As a part of our support for researchers’ digital humanities projects, the DHIL regularly offers tool- and skill-based workshops, like qualitative analysis with NVivo or spatial data visualization with Story Maps. In an effort to include more “yack” along with the “hack” – for more critical discussion to complement our digital humanities workshops – we wanted to offer a space for our community to focus on some of the cultural and political questions that have arisen as humanities departments have embraced the digital.

Bringing labour into the open

The belief behind Open Scholarship is one that many Digital Humanists are happy to get behind: knowledge should be openly and freely available. In an ideal open access world, researchers and educators would share their knowledge and resources with anyone who had access to the internet. In the often less-than-ideal world, however, for-profit journals and online harassment can prevent the free production and distribution of knowledge.

The Digital Humanities Skills Workshop Series continued on Tuesday, October 30 with the workshop, “Using NVivo for Humanities Research.” Facilitated by Graduate Peer NVivo Facilitator, Esteban Morales, and DHIL Fellow Kandice Sharren, this workshop explored the possibilities NVivo represents for humanities research and introduced participants to the basics of using it. 

This fall, the Lab is very happy to welcome a new User Interface Developer to the team! Catherine Winters joined us this September, and I talked with her about her path to the DHIL, designing cooperative interfaces, creating Twitter bots, and growing up with the World Wide Web.

Kim: Hi Catherine! So my first question is, what does a User Interface Developer do?

Catherine: Hi! Well, I make our Digital Humanities projects easier to use by improving their user experience.

When did you first learn to code, and how?

Hello! Hannah Holtzclaw here, the Digital Humanities and Innovation Lab’s newest technical fellow. As a new team member to DHIL, I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself and the role of DH in my personal pedagogy and philosophy.

“If I had to draw a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail...the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center,” Cheryl Strayed writes in her autobiography, Wild. “But,” she continues, “those lines wouldn’t tell the story” (28).

For a week in June, I joined seven other members of the Digital Humanities community from around the world for a week-long session called “Open Access and Open Scholarship” to learn more about how to responsibly make scholarly communication open and accessible to the public. I was at DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, which has become one of the most well-attended DH training programs in North America.

If you are interested in finding out what the most frequently occuring words are in the text(s) you are researching, you could always start by creating a Word Cloud, one of the best known text analysis visualizations. The results are simple and aesthetically-pleasing: run your text through a word cloud application to produce a roughly circular design of the most frequently used words, with the highest frequency appearing as the largest and lower frequencies diminishing in size.

On May 25th, 2018, the Canada’s Early Women Writers project announced that their two sister websites, Canada’s Early Women Writers and the Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers, were both fully populated and available online. 

From keeping track of our schedules, our citations, our writing revisions, and our millions of photos, digital tools have the power to make research and teaching easier - or, at least, more organized. The only problem is, they only work if you know about them! On April 13, 2018, the DHIL’s day-long event “Hacking the Scholarly Workflow” was a chance to introduce participants to some of those useful tools and their best practices.