Fall 2019 Events

This fall’s programming includes events and workshops on maps, organizing sources, transforming sources into data, and transforming data into visualizations. Reserve your place at a workshop at http://go.rutgers.edu/11x2vbxi. Workshops will be taught by Alex Leslie, Digital Humanities Graduate Specialist, and Francesca Giannetti, Digital Humanities Librarian.

Note by FG on 2019-09-19: Edited to include additional workshops. Added Suffragist Transcribathon.

Note by FG on 2019-10-23: Added digital editions workshop and more details on suffrage transcribathon.

Events

Suffragist Transcribathon

Digital Humanities Lab, Alexander Library
Tuesday, November 12, 3:00-6:00pm

Join us to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 204th birthday by helping the Library of Congress transcribe the personal papers of American suffragists, including Mary Church Terrell, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna E. Dickinson, & Elizabeth Cady Stanton!

Featuring a talk by Professor Emerita Ann Gordon (Historian & Editor of the Stanton & Anthony Papers) at 3pm, and birthday cake!

Learn more about this crowdsourcing effort at https://crowd.loc.gov/topics/suffrage-women-fight-for-the-vote/

Sponsored by the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative and the History Department/Public History Program

Mapathon for Humanitarian Relief

Pane Room, Alexander Library
Thursday, November 14, 2:00-5:00 pm

Help people in need by participating in a crowd-sourced, humanitarian mapping project. Together with students, staff, and faculty, you will contribute geospatial data to OpenStreetMap, a free and editable map of the world that is used by communities, organizations and governments worldwide to address local development challenges and aid disaster response. The exact project will be determined closer to the event. In past years, participants have worked on projects to assist relief operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. No mapping experience or knowledge is necessary. Training will be provided. Come at any time during the afternoon. Please bring a laptop.

Sponsored by the New Brunswick Libraries and the Department of Geography.

Workshops

Citation Management with Zotero

• Tuesday, September 24, 10:00 am – 11:00 am, Alexander Library, Digital Humanities Lab (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)
• Thursday, September 26, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Alexander Library, Digital Humanities Lab (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)

Zotero is a free application that collects, manages, and formats citations and bibliographies. In this introductory, hands-on workshop, we’ll learn how to organize sources, attach PDFs and notes, create tags for easy searching, and generate citations and bibliographies in Word. Bring your personal laptop, download Zotero 5.0 for your OS, and the Zotero Connector for your favorite browser.

What can be Data in the Humanities?

• Monday, October 7, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Tuesday, October 8, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 415 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Thursday, December 5, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 415 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

The biggest initial hurdle to using DH methods in one’s own work is finding usable materials in the first place. This workshop is designed to help identify potential data in the wild of humanistic sources and how to translate it into usable formats. We’ll explore specific practices like transcribing archival materials into spreadsheets and turning HathiTrust texts into clean .txt files. We’ll also survey examples from existing scholarship to demonstrate some possible uses of these kinds of data as well as weigh the costs and benefits of translating sources into data.

Thematic Maps in QGIS

• Wednesday, October 9, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)
• Tuesday, October 15, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)

Thematic maps show one or more themes (or variables) arranged spatially on a map. In this workshop, we’ll explore the basic building blocks of geospatial visualizations, including data types, file formats, and some ways of representing data, using a free and open source GIS called QGIS.

Data 101

• Monday, October 14, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Thursday, October 17, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Digital Humanities Lab (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Tuesday, December 10, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

So you’ve finally assembled or gotten your hands on a dataset or spreadsheet. Nice work! Not sure what to do next? This hour-long workshop will provide strategies for efficiently turning semi-structured data into tidy data before introducing participants to a range of simple but powerful analyses using the R programming language. No coding experience required. Participants are encouraged (but not required) to bring their own datasets to work with, and all are welcome to stay afterwards for an open office hour to discuss any further or more specific questions.

Georeferencing Historical Maps in QGIS

• Wednesday, October 16, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)
• Tuesday, October 22, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)

Georeferencing is the process of assigning real world map coordinates to a two dimensional image or raster. This technique allows researchers to take an historic map and plot it in modern mapping software, such as QGIS. In this workshop, we will explore two different methods of using raster imagery in historical GIS.

Text Mining Newspapers, Part 1

• Thursday, October 31, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Tuesday, November 5, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

This workshop is the first of two exploring the recently added New Jersey newspapers in Chronicling America. In this first part, we’ll focus on techniques and strategies for fuzzy string matching in the R programming language, using the OCR-derived text from the Perth Amboy Evening News. Anyone interested in fuzzy string matching or textual analysis of mass print is encouraged to attend.

Text Mining Newspapers, Part 2

• Thursday, November 7, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Tuesday, November 12, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

This workshop is the second of two exploring the recently added New Jersey newspapers in Chronicling America. In the second part, we’ll begin with the results of the previous workshop and do some basic analysis of phrase use over time, frequency, and collocate words. Anyone interested in fuzzy string matching or textual analysis of mass print is encouraged to attend; attendance of part one is encouraged but not necessary.

Exploring the Landscape of Digital Editions

• Monday, November 11, 2:45 pm – 4:15 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructors: Isabella Magni and Francesca Giannetti)

Curious about the latest developments in digital textual studies? Would you like to learn about existing and ongoing digital editions undertaken by scholars at Rutgers and beyond? This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the theory and practice of encoding literary and historical texts for the humanities. This workshop is designed for people considering starting a digital project using primary sources, or who would like to understand the concepts of text markup using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines.

Network Analysis in Gephi

• Monday, December 2, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
• Tuesday, December 3, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

Network analysis is one of the most popular approaches in the digital humanities because it allows us to model relations–between individuals, texts, locations, and more. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to the central concepts of network analysis before learning how to use Gephi, one of the most popular programs for analyzing and visualizing networks.