Digital Humanities research guide: Training

Engaging in digital scholarship often includes building new technical skills and experimenting with various digital methodologies. There are a number of local opportunities to begin building your digital skills through consultations, workshops, and community building events. In addition, DH scholars, librarians, and technologists have created a number of self-paced online resources to support the development of digital skills within the community.  

This page provides you with some starting points to build your digital skill toolbox, for further information or to suggest a workshop or event at SFU, please contact Rebecca DowsonDigital Scholarship Librarian, at rda26@sfu.ca.

Workshops and events

See Events + Workshops: Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) for information on training opportunities surrounding the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab.

See SFU Library Research Commons Workshops listing for information on training opportunities surrounding the Research Commons.  Workshops of particular interest to DH include: Spatial Humanities, Introduction to Tableau, and using R for textual data.

Vancouver Institute of Visual Analytics provides education and training in visual analytics, offering a wide range of visual analytics workshops and courses for students, managers/directors and academic researchers. Courses offered at SFU Harbour Centre, Burnaby, and UBC Point Grey.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute “provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach. During a week of intensive coursework, seminars, and lectures, participants share ideas and methods, and develop expertise in using advanced technologies.”

Vancouver Public Library Inspiration Lab “is a digital media lab at VPL’s central library downtown: a free place that combines traditional, digital and new media in a custom-built space dedicated to digital creativity, collaboration and storytelling. It features high-performance computers, analog-to-digital conversion, sound studios, video editing and self-publishing software.” The Inspiration Lab also offers introductory workshops on topics such as: audio and video recording and editing, digitization, and self-publishing an ebook.

Resources

Linkedin Learning (prev. Lynda.com) is an online resource for thousands of video tutorials on design, video, photography, production and more. Restricted to current students, faculty and staff. All users must create a profile with a valid SFU email address before logging in to this resource for the first time.  

Programming Historian “offers novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research.” Includes lessons on APIs, data management, data manipulation, distant reading, linked open data, mapping, network analysis, Omeka, web scraping, and programming in Python.

DevDH.org was “built to respond to the growing demand for digital humanities training in that area but also as an online repository of training materials, lectures, exemplars, and links that offer best practices to beginner, intermediate, and advanced digital humanists.”

DHIL Canvas Page to access our workshop materials, online tutorials or set up a consultation.