Pixelating

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

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

Candice McGowan

Do you have a lot of messy text data? Does it have a lot of spelling mistakes or variations? OpenRefine, a free, open-source tool can help you clean your data. In this introductory workshop, we will cover what OpenRefine is, when it’s useful (as well as when it’s challenging to use), and how to do some basic data cleaning using OpenRefine on a demo dataset. Bring your laptop so that you can follow along!

Link to dataset.

Link to Open Refine.

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

Jeremy Frey, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Head of Computational Systems Chemistry, University of Southampton, UK

Audrey McCulloch, Chief Executive, Association of Learned Professional and Society Publishers (ALPSP) and Director of the Publishers Licensing Society

Ellen Finnie, Head, Scholarly Communications & Collections Strategy, MIT Libraries

Michael Levine-Clark, Dean and Director of Libraries, University of Denver

Text and Data Mining (TDM) facilitates the discovery, selection, structuring, and analysis of large numbers of documents/sets of data, enabling the visualization of results in new ways to support innovation and the development of new knowledge. In both academia and commercial contexts, TDM is increasingly recognized as a means to extract, re-use and leverage additional value from published information, by linking concepts, addressing specific questions, and creating efficiencies. But TDM in practice is not straightforward. TDM methodology and use are fast changing but are not yet matched by the development of enabling policies.

This webinar provides a review of where we are today with TDM, as seen from the perspective of the researcher, library, and licensing-publisher communities.

Link to the webinar.

Allan Cho

This presentation is based on a recent study visit to East Asia.   Not
only is the digital humanities in Asia a new and highly contested area of research, the digital tools and text corpora – considered the raw material of text mining and computational text analysis – are often more abundant in English and other Latin alphabetic
scripts than they are for projects dealing with Non-Latin orthographies.  Despite this, there is an emerging movement among East Asian academics both inside and outside the continent that are expertly driving new research and interdisciplinary collaborations
in the area of digital scholarship.  This presentation looks at three in particular: the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive; the Hong Kong Memory Project; and the MemoryHunt photo project in Japan.  This presentation will be thirty minutes in length.

Presentation: Digital Humanities in East Asia (Aug 11)

Useful links:

• http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/memory-hunting/before-after.pl?projectID=3&before=8AF419FA-6B25-11E4-B0A4-8430D00D5249&after=14B8DAF6-6DEF-11E4-8AC2-E060D00D5249&lang=en
• http://www.hkmemory.hk/
• http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/memory-hunting/

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