Digital Humanities Workshops

This event was held on Monday 5 August 2019

The Faculty of Education & Arts invites you to attend two days of Centre for 21st Century Humanities workshops with visiting Digital Humanities specialist Dr Alana Piper from the University of Technology, Sydney.

The workshops will run Monday August 5th and Tuesday August 6th in Room X803 at New Space, Hunter Street, Newcastle. They are open to all FEDUA staff. Please RSVP to C21CH@newcastle.edu.au and specify which workshop (or both) you will attend.

Workshop 1 – Monday August 5,1pm-5.30pm

‘Building Research Project Websites: From Blogging and Wordpress to Crowdsourcing and Zooniverse’.

This workshop explains the benefits and challenges of blogging about research, and provides advice on blog writing. It also details how researchers can go about setting up their own blog or project website using Wordpress.

Topics covered include choosing your hosting platform, search engine optimisation, must-have plugins etc. The second half of the workshop introduces participants to the methods and debates about crowdsourcing research, that is using volunteers or members of the public to perform research tasks like transcribing historical records. Different options for utilising such ‘citizen science’ or ‘citizen history’ approaches are outlined. Participants will then be shown how they can set up a citizen science project using the open-source platform Zooniverse. (Participants are encouraged to bring along some samples of the types of records they may want members of the public to work with.)

Workshop 2 – Tuesday August 6, 9.30am-5pm

‘Data Visualisations: Timelines, Storymaps and Network Analysis’

This workshop introduces participants to some easy-to-use tools for visualising humanities data. The first half of the workshop focuses in particular on the types of visualisations that can be used to convey a narrative about temporal data and explores some of the critical thinking around timeline visualisations.A range of tools for creating such visualisations will be outlined, and participants will take an in-depth, hands-on look at using open-source platforms Timeline.JS and Storymap.JS from Knightlab.

The second half of the workshop moves on to the slightly more advanced concept of network analysis visualisations. Network analysis involves the mapping of connections or relationships between people or things. This workshop demonstrates some of the different ways that network analysis can be used in historical research. Participants are introduced to the open-source software Gephi, how to create network visualisations within this programme, and some simple statistical analyses that can be used to understand or quantify what the relationships within the networks mean. (Participants are encouraged to pre-install the software Gephi – free to download – on the computers they will be using for the workshop.)