Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
The University of St Andrews Library is running some Digital Humanities training, including a data visualisation workshop.
My slides, sample data and instructions and links for exercises are available here: St Andrews Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research Handouts.
I was invited to give a talk on my work in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) Seminar in Digital History series. I talked about 'Citizen History and its discontents':
'An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about ‘citizen history’ – but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history.'
The video and slides are linked from the IHR Seminar in Digital History site.
Ananda Rutherford organised a workshop for the Documenting Homes project at the Geffrye Museum, which is researching visualisation models for presenting the archive and other collections information across digital platforms. The workshop is a chance to explore the role of visualisations in organising, interrogating and interpreting collections in context and to develop critical and planning skills for designing visualisations. It will include guided exercises for turning data in a spreadsheet into simple visualisations and an optional hour for trying out visualisation tools with your own data.
Contact me for the workshop slides and datasets. The exercises are below.
Continue reading "Workshop: Visualising Collections, Geffrye Museum"
Presentation on CHNM's One Week One Tool project, Serendip-o-matic, at 'Sustainable History: Ensuring today's digital history survives', Senate House, London, 28 November 2013.
I gave a half-day pre-conference workshop on ‘Data Visualizations as an Introduction to Computational Thinking’ for the University of Manchester.
From the event blurb:
Digital Humanities (DH) has grown rapidly in importance in recent years, as interest turns away from technology as an instrumental tool simply for resource discovery and access and towards the need to identify and solve new research challenges for the humanities. As one of the largest concentrations of humanities scholars in the UK, surrounded in turn by the enviable breadth of expertise provided by the University’s technologists and librarians, the University could be a fertile ground for Digital Humanities research.
On 7 November 2013, the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures will be hosting an afternoon workshop for University academics and post-graduates; the event is aimed at exploring the skills and literacies researchers might need as potential digital humanists. This informal, hands on event will provide an opportunity for academics, post-grads to start to ‘think like a programmer’ and learn some computational thinking. Participants will be introduced to new methodologies and tools, including those for manipulating and analysing data using visualization tools. No technological expertise in these areas, only a laptop, curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Goals of session
- Provide opportunity for academics, post-grads to start to ‘think like a programmer’ and learn some computational thinking
- Learn and put into practice some skills for accessing, manipulating and analysing data using visualisation tools
- Introduce new methodologies and tools
- Demystify tools, think critically about what’s happening ‘under the hood’, understand the impact of tool choice and data structures
- Enable dialogue with technologists about project design and tool choice
- Think about the skills, literacies Digital Humanists need