Continuing the spirit of community-building and collaboration built during the inaugural NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities (WIDH) in January 2020, this year’s WIDH will be collocated with NYCDH Week as an entirely virtual event (February 8-12, 2021). The hashtag is #WIDH21
We are offering ten, two-hour courses at WIDH 2021 on various topics in digital humanities. Course descriptions, prerequisites and requirements are found below with each course, along with a Zoom registration link. Times below are listed in 24 hour format in both Eastern Standard Time (New York) and Gulf Standard Time (Abu Dhabi). Bios of the instructors and organizers can be found on our people page. Registration is closed and courses are full.
See a map of the institutional locations of our participants in 2021 here.
List of courses offered in 2021:
→ Introduction to Arabic Text Processing with Python and CAMeL Tools
→ Cybersecurity for Humanists
→ Introduction to Open Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
→ QuicheGIS: A cooking show style introduction to thinking about geospatial projects and transforming text to maps
→ Implementing Learner-Created Podcasts
→ Network Analysis for the Humanities
→ Archiving Web Content With Conifer
→ Using Google Sheets to Create, Organize & Explore Your Humanities Data
→ Using R and Shiny for Visualizing Humanities Spatial Data
→ Build Your Own Text-as-Data Corpus: A Print-to-Bytes Primer
Introduction to Arabic Text Processing with Python and CAMeL Tools
Instructors: Salam Khalifa | Ossama Obeid
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Time: 1000-1200 EST | 1900-2100 GST
Please note that this workshop will be given in Zoom webinar format (with questions taken only by the Q&A function)
This workshop introduces the basics of Arabic text processing. The workshop consists of two parts. We first introduce the basic challenges and common tasks associated with Arabic natural language processing. We then present CamelTools, a Python Open-Source toolkit for Arabic processing that addresses the challenges and targets the tasks. The second part of the workshop will be hands-on and introduces general Python text processing utilities, CamelTools utilities for transliteration, normalization, morphological analysis and disambiguation, named-entity recognition, dialect identification and sentiment analysis.
Skill level: Advanced
Prerequisites/requirements: Access to COLAB, with 3.0GB available on Google Drive for running interactively (needs a gmail account). Participants should have some skills in programming (Jupyter notebooks, Python, command line, etc.). Arabic literacy is not necessary, but obviously helpful.
Cybersecurity for Humanists
Instructor: Aaron Mauro
Date: Friday, February 12, 2021
Time: 1300-1500 EST | 2200-2400 GST
In this session, we will discuss security challenges facing the humanities and how to defend research interests online. We will learn many of the common terms and issues related to Cybersecurity and think about how to protect our project infrastructure beyond institutional IT requirements. We will discuss how to detect, respond, and recover from an attack. We will think about a broader threat model for the humanities and academic research in general. We will also take time to consider particular threats faced by researchers engaged in politically charged issues.
Skill level: Intermediate
Prerequisites/requirements: None
Introduction to Open Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Instructor: Alyssa Arbuckle
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Time: 1300-1500 EST | 2200-2400 GST
Open access, open science, open knowledge, open data … what does all of this openness mean, and what does it mean for those working in or alongside the humanities in particular? This offering will explore the role of open knowledge dissemination in the humanities, academia, and at large. We will focus on the history, evolution, forms, and impact of open digital scholarship within the domain of scholarly communication. Our time together will be content- and discussion-driven, but we’ll also engage with an open publishing tool or two. This workshop is geared toward students, librarians, scholars, publishers, government representatives, and others who are invested in the open development and sharing of research output.
Skill level: Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: None
QuicheGIS: A cooking show style introduction to thinking about geospatial projects and transforming text to maps
Instructor: Taylor Hixson
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Time: 0800-1000 EST | 1700-1900 GST
This session will focus on learning to think about geospatial projects and will demonstrate the data collection, creation, and mapping steps by:
– Planning the menu (thinking about your sources and ideas),
– Mise en place (structuring point data in a spreadsheet prior to GIS work),
– Cooking (plotting, styling, or analyzing data),
– Serving (sharing the end product or map)
Attendees are welcome to follow along as much as possible on their own computers. However, the outcome of this session is for attendees to gain confidence and awareness surrounding spatial and tabular thinking for geospatial projects by utilizing open resources. View session outline and resources: tiny.cc/quichegis.
Skill level: Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Ability to use and navigate spreadsheet software, especially Google Sheets; experience with analysis, visualization, or complex software suites (e.g., Stata, R, Adobe Creative Suite) is recommended for participants who wish to fully participate; download AND install QGIS 3.X prior to start of session for full participation. View the NYU Data Services install guide for assistance.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD LATEST RELEASE, 3.16.
This session will NOT provide a space for download and install assistance. Prior experience with GIS or mapping is NOT required.
Implementing Learner-Created Podcasts
Instructor: Kim Fox
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021
Time: 0800-1000 EST | 1700-1900 GST
As global podcast listenership continues to grow, students are now aware and interested in the medium. Podcasts can be an engaging collaborative course activity and/or assignment and it works well in the remote learning environment. This workshop will focus on implementing learner-created podcasts in the classroom including rubrics on how to assess creative content. No audio or podcasting experience is necessary.
Skill level: Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Listen to some podcasts (come prepared to share some of what you’re listening to). Here are some student produced podcasts: The Outlet | JRMC Award Winning Audio | Undercover
Network Analysis for the Humanities
Instructor: Gustavo Riva
Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Time: 1000-1200 EST | 1900-2100 GST
The world is full of networks and different topics of study in the humanities can make up networks: people, texts, ideas, etc. This workshop will introduce the basics of network analysis for the humanist. We will learn how to design a network in order to answer research questions in the humanities, how to create and visualize networks with open software and how to interpret some of their most important features and metrics. Participants will practice the skills acquired on a corpus of networks of characters in movies and theater plays.
Skill level: Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Recommended but not compulsory: installation of Gephi or Cytoscape.
Archiving Web Content With Conifer
Instructor: Jean-Christophe Peyssard
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Time: 0800-1000 EST | 1700-1900 GST
The composition of corpus, analysis and preservation of Web archives is crucial for Social Sciences and Humanities. Conifer (ex-Webrecorder) developed by Rhizome offers a wide range of possibility to start the simple and fast constitution of standardized research corpus. After a quick introduction to the problematic and landscape of Web Archiving, this Workshop aim at learning how to use Conifer and build a first set of archived Web pages.
Skill level: Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Google Chrome and Firefox
Using Google Sheets to Create, Organize & Explore Your Humanities Data
Instructor: Nada Ammagui
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021
Time: 1000-1200 EST | 1900-2100 GST
Google Sheets is a web-based spreadsheet program, equivalent in some ways to Microsoft Excel, with a wide array of features and uses. For people who would like to embark on a digital humanities project, it is one of many options for organizing data. This workshop is aimed at total beginners and will introduce a few ways to facilitate automatic data entry, organization, and visualization on Google Sheets. The skills presented in this workshop are suitable for anyone working with spreadsheets, and apply for any project in which there is repeated information (names, places, objects, dates). We will learn to sort and filter data, auto-populate cells, and organize sheets visually. The workshop is in three parts: first, an overview of Google Sheets and potential use cases (e.g., art exhibitions over time, books authored by a publishing house); second, a detailed explanation of some of Google Sheets’ features (Code Tables, Data Validation, Conditional Formatting, VLookup, Column Stats and Filters, and Pivot Tables); and third, a walk-through of these tools using a sample data set. Participants can follow along with the walk-through by using their own data or the sample set provided.
Skill level: Total Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Basic familiarity with Google Sheets or Excel. The course will be carried out using Google Sheets. You will be added to a shared sheet using the email address that you provide for the registration, so a Google account is required. Participants can also observe the process without using the Sheets and can use their own data set to practice the skills learned.
Using R and Shiny for Visualizing Humanities Spatial Data
Instructor: Victor Westrich
Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Time: 1300-1500 EST | 2200-2400 GST
This course will focus on using the programming language R as a way of visualizing spatial data. It will use four humanities datasets (pre-modern and modern, from Europe and the Middle East) and provide participants with the code required to carry out the visualization. We will discuss how participants might match different kinds of spatial datasets for different visualizations in Shiny. We will approach the visualization process in four steps: (1) discussing what the “story” of our data is, and which aspects or conclusions from it we want to illuminate via visualization. (2) preprocessing our data into a dataset. Here it is especially important to determine the aspects of a given dataset, i.e. if a two-faceted approach is satisfactory or if a more faceted approach (e.g. temporospatial) is required. (3) choosing the clearest and most efficient visual representation for our dataset. (4) selecting the most viable user interface to maximize accessibility and impact of our visualization.
Skill level: Intermediate
Prerequisites/requirements: Basic familiarity with Leaflet & a programming language such as R. The course will be carried out using RStudio Cloud. You will be added to an account using the email address that you provide for the registration and you will need to activate it by responding to an email before the session. Participants can also observe the process without being added to RStudio Cloud.
Build Your Own Text-as-Data Corpus: A Print-to-Bytes Primer
Instructor: Nicholas Wolf
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021
Time: 1800-2000 EST | 0300-0500 GST (12 Feb)
This hands-on workshop will teach participants how to construct their own digital text corpus for conducting humanities data analysis. We’ll cover simple tools for turning printed texts in a variety of languages into computer-readable files, the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and consider helpful tools for post-process correction of digitized texts. We’ll also look at open-access text-as-data sources available over simple web-browser-based API calls. The workshop is geared toward digital humanists needing to assemble text data that are not yet compiled or in computer readable form for analysis, and who are looking for an introduction to the workflows and software suited to building the research materials needed for analysis. We’ll learn how to use Tesseract, an open-source OCR software, consider the anatomy of an HOCR file (the output of OCR efforts), and deploy techniques for extracting structured information from a page.
Skill level: Intermediate
Prerequisites/requirements: Familiarity with using a web browser, willingness to try out some short command-line steps with guidance, interest in text-as-data analysis projects. Participants should have a computer with a text editor installed such as BBEdit, TextWrangler, Atom, Notepad++ or the like; administrator access to install open-source software (Tesseract).
