digital humanities – Pixelating

“So I Want To Use the TEI…Now What?”

This workshop—the second in the Introduction to TEI series—aims to introduce participants to tools and methods for encoding and rendering their TEI texts. We will start with (arguably) the best TEI-XML editor: oXygen XML Editor, a powerful, but costly, software for encoding TEI. We will explore oXygen’s built-in encoding frameworks and transformation scenarios and toggle between the various interfaces that oXygen provides for editing TEI.

We will then look to and experiment with some online encoding interfaces for creating TEI projects—TEI Publisher, CWRC Writer, and others—in order to create our own TEI files. We will then take those files and create various output formats (HTML, PDF, DOCX) using a number of different tools, including TEI’s own OxGarage, a free web interface for converting between many different file formats (not just TEI), as well as the powerful generic file conversion program Pandoc.

This workshop is open to everyone—no technical skills or prior experience with the TEI necessary. For those who are interested but did not attend the first workshop, please look over the introductory materials found here: https://github.com/joeytakeda/teiworkshop/. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop with them and, if possible, download a free trial of oXygen. This is not mandatory but will allow you to follow along in the first stage of the workshop. To download the 30 days free trial of oXygen, see here: https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/register.html

Registration: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7458

Instructor Bio

Joey Takeda is a digital humanities programmer for a number of projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and The Stratford Festival Online. He is currently an MA student in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream) at UBC, specializing in indigenous and diasporic literature in Canada.

Webinar on the Digital Scholar Lab – Digital Humanities Without Scripts and Programming?

Join us as for a live webinar on the use of Digital Scholar Lab a promising tool that enables users at any level to perform textual analysis on large corpora of historical texts, streamlining the workflow process to help generate new research insights. Digital Scholar Lab allows users to apply natural language processing tools to raw text data (OCR) from Gale Primary Sources archives in a single research platform that could not have been done in the past without extensive knowledge of computing languages for querying data such as R or Python.In the past, working with big data for analysis required hurdles to jump before a humanities researcher could conduct text mining and analysis. Even most out-out-the-box applications still required technical knowledge to install and use command line operations, rendering using them out of the scope for many students and researchers in the humanities.

Enabling a point-and-click approach to link the content sets created within the platform directly with the digital tools to analyze them, the Digital Scholar Lab research environment provides access to powerful text mining tools which are embedded in the dataset curation process and visualization outputs from your analysis.

As UBC Library embarks on a one-month subscription trial of Digital Scholar Lab, we invite you to join us for this webinar on using this tool.

Thursday, October 11, 2018, 12.00pm-1.00pm, Koerner Library, Room 153 (Level One) Register online at: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7456

What is TEI and Why Should I Care?

This workshop is an introduction to Text Encoding Initiative: an open-source, community based, multilingual standard for digital textual scholarship that gives scholars a vocabulary and a method to create richly expressive and critically informed versions of their texts (whether that be a poem, a novel, a manuscript, an inscription on a tombstone, or even an audio recording). This workshop thus has two main goals: (1) introduce participants to textual encoding and the wide range of possibilities that are afforded by good, critical markup and (2) help participants understand why TEI might work for their own projects.

By the end of this one-hour workshop, participants should become familiar with the variety of projects that use TEI, understand the expressive power of the TEI, and walk away understanding how working in TEI could be benefit their upcoming translation, edition, transcription, et cetera. This workshop is open to anyone interested in “text,” however broadly defined. Absolutely no technical skills are required, but participants are asked to bring a text (either analog or digital) to work with during the workshop. The workshop instructor is Joey Takeda, a graduate student in the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures.

Bio

Thursday, September 20, 12.00-1.00pm, Koerner Library, Room 153. Please register: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7452

Ending Your Digital Humanities Project from the Start

Departing from the oft-asked question of “How do I know when my project is finished?”, this presentation centers around the question “How do I end my digital project, even if I don’t think it’s done?” Though various criteria have been proposed for evaluating the “done-ness” of a project (see, for example, this Digital Humanities Quarterly 2009 article), there has been little discussion about how to ensure that your project is archivable, accessible, and stable even if the project’s primary objects—say, an edition of a text—do not completely meet your project’s definition of “done.”

The Endings project, based out of the University of Victoria, is a collaborative project between digital humanities programmers, project directors, and university librarians that focuses less on content-based “done-ness” and more on best practices for archivable and sustainable scholarship. While the digital projects that form the core of the Endings project—The Robert Graves Diary, Le Mariage Sous L’Ancien Régime, The Nxaʔamxcín Dictionary Project, and The Map of Early Modern London,—are all at varying stages of completion, they share a common set of principles that lead to maximum archivability and accessibility.

In this presentation, Takeda discusses two of these projects at either end of the completion spectrum: The Robert Graves Diary, which was technically finished in the mid-2000s but required significant upgrades throughout the last decade; and The Map of Early Modern London, a long-standing project whose many objectives include a complete set of the extant mayoral pageants of London from 1585 to 1639 by 2022. Through these projects, Takeda explores and shares what makes a project “Endings-compliant” and offers up some best principles for thinking about how to end your digital humanities project from the start.

Bio:

Joey Takeda is a digital humanities programmer for a number of number of projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, The Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Stratford Festival Online. He is currently an MA student in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream) at UBC, specializing in indigenous and diasporic literatures in Canada.

(Date changed to Thursday, June 28, 2018, 12.00pm)

Queering the Map in #TransformDH with Y Vy Truong

Queering the Map is a community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space. As queer life becomes increasingly less centered around specific neighborhoods and the buildings within them, notions of ‘queer spaces’ become more abstract and less tied to concrete geographical locations.

As the project collectively documents the spaces that hold queer memory, from park benches to parking garages, to mark moments of queerness wherever they occur, Queering the Map is emblematic of #TransformDH, a movement within the digital humanities that not only seeks questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability within the work of Feminist, queer, antiracist activists, artists, and media-makers outside of academia that contribute to digital studies in all its forms, but also to invite others to join and claim the hashtag for themselves, and to actively seek a more transformative DH.

In exploring this unique digital space, Y Vy Truong’s session will examine how we can shift our framework of digital humanities from technical processes to political ones, and seek to understand the social, intellectual, economic, political, and personal impact of digital practices as we develop them in our own work.

Registration: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7404

Describing History With Data in the Digital Humanities

The Canadian government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants entering Canada between 1885 and 1923 in order to restrict immigration. While a print register was created to keep track of the influx of migrants, the detailed recording resulted in years of demographic information about the immigrants that has become a rich source of data for researchers. These original records were painstakingly transformed to a digital spreadsheet, a project led by UBC history scholars from 2005 to 2007. Yet the record was incoherent as records showed idiosyncratic dialects of the immigrants resulted in variations of placenames and titles.

From 2008 to 2010, a project to normalize various transliterations of the immigrants’ origins laid the groundwork for more in-depth research for future researchers was led by UBC’s Asian Library. Driven by the curiosity about to what extent the data is used and how far we can go, Sarah Zhang conducted a study analyzing the data regarding the immigrants’ wellbeing and migration pattern. By leveraging the power of Palladio, a networking analysis intertwined with a set of visualizations designed for complex, multi-dimensional data, Sarah discovered some hidden patterns that contradict previous studies on this topic, revealing the substantive potential of this data waiting to be unlocked with further research. Join us for an informative workshop on how this research was conducted and learn how to do some data analysis using this software.

Please download the following sample dataset before coming to the workshop.

Speaker

Sarah is a reference librarian at Simon Fraser University Library and a recent MLIS graduate from the iSchool at UBC. She was a Koerner Research Commons Graduate Assistant and gave instructional sessions on Quantitative Data Software using SPSS and on Qualitative Data Software using NVivo. As a librarian, Sarah is not only interested in facilitating access to knowledge, but also passionate about promoting critical thinking and openness as means for us to become freer to think and grow.

Registration link: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7055