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marijnkoolen

Day 1: Gathering Data

After a general introduction into the goals of Digital Humanities, we discuss the shift in perspective when we look at our objects of study as data points. What questions and methodologies does this new point of view prompt? We encourage you to start thinking about new research questions that could be answered by analysing the data. In order to facilitate this, we introduce a workflow that guides the process of getting from raw through presentable data. We focus on the process of acquiring data and on how to structure it in a meaningful way. We focus on Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) and writing REST queries to acquire data.

Reading material: Ben Fry - The Seven Stages of Visualizing Data

Slides

Tools

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Humanities Dimension of our Course

Examples

Bosch project

• imaging
• translation
• mapping

New York Times Guantanamo project

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Diagnosis

Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their learning and research. They are reluctant to engage with computers and technology through coding. This remains a major distinction between the humanities and the sciences. The sciences design, create and maintain their own relevant digital research enviornments and tools, while the humanities make do with prefabricated, and often inappropriate, tools.

At the moment, there are no broadly available academic programming courses aimed at humanities scholars. For various reasons, however, coding skills are needed now more than ever, and even more so in the future:

1. Knowledge of programming helps students and researchers to understand the various technologically mediated objects that they are studying.

2. Developing custom tools, rather than using ready-made ones, can improve the actual practice of humanities research as well as (the quantity and quality) of its output.

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Coding the Humanities

Vision

Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their research and are reluctant to engage with computers and technology through coding. At the moment, there are no broadly available academic programming courses aimed at humanities scholars. In the future, however, these coding skills will become increasingly important: to understand the various technologically mediated objects that we are studying, to the actual practice of our research, and to meet an ever-growing demand in the public and private sector for academics who can code

At the same time there is a development towards online academic education. Currently this is mainly in the form of MOOCs, which focus on massive numbers of students who can participate in these courses. There is a reasonable fear, however, that the lack of individual attention will lead to a decay of quality of education and scholarship. We believe, however, that a different, more creative use