Digital Humanities & Research Software Engineering Summer Workshop
The Alan Turing Institute is pleased to announce registration is now open for the Digital Humanities & Research Software Engineering virtual summer school 26 - 30 July 2021, organised by Federico Nanni (The Alan Turing Institute), Mary Chester-Kadwell (University of Cambridge), Neil Jakeman (King's College London), Lucia Michelin (University of Edinburgh), Barbara McGillivray (University of Cambridge and The Alan Turing Institute).
The one-week summer school will involve 5 intensive training days where the learners have an opportunity to gain thorough understanding of the role of a Research Software Engineer in Digital Humanities research. This is an introductory course open to all (including postgraduate students, early career researchers, data scientists), and will require full time (8h/ day) or part time (4h/ day) remote attendance for a week in the UK timezone (BST) - see more below.
A day in the summer school
Morning lectures will introduce examples of research projects in Digital Humanities (DH) that have strongly benefitted from the contribution of Research Software Engineering (RSE) experts in the team. The afternoon sessions will consist of hands-on activities on the topics presented in the morning. Each day will finish with an open discussion with a speaker on their career in between RSE and Digital Humanities.
Please note you can apply either for the lectures only (theory) OR for both lectures and practicals (full experience of the summer school). You will have an option in the application form to select which of these you are interested in.
Schedule
Day 1. Organised by: Turing Research Engineering Group (REG) & Living with Machines (LwM)
Opening talks by Barbara McGillivray on the challenges and prospects of the intersection of Humanities and Data Science at the Alan Turing Institute and on REG role in Living with Machines by Ruth Ahnert and David Beavan, PI and Co-I on the project. Afternoon activity on integrating Git-flow when collaboratively developing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool for Digital History in Python (by Federico Nanni, Kasra Hosseini and Mariona Coll Ardanuy). DH-RSE Stories by Giovanni Colavizza (previously at Turing Research Engineering Group and Living with Machines Co-I) on his career path back-and-forth between Digital Humanities and Software Engineering.
Day 2. Organised by: Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH)
Best practices in coding for humanities research to make code more open, reproducible and sustainable. Morning talks on recent DH projects in Cambridge where research software has been integral to research outputs. Coding activity in Python on organising and evolving code projects for usability, re-use and automation. DH-RSE Stories by Mary-Chester Kadwell on the 'coding journey' that individuals take as they go through their careers: developing individuals and code in tandem.
Day 3. Organised by: Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society (CDCS)
Present your result efficiently: using code for data visualisation in humanities and social science. Best practices and pathways to generate more informative, reusable and open visualisations of your datasets. The day starts with a keynote on “Data Visualization: From Exploration to Storytelling to Participation” by Benjamin Bach. The activity is offered in R - participants are not required to have knowledge of it - it is part of the training activity to experience working on a project in a non-familiar programming language. In parallel to the R-tutorial, we run a hands-on tutorial on network visualization using vistorian.net. DH-RSE Stories by Lucy Havens.
Day 4. Organised by: Kings Digital Lab (KDL)
A Sustainable Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) model for RSE. The morning session will look at case studies and introduce the SDLC, with contributions from other members of the Lab. The afternoon will be delivered in medium length sessions which apply SDLC principles to hypothetical research project scenarios, working in groups to refine requirements and priorities, and to plan a digital strategy. Presented by Neil Jakeman and Ginestra Ferraro.
Day 5. Organised by: The Turing Humanities & Data Science Interest Group (H&DS)
Opening talks by Dave De Roure and Jane Winters on current and future landscape in UK and beyond for DH&RSE. Coding activity by Federico Nanni and Sarah Gibson on using MyBinder for research reproducibility in digital humanities contexts. DH-RSE Stories by Olivia Vane and summer school wrap-up by Federico Nanni.