Analytics research (SoLAR), refers to “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.” Developments in education and learning technologies in recent decades mean that universities are now awash in data about learners and learning. Online teaching tools such as Learning Management Systems (e.g. UBC’s ‘Connect’ system), discussion forums, messaging and homework systems, simulations, peer feedback environments and audio/video tools used in flipped or blended courses all collect rich sets of data about learner activity, behaviour, course choices, and performance. As a result, we now have a wealth of e-traces about learners, courses, and programs.

In this session, I will give a brief overview of the emerging field of learning analytics. I will review the kinds of questions that learning analytics research typically seeks to address, and the HE stakeholders who may be served by learning analytics. I will describe some concrete examples of current learning analytics projects in UBC Arts, and the ‘current state’ of learning analytics at UBC. Substantial time is planned to allow for group discussion and questions.

Leah P. Macfadyen is Program Director, Evaluation and Learning Analytics in the UBC Faculty of Arts, where she leads a variety of learning analytics and academic analytics projects to better inform student support and planning at many levels. Leah holds graduate degrees in the Sciences (UBC) and the Social Sciences (Simon Fraser University), and has undertaken interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative educational research over the past fifteen years, with a particular interest in eLearning, culture and communication in virtual learning environments, temporal analysis of learning data, and the challenges of implementing learning analytics at scale. She is currently a member of the Executive of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), and at UBC co-leads the Learning Analytics/Visual Analytics special interest group (LAVA) For more, see: https://changingeye.com and http://isit.arts.ubc.ca/learning-analytics/.

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

Dr. Mark Turin

The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. The project website connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download – without payment, subscription or password.

While Digital Himalaya began as a strategy for collecting and protecting the products of colonial-era ethnographic collections on the Himalayas – for posterity and for access by source communities – the project has now become a collaborative digital publishing environment, bringing a new collection online every month, with close to half a million web visitors since its establishment in 2000.

Early digitization projects often face sustainability issues. In this talk Dr. Mark Turin will offer some candid reflections on how Digital Himalaya has been nurtured and supported over 15 years with sometimes unlikely sources of funding, and conclude by discussing an exciting and emerging partnership with the UBC Library system.

Mark Turin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the University’s new Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies.

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

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