detail of engraving by Lowry

DH programming this spring includes events and workshops on Wikipedia editing, social media, network analysis, web scraping, text analysis, and more. Reserve your place at a workshop at https://go.rutgers.edu/cq7y8muq. Workshops will be taught by Alex Leslie and Caterina Agostini—Digital Humanities Graduate Specialists—and Francesca Giannetti, Digital Humanities Librarian.

Additional workshop topics will be added later in the spring. More to come!

Note by FG on 2020-02-26: Added information on workshops taking place in March and April.

Note by FG on 2020-03-23: COVID-19 related updates. Added Hugo workshop text.

Events

Frederick Douglass Day Transcribe-a-Thon

  • Friday, February 14, 2020, 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm, Alexander Library, JetStream (Room 404)

Join us to help transcribe the papers of Anna Julia Cooper, a visionary black feminist, as part of a birthday party for Frederick Douglass and a celebration of Black History Month. We will transcribe letters, diaries, and other documents in the digital archive of Cooper’s papers using the Zooniverse platform. Bring a laptop. Training and light refreshments will be provided. See douglassday.org for more information.

Black Lunch Table Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon

  • Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm, Art Library, Lower Level Seminar Room

The Black Lunch Table (BLT) project will host an edit-a-thon at the Art Library of Rutgers University–New Brunswick focusing on important but underrepresented visual artists, curators, and art workers of the African Diaspora. A training session will be held at the beginning but help will be available throughout the event.

Please bring a laptop and reserve your place, as space is limited. Refreshments will be provided.

Workshops

Introduction to Quantitative Text Analysis

  • Tuesday, February 4, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, JetStream, Room 404 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
  • Thursday, February 6, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, JetStream, Room 404 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to the basics of quantitative textual analysis using the R programming language. Participants will each first select a text of their choice from Project Gutenberg (literary or otherwise), which we will then explore through the demonstration of a variety of approaches, including word frequency, distribution, and co-appearance. No coding experience required.

Collecting Twitter Data for Research

  • Tuesday, February 11, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)
  • Thursday, February 13, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)

This workshop is the first in a two-part series on social media data. Twitter data provide researchers with a real-time view into a wide variety of social and cultural topics. In this workshop, we’ll explore beginning and intermediate tools for collecting social media data from Twitter.

Analyzing Social Media Data in R

  • Tuesday, February 18, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)
  • Thursday, February 20, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Francesca Giannetti)

This workshop is the second of a two-part series. In this workshop, we’ll receive a gentle introduction to the R language and RStudio, the most commonly used integrated development environment for R. We’ll explore a social media dataset using some popular packages of the tidyverse collection, including dplyr and ggplot2.

Network Analysis in Gephi

  • Monday, February 24, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
  • Tuesday, February 25, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Room 415 (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.

Approaches to Web Scraping in R

  • Tuesday, March 3, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
  • Thursday, March 5, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Alexander Library, Digital Humanities Lab, Room 406-407 (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

An ever-growing wealth of information can be accessed online, but often there is no easy way to obtain this information for further analysis. This hands-on workshop will introduce a solution to this problem: web scraping, a technique for extracting data and data structures from public websites. Using our browsers and the R programming language, we’ll also explore strategies for handling different kinds of websites. No previous coding experience required.

Introduction to Scalar

  • Wednesday, March 11, 9:30-11:00 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)
  • Thursday, March 26, 4:30-6:00 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)

In this workshop, we will introduce the use of Scalar, a web publishing platform for digital scholarship which supports individual and collaborative projects featuring tagging functionalities, analysis and annotation of images, maps, audio and video files, as well as visualizations.

Using Palladio for Mapping

  • Thursday, April 9, 9:30-11:00 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)
  • Monday, April 27, 4:30-6:00 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)

Palladio is a web-based tool for investigating and visualizing multi-dimensional data. In this workshop, we will learn to visualize humanistic research data on a map, and track connections between data points.

Making Websites with Hugo and GitHub Pages

  • Tuesday, April 14, 10:00-11:30 am (Instructor: Alex Leslie)
  • Thursday, April 16, 2:00-3:30 pm (Instructor: Alex Leslie)

Personal and project websites can be effective vehicles for sharing your research. In this workshop we’ll learn to use Hugo, an open-source static site generator, to build a website locally by editing themes and adding original content. We’ll also learn how to deploy the result with free hosting on GitHub Pages. In the process, participants will gain some experience with HTML, Git, and the command line. Previous knowledge of any of these will help but is not necessary; a personal computer on which you have admin privileges, however, is required.

Word Vectors and Text Analysis

  • Thursday, April 23, 4:30-6:00 pm, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)
  • Wednesday, April 29, 9:30-11:00 am, Alexander Library, Room 413 (Instructor: Caterina Agostini)

This workshop introduces the Women Writers Vector Toolkit, an interface that allows researchers to conduct word vector analyses on texts already available in the Women Writers Project (works authored by women from 1400 to 1850). Word embedding models are a type of text analysis used to explore larger thematic questions about extensive collections of texts. Through this method, computational tools display spatial analogies, thus representing relationships between words.