Workshop: The Triangle Digital Humanities Institute
Join the Triangle Digital Humanities Network (TDHN) for the second Triangle Digital Humanities Institute (TDHI)! This three-day event aims to help practitioners build digital skills, share work, and meet new collaborators. TDHI is open to anyone interested in the digital humanities community, including academics, cultural heritage specialists, civic hackers, and others. There will be two days of skill-building workshops followed by a day-long unconference, and you can register for one, two, or all three days.
Early registration is now open!
Early registration from April 15th to April 22nd is open anyone outside of the three major R1 institutions in the Triangle (Duke, NCSU, and UNC Chapel Hill), and students from any institution. This is intended to encourage diverse participation, especially for people who are outside of academia entirely. If you are from UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, or NC State, we invite to register beginning on Monday, April 22nd.
Register Here: May TDHI Registration Form (https://forms.gle/TZAFkzwcQy1BrS9Y7)
Wednesday, May 22nd
09:00 – 10:00 AM Coffee and Registration
10:00 – 10:30 AM Welcome
10:30 – 12:00 PM Workshop Session 1
- Low Barrier to Entry: Using Free Tools to Introduce Undergraduates to the Digital Humanities (JJ Bauer)
What is the quickest and easiest way to integrate the digital humanities into your undergraduate teaching? This workshop will examine several freely available online tools (Google Maps, Timeline JS, and Pinterest) alongside case studies pulled from several UNC Art History undergraduate courses. The case studies will lay out practical means for introducing the tools to students via the syllabus, course website, and in-class instruction as well as demonstrate their effectiveness in enhancing student research and engagement with course content. Workshop participants will use some prepared materials to learn the basics of each tool and to begin thinking about how to structure an assignment around the tool for a variety of humanities disciplines. - Is it Achievable? Assigning Tenable Media Projects (Winifred Metz and Jennie Goforth)
This workshop will help instructors create an effective project time-line for a DH assignment. We’ll discuss making assignments tenable within a reasonable timeframe during a semester’s class. We’ll cover negotiating an effective outline for a manageable DH assignment that balances achievable learning goals and conducting research in tandem with producing a meaningful digital work.
12:00 – 1:00 PM Lunch Break (Provided)
01:00 – 2:30 PM Workshops Session 2
- Twitter Analytics in the Humanities Classroom (Emma Davenport)
This workshop will walk participants through the steps of conceiving, planning, executing, and assessing a two-week unit that invites students to explore the relationship among social media, visualization of large datasets, and humanities questions. We will examine and evaluate a completed sample unit, discuss the pedagogical benefits and drawbacks of the visualization software Tableau, and develop familiarity with some of the classroom applications of Twitter. Additionally, participants will have an opportunity to construct their own visualizations of a sample Twitter dataset. Ultimately, we will aim to answer the question: how can working with large datasets augment students’ abilities to engage with humanistic questions? - Mobile Storytelling (Brett Chambers)
More information coming soon!
02:30 – 02:45 PM Break
02:45 – 04:15 PM Workshop Session 3
- Developing websites including VR for use in the classroom (Thomas Herron, Doug Barnum, and Laurie Godwin)
This workshop is targeted at teachers at all levels who wish to update or use a tailor-made website in their classrooms for the first time. The workshop will focus on conceptualizing and building specialized websites containing DH material for use in class and research (this workshop is not a tutorial in on-line teaching or programming). Best and worst pedagogical practices using open-access DH websites will be explored. Participants will model their proposed websites on paper as the workshop helps them troubleshoot and explore applicable software applications to create the sites with. Additional information will be given on different kinds of VR experiences now available. Working models developed at ECU will be used as examples. These include Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington 1898 (http://core.ecu.edu/umc/wilmington/index.html), directed by Prof. Karen Zipf (Dept of History, ECU), and the multidisciplinary Centering Spenser: a digital resource for Kilcolman Castle website (http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/index.html). The latter has recently begun employing VR applications and devices like WondaVR, Google-cardboard/cellphones, and Oculus. - Teaching with Scalar (Grant Glass)
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
04:15 – 04:30 PM Wrap-Up
Thursday, May 23rd
09:00 – 10:00 AM Coffee and Registration
10:00 – 10:30 AM Welcome
10:30 – 12:00 PM Workshop Session 1
- Bringing Historical Maps into GIS (Mia Partlow and Erica Hayes)
Interacting with historical maps in their proper geographic space allows for a more accurate representation of a particular place and the changes it has undergone over time. This workshop will provide you with the steps to align geographic data to a digitized historical map and create a georeferenced historical map layered with geospatial data. Participants will work with simple tools like Map Warper, Mapbox, and Tableau to create an interactive mapping visualization.
In order to participate in the hands-on activity, participants will need a laptop. Please create accounts with Map Warper and Mapbox, and download Tableau’s free version at public.tableau.com - Python I – Beginner Basics (Matt Jansen, Claire Cahoon, Kristina Bush, and Nathan Kelber)
Get started with the Python, one of the most widely used programming languages. We’ll help you install Python 3 and the Anaconda distribution, execute your first lines of code, and explore the basic functionality of Python. After this workshop, attendees should be better placed to start working on a specific project in Python, learning along the way, or work through more in-depth training.
12:00 – 1:00 PM Lunch Break (Provided)
01:00 – 2:30 PM Workshops Session 2
- Customizable Leaflet Maps (Maggie Murphy and Jo Klein)
Learn about Leaflet, an easy-to-use open source JavaScript library for creating customizable interactive maps, in this hands-on workshop taught by a humanities librarian and a GIS/data viz librarian from UNC Greensboro. Leaflet requires only basic ability to read and edit HTML, CSS, and JSON in order to create beautiful maps for presentations and exhibits, but can be used in combination with other scripting languages and GIS technologies for visualizations of larger data sets. - Tropy for Archival Research (Erica Hayes and Nathan Kelber)
Tropy is free, open-source software that allows you to organize and describe photographs of research material. Once you have imported your photos into Tropy, you can combine photos into items (e.g., photos of the three pages of a letter into a single item), and group photos into lists. You can also describe the content of a photograph. Tropy uses customizable metadata templates with multiple fields for different properties of the content of your photo, for example, title, date, author, box, folder, collection, archive. You can enter information in the template for an individual photo or select multiple photos and add or edit information to them in bulk. Tropy also lets you tag photos. You can also add one or more notes to a photo; a note could be a transcription of a document. A search function lets you find material in your photos, using metadata, tags, and notes.
02:30 – 02:45 PM Break
02:45 – 04:15 PM Workshop Session 3
- Augmented and Virtual Reality Workshop (Brian Moynihan and Lynn Eades)
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) are making an impact on all aspects of teaching, learning, and research in every field. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the technologies available and how they are being used at UNC Chapel Hill and beyond. It includes hands-on interaction with some of the devices and tools that are available for creation and consumption of immersive experiences. - Python II – Advanced Beginner (Matt Jansen, Nathan Kelber, Claire Cahoon, and Kristina Bush)
This workshop builds on Python I offered in workshop session 2. Learn more about the functionality of python and how to use its features to accomplish or automate tasks in and outside academia.
04:15 – 04:30 PM Wrap-Up
Friday, May 24th
09:00 – 09:30AM Coffee and Registration
09:30 – 10:00 AM Welcome (Defining the Triangle Digital Humanities Network)
10:00 – 10:50 AM 7 x 7 Speed Networking
- Meet 7 new people for 7 minutes each
11:00 – 12:00 PM Birds of a Feather I
- On-the-fly discussion groups with people who share your interests
12:00 – 01:00 PM Lunch Break (Provided)
01:00 – 01:50 PM Lightning Talks
- A series of 5-minute project talks from your fellow unconference attendees
01:50 – 02:00 PM Break
02:00 – 03:00 PM Birds of a Feather II
- On-the-fly discussion groups with people who share your interests
03:00 – 04:30 PM TBD
04:30 – 05:00 PM Open Mic and Wrap-Up
- Open session to make announcements, give congratulations, advertise job openings, put out a call for papers, or anything else! Then a recap from the day.
Questions can be directed to triangledhnetwork@gmail.com
The TDHI is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is one of fifteen Digital Humanities Research Institutes formed in partnership with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Interested in hosting a TDHI in the future? We are currently seeking volunteers to help organize the final 2019 Institute. Please contact Nathan Kelber (nkelber@email.unc.edu)
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