Digital Humanities Interns 2022/23 part 3

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Each year we ask our interns to write a blog post at the end of their time working with us looking back on their time in the DH Lab. Here is the third of this year’s blogs from Isabel:

Hi, my name’s Isabel and I’m a third year History student and intern at the Digital Humanities Lab and this year I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy my second year at the lab.

Recently, I’ve been spending my time getting to grips with photogrammetry and 3D modelling. On top of photographing and processing lot of palaeolithic flints and ancient pottery from the archaeology department’s teaching packs, one of my main projects I worked on was fully processing a small ornament from a physical object, to a digital model, to a physical object again in the form of two differently printed 3D prints. I started with the original Egyptian pyramid ornament, photographing it in the photogrammetry set up in the lab space. Then, these photos had to be processed in computer software which aligned the images into one digital 3d model.

Once this was completed, I printed the first 3D model in our Ultimaker 3D printer in white and finally I printed a green resin model in the form lab printer and had a look to see how different the results were.

This year I also got to spend a lot of time with the RTI dome. On the one hand this meant creating RTI images of the archeology from the teaching packs so that people could better see the markings and lines on the side where the pottery had been cut and which showed more information about how the pottery was made. On the other hand, this also meant experiemtnsing with some of my own objects to see how they would look under RTI. I experimented with a necklace of mine with bronze age chain on it to see what the different RTI photos would show me.

And finally, I got to have a bit of fun at Halloween this year when I printed a glow in the dark pumpkin pot!

Digital Humanities Interns 2022/23 part 2

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Each year we ask our interns to write a blog post at the end of their time working with us looking back on their time in the DH Lab. Here is the second of this year’s blogs from Dayna:

Being a DH Intern

Working at the Digital Humanities Lab over my final year has been an incredible and exciting end to my time studying History at Exeter. I first heard of the DH Lab in my second year through the Festival of the Past, and I was immediately impressed with its innovative and important work. Despite having very limited technological experience prior to my internship, the Lab has cultivated and encouraged me to learn and develop a multitude of skills.

I was introduced to the many operations of the lab through weekly training sessions including lessons on photography, photogrammetry, reflective transformation imaging (RTI), and more. Within these guided sessions, I not only developed a repertoire of skills through hands-on experience but also a sense of confidence to experiment with new things.

Alongside the training sessions I also began independent work on other projects in my shifts. In the lab, I began digitising some of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum’s film programmes which introduced me to Capture One software and handling archival material. Working with this helped prepare me for later work I would do with the Museum’s stereocards and glass slides, which I both digitised and morphed using Microsoft Powershell. Meanwhile, whilst helping on the advisory desk I created posters for an exhibit in the Arabic and Islamic Studies department. This demonstrated to me the interdisciplinary approach of the Lab’s work and the range of material being worked on.

One of my favourite parts of working in the Lab has been 3D printing. At the start of the internship, the team are so encouraging to engage in this method in fun, innovative, and experimental ways. As such, I was able to print a range of novelty items including an articulated lizard, a glow in the dark cat, and even create my own snowman on TinkerCad to then print out. With the lab’s addition of a Formlabs resin printer, as well as their Ultimaker 3 and Makerbot, I was able to understand the subtle differences between 3D printing techniques.

Towards the end of my internship, I became involved with the lab’s social media pages. I helped create Instagram stories to raise awareness of the lab’s facilities and availability to HASS staff and students. From this, I also created some short video content for the wider Archaeology and History Department. These videos further explained the lab’s work, especially drawing attention to opportunities offered to student interns. I really enjoyed making these videos as it consolidated my year’s long experience at the lab in an informative and useful way to encourage and educate other students. These can be viewed on the departments TikTok page @Uoearchhistdept!

In addition to these broader tasks, my time working has also involved projects like transmitting data from floppy disks and digitising objects from archaeology teaching packs. I’ve also helped represent the DH lab on undergraduate open days where I have gotten the chance to speak to prospective parents and students about the lab’s opportunities. In all, my internship has encompassed a myriad of projects and disciplines that has made it a continuously exciting and educational role. Looking back, I am amazed at how much I have accomplished when considering that I began with such limited knowledge in this field. The enthusiasm of the team, and their unwavering support and encouragement has made for a thriving learning environment. I have loved coming into work with each shift being totally different from the last. I would absolutely recommend this opportunity to anyone interested!

Digital Humanities Interns 2022/23 part 1

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Each year we ask our interns to write a blog post at the end of their time working with us looking back on their time in the DH Lab. Here is the first of this year’s blogs from Jane-Marie:

I am Jane Marie a final year Art History, Visual Culture and Classical studies student. I remember visiting the digital humanities lab on my open day at the university. I was immediately impressed at their wide range of technologies and the opportunity to become an intern at the lab.

Before starting the university, I had completed and art foundation course in graphic communication this meant I had some computer skills before I started the internship. At the end of my first year, I completed a short internship with the University of Exeter’s special collections team cataloguing the university’s Leonard Baskin Prints. Both experiences provided me with the necessary skills and interest to start my internship at the Digital Humanities lab.

Some of the modules I have taken during my time at university have been directly related to Digital Humanities. In my second year I took the AHVC Field study module as part of which we created a walking tour of Florence. From this module I learned digital mapping and audio editing skills. In my final year I took the ‘Hacking the Humanities: how to run successful digital projects’ module which paired very nicely with my work at the Digital Humanities lab.

Over the year as Digital Humanities Intern, I have assisted on a range of projects from digitisation to podcast editing. The most interesting and different project I have worked on is filming the CRAB Lab bees on the top of the Washington Singer Building.

I had no idea that there were any beehives on the Exeter university campus so to get to see them up close and personal was an amazing opportunity. I assisted in the filming of the video and had to wear a bee suit in the process. I was the responsible for the editing of the video.  

The challenge when editing this video was knowing what of all the information Zoe, the beekeeper, had told us was the most important to include. We also had a lot of “Bee-role” footage to intersperse with the talking. Another challenge I found was controlling the audio levels across the different bits of footage. As we where filming in a working lab space there was some background noise that needed to be removed from the footage. While editing I learned how to edit the audio to remove the sound without distorting the audio. This example shows the problem-solving skills you develop when working with the digital humanities.

Along side the projects we have also completed training in all aspects of the lab from the 3D printers to Photogrammetry. This has helped me build confidence in using the technologies of the lab as well as introduce me to unfamiliar skills which I found challenging such as coding. Completing these challenges as a group made them less daunting.

Overall, my experience at the digital humanities lab has been an incredible opportunity to learn a range of different skills some of which I found quite challenging and others I immediately clicked with. It has been wonderful working with the other amazing interns, the DHL team and aiding academics in their research and outreach.

Hot Source! Digital Skills Training

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As part of the AHRC’s iDAH program, the University of Exeter Digital Humanities Lab is organizing a Summer School during June 2023 in Digital Skills that comprises two free training courses for Arts & Humanities Researchers: 

  • The first course (intermediate to advanced level; 12-16 June) will focus on Text Analysis using the Python programming language 
  • The second course (foundation level; 19-23 June) will focus on 2D, 2.5D, and 3D recording and visualisation

We have a limited amount of financial support for PGR and ECR with no access to travel funds. If this will help you, please check the relevant section of the form when you apply.

Course 1: AHRC iDAH/Exeter Digital Summer School: Introduction to Text Analysis Using Python

As part of the AHRC iDAH network for Digital Skills Training, the University of Exeter Digital Humanities Lab is offering a free introductory Summer School in Text Analysis with Python. Over a 5-day period, participants will have the opportunity to develop their digital skills through hands-on experience with Python, a popular programming language widely used for data analysis and text processing. The schedule for the course is available here: Hot Source! Course 1 information

During the course, you will cover topics such as regular expressions, text preprocessing, Named Entity Recognition, feature extraction, sentiment analysis, visualization, and language models. The objective is to provide practical experience with popular Python libraries like Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), spaCy, and Matplotlib which are widely used for text analysis and natural language processing tasks, leaving you well-equipped with the necessary skills to succeed in these fields.

The intended audience for this course is academic professionals and researchers in Higher Education Institutions and Research Organizations who conduct research related to language, literature, history, social sciences, or any other field that involves text data analysis. It may particularly appeal to those working in linguistics, digital humanities, computational social sciences, and data journalism, but all are welcome.

This is an intermediate-to-advanced digital skills course and participants will need to be familiar with the fundamentals of Python and Google Colab before the course. For those without prior experience, we are happy to recommend a variety of tutorials to help prepare in advance. During the course, we will cover the essential libraries for text analysis in Python, such as SpaCy and NLTK. More experienced participants will have additional opportunities to explore other libraries such as Matplotlib, Genism, and Plotly.

The course will be in person, with a maximum of 10 participants. It is initially offered to researchers in the South-West. The remaining places will be available countrywide from May 19th.

To apply please use this application form. Applications must be received by May 31st and you will be notified by June 2nd.

Course 2: AHRC / Exeter Summer School on 2D, 2.5D and 3D capture and visualisation of textured artefacts

As part of the AHRC iDAH network for Digital Skills Training, the University of Exeter Digital Humanities Lab is offering a free introductory Summer School in 2D, 2.5D and 3D capture and visualisation of textured artefacts. Over a five-day period, participants will have the opportunity to develop their digital skills through hands on experience with accessible and low-cost equipment. You will learn the basics of Archival Photography, RTI and Photogrammetry and have a chance to apply these to your own materials if desired. The schedule for the course is available here: Hot Source! Course 2 information

This course is intended for academic professionals and researchers in Higher Education Institutions and Research Organisations who conduct research related to Arts and Humanities topics. It may particularly appeal to those working in Archaeology, Heritage and the Visual or Plastic Arts but all are welcome.

This is a foundation level course and no prior experience or skills in 2D, 2.5D and 3D visualisation is required, or expected but a basic knowledge of digital photography will be beneficial. The course will be in person, with a maximum of 10 participants. It is initially being offered to researchers in the South West area of the UK, but any remaining places will be made available to researchers countrywide from May 19th.

To apply please use this application form. Applications must be received by May 31st and you will be notified by June 2nd.

If you would like any additional information or have any further questions, please email us and we’ll get back to you shortly.

The DH Lab is 5!

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5 years ago, on the 23rd October 2017, after many months of planning and construction work, the Digital Humanities Lab officially opened. Since then we’ve supported teaching and research through a pandemic, collaborated with academics and cultural heritage institutions on research projects, created many exciting digital resources and websites, worked with 28 undergraduate interns, digitised 100s of cassettes to preserve recordings for future use, worked with Exeter City FC, developed websites and databases for research projects, taken 1000s of high quality photographs of rare books and manuscripts including the Exeter Book and the University of Exeter archive, supported podcast and film recordings, created RTI and 3D printed models for archaeology and a whole lot more.

To celebrate our 5th birthday we will be running open day events throughout the term – keep an eye on our upcoming events or twitter to join us!

In the meantime, lets look back to where the lab began!

In the summer of 2016, this corner of the Queens building featured an archaeology equipment store, a bike rack and some very exciting recycling bins. And then the diggers showed up…

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Digital Humanities Intern – Heide

Hi, I’m Heide, a second year English Undergraduate. I first encountered the Exeter Digital Humanities Lab during the Festival of Discovery after my first year, but I had already unconsciously experienced Digital Humanities throughout my degree, through online resources such as EEBO (Early English Books Online), The Hardy Correspondents and many other archive websites that I used to research primary sources.  

My first hands on experience with digital humanities was during my year one Rethinking Shakespeare module (EAS1041), where we used TEI text encoding to combine differences in Folio and Quarto texts for scholarly consideration. The digitally encoded text provides a more interactive text for study, as different textual variants can be easily seen and more equally considered. The accessibility of the digital texts and the significant scholarly applications inspired me to look further into the previously unknown field of digital humanities by applying to be an intern.  

Crochet rabbit photographed on a turntable in Digital Humanities Lab 2

At the start of my internship, I had little technical knowledge about digital photography and technology, however, the DH Lab provided all the training basics. Every week I enjoyed learning new things: Basic Camera skills, Photogrammetry, RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imagery), 3D Modelling and Printing, Photoshop, Audio and Visual recording and editing… The list really does go on! I loved all of the training across the lab and attempted to partake in as many varied projects as I could throughout my internship. One of our training sessions was on photogrammetry, where we brought in our own objects to produce a model. I brought in one of my crochet projects – a kind of awkward looking rabbit (who can be found on one of the Digital Humanities information slides in the Breakout space!). The software wasn’t a great fan of the object, and fabric itself is not the best suited to photogrammetry, so it turned out a little bit wonky (as seen below).  

Crochet rabbit photogrammetry model produced using Metashape

My first projects consisted of 2D digitization in Lab 1, using the A0 copystand. I digitized many letters , and I still enjoy discussing the adorable wax seals to this day. The experience of touching and reading documents and artefacts that would commonly be sealed away in a private collection or museum is such an amazing and interesting experience. I also helped to digitise a collection of Arabic postcards and documents and the Exeter University Fine Art Committee documents. I also used Lab 1 to photograph and reverse negatives of Arabic documents for study in the Lawforms project. Alongside the other interns I helped with inbox and reception management, as well as social media contributions for the Lab and university projects, such as promotional material for the Famine Tales Project.

Image posted @faminetales on twitter: https://twitter.com/faminetales/status/1455826584032538632?s=20&t=eXrCY9IMquPVitqoqJzs_Q

I also worked on digitising cassette tapes of interviews with Devonshire farmers to convert them into a digital format using the Audio-Visual Lab (AV Lab, Lab 3). As someone who grew up in Devon it was very interesting to hear personal interviews of the locals, and often quite entertaining.

I worked on a larger RTI project to digitize archaeological arrowheads for a university colleague at Exeter. RTI (Reflectance transformation imagery) is performed by capturing images of a static object with a static camera but with changing light angles (check out the DH Lab RTI demonstration page here: https://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/rti/). These images are then put into a software called RTI_builder and the process is followed to create an interactive RTI model. Here is a “normals” (the colours correspond to the direction of the surface) of one of the arrowheads:

RTI model created by the Digital Humanities Lab on 09/06/2022, object LAZ540 provided by the Archaeology department

And a regular screen capture of the object’s other side here:

I also worked on several of my own digitisation projects, including handwritten letters from my Grandma as well as wedding photos from my Aunt. I worked on this alongside all of the projects at the Lab, and it was nice to digitise some of my own family history.

Drawing from one of my Grandma’s letters about our new cat

I found working as an intern at Digital Humanities an invaluable experience and recommend it to anybody looking for any experience in the field for job opportunities and personal experience. Don’t let lack of digital experience daunt you – the lab is very welcoming and provides all necessary training help to all interns!

Referenced Links

Early English Books Online (EEBO): https://www.proquest.com/eebo/index?parentSessionId=unTEUaEuRaIEPNHaUj3kn0BwSoOuc4xoiUyxeD1EVZ0%3D

Exeter Digital Humanities RTI demonstration Page: https://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/rti/

Famine Tales Twitter: https://twitter.com/faminetales/with_replies

The Hardy Correspondences: https://hardycorrespondents.exeter.ac.uk/about.html

Lawforms: https://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/lawforms/place.html?place=pgDhar

Digital Humanities Intern – Maya

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What a year! I have loved working at the Digital Humanities Lab over my third year at Exeter – I have had the opportunity to try so many different activities and have seen a side of the History Faculty and Department I would not normally get to experience as a student. Most enlightening has been the gradual process of understand just how much work goes into conserving and storing the documents we use in our daily studies, and it has given me a new appreciation for the feat of achievement of many of our digital archives. I have particularly enjoyed working with the Drama department’s new Podcasting studio; its accessible format and set-up making it really easy to create podcasts with other students and friends, and I hope to continue this project in my career as a way of enjoying more public debates on history. The most useful advice I could give to someone applying to the Lab or who has already got a place on the internship team is to try everything – and to not be afraid to ask questions. All the staff are super friendly and helpful, and it’s always a great idea to start off slow, learn the techniques properly and learn how to best use and approach each type of archival material, giving you the skills to work more efficiently as the year progresses.    

Digitising a book in Lab 1

A typical day in the Lab starts with me digitising the most recent documents, photographs or journals that have been brought in – I have partially loved digitising a collection of journals written in the late 1800s by local Devon women, to showcase their artistic, literary and poetic skill. Working with this was challenging, especially as the books were often badly bound or produced on thin, cheap paper, and so they had to be handled slowly and carefully. I used my training from the Special Collections team to plan how to approach each challenge in digitising such a varied type of document. I have also enjoyed seeing the various people and departments who use the Labs photography and recording equipment on a weekly basis to improve course delivery and structure. Learning how to integrate these technologies into future education approaches and lesson planning is the future of education, and will open up the Humanities to a much greater variety of abilities, learning approaches and stages-  and as a protective future teacher this has been truly exciting to experience first-hand and have a ‘hands on’ impact on digitisation delivery at the University.   

I have really enjoyed my time at the Lab, and can’t recommend enough applying for an internship – you’ll lean so much about the complex and intriguing world of document preservation, and get a new-found appreciation for our brilliant archives and libraries.   

Digital Humanities Intern – Isabel

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Hi, I’m Isabel, a second-year history student and intern at the Digital Humanities Lab.  

I have been interested in the Digital Humanities Lab since my first open day before coming to Exeter. What inspired me was the idea that modern technology could expand our understanding of history and build on our current knowledge of the past in brand new ways. I wanted to find out what the Lab had to offer and what opportunities might be out there in the changing world of historical research.  

The biggest project I’ve been a part of this year has been working with the Disability Namibia Team (@NoBODYexcluded). I’ve led, recorded and edited interviews, ran website design and supported the social media outreach of this wonderful project which aims to build a network of disability activists, scholars, clergy, artists and political representatives to explore religio-cultural narratives of embodiment and disability in Namibia. It’s been wonderful to be a part of such a multidisciplinary project and something I would never have been able to do as an undergraduate outside of the internship.  

Alongside this has been my work with Dr Charlotte Tupman, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities. The project has mainly focused on exploring the OCR – Optical Character Recognition – capabilities of the ABBYY FineReader software when it is presented with a book’s text and measuring its abilities to transform early modern script into computer-readable XML format. My favourite aspect of working on this project has been its investigative nature, finding out how best to use this technology and what might soon be possible as the project advances.  

Other than this, my favourite parts have been working with special collections and with the Lab’s 3D printer. As an intern, I had the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of working with historical collections, including how to handle things such as books, pamphlets, lantern slides, and photo negatives and I loved that I could learn skills I could take away with me into a future in humanities. 

The 3D printer has been a brilliant opportunity to discover my creative capabilities at the DH Lab. Working with the Ultimaker 3D printer, I was able to make two small and adorable models that made great Christmas gifts for friends and family! The first of these was the goose. Initially, the software was uncertain whether it could print something with such an overhang at the neck when there were no materials available for making a temporary support. But, I was able to adapt settings and re-scale where necessary until I could print the goose I have today. The second was this puppy. By this time, I could use what I had learnt from my experience making the goose to confidently scale and print the puppy ready to make a gift at Christmas. So, not only do I know how to set up a 3D printer, operate the software and print anything I’d like, but I now have these two little pets to call my own!  

3D printed model of a Goose and Puppy

My tips for anyone considering an internship at the Digital Humanities Lab would first be: apply! It’s a brilliant opportunity and a great place to work. This internship has given me an opportunity for a wealth of experience and knowledge unique to the Digital Humanities Lab here at Exeter. 

Photography at the DH Lab

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Here at the Digital Humanities Lab, we are called upon to photograph a wide range of objects, which means we often have to come up with creative ways to position them our lab copystands. I have recently been working on digitising a set of bound letters, for which I am using the 150MP camera in Lab 1. However, it took me while to work what the best way of setting up the volumes would be, as it became clear that the glass platform we usually use for keeping books flat for photography was not the most appropriate option in this case. For one thing, as each letter in the volumes was written separately, and later brought together into one book, any given double page spread was likely to cover two letters, rather than one. As I wanted to have each page of the letters as separate images, this made things tricky, and if I’d carried on I would have had to crop each image twice and export it twice as well. This also made the metadata that I created for this first dozen test images difficult to write as well, because almost every image contained a page each of two letters, meaning I was writing two rows of metadata for one image on CaptureOne. Another issue with the glass platform is that once I got more than a few pages in on the first volume, it started to squash the pages on the left-hand side of the book in such a way that they covered the first two or three letters of each word on the right-hand side. After all this, I decided that I needed to come up with a better way of doing things, and started again from the first page.  

Manuscript book being digitised

I knew that the pages of the book were too tightly bound to be able to lie flat unaided, so when I put them on top of the copystand, rather than under the glass platform, I tried holding down each page using a system of bone folders and weights to hold them up and in place. This works for pages made of quite thick paper and are naturally heavy, as I had found when I digitised a photo album from the university’s archive earlier in the year, but for the lightweight springy paper of the bound letters, this wasn’t as effective. As I was now moving the book for each photograph, so that only one page was in view of the camera, this method involved a lot of adjustment, and the bone folders always ended up in shot because they had to be a certain way onto the page to hold it down properly. The next method I came up with, after I had taken perhaps a hundred or so photos in this manner, was using strips of polypropylene cut from a roll. This material is normally used in museum displays for holding down pages of a book on a particular page, so I thought that it might work here. I cut two strips, one for each side of the book, put them round the page and cover vertically, and secured them at the back using paperclips so that they were taught. This was a much better solution than the bone folders, as it held the pages down almost completely flat, and all that was needed was a weight underneath the higher side of the book, which could be taken out once the pages levelled out. The downside of this method was that, like the bone folders, the polypropylene stood out in the photographs compared to the paper of the letters. Although all the writing underneath the area was perfectly readable, it was very obvious, and inconsistent with the standard methods for digitising letters. However, I was unable to come up with a different solution at that stage, so I completed the first and second volumes using this process; adjusting the length of polypropylene around each side of the book as the pages built up or decreased.  

It was once I was about 20 or so pages into digitising the third volume that I stumbled across the approach that I am currently using. I was watching a recorded AHFAP (Association for Fine Art and Historical Photography) online event from 2020, which featured a talk from Jo Castle from the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. She was speaking about the library’s project to digitise the archive of Heinrich Simon, namely the eight books known as The Simon Papers. As these books were made up of pages and scraps of paper of all different sizes, with many flaps and pages glued in, the digitisation team came up with the idea of using nylon monofilament secured between leather weights to hold down the pages as they were photographed. This was especially good for holding down the smaller pages in the middle of larger ones. Having watched this talk and seen how effective a method it was, I was able to acquire some finishing line from our Lab Manager Gemma.  

Digitising a book of bound letters

As you can see from the pictures, this has proved a success, and in the final exported images, the fishing line is barely visible, especially compared to the bone folders and polypropylene. We have already utilised this method for another project in the lab, and I hope it will continue to be a viable option for digitising tricky material in the Digital Humanities Lab.  

Happy World Digital Preservation Day!

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We work on lots of exciting digitisation work in the Digital Humanities Lab, and our wonderful undergraduate interns have put together a video to give you a snapshot of just some of the materials we have made digitally available.

Just some of the materials and techniques we work with in the DH lab

But how do we make sure that the resources we create will be usable in 5, 10 or even 100 years time? Digital content can be extremely ephemeral, and is vulnerable to being irreplaceably lost if we’re not careful – just think of how many floppy disks and CDs most of us have that are no longer supported by our current computer. So while we’re creating new content through digitisation in the lab, we’re also working hard with colleagues around the University to plan for the longer-term future of the materials we create, as well as supporting the preservation of digital resources in the University collections.

A lot of digital preservation goes on behind the scenes, and isn’t always as obvious as some of the other work we do, so World Digitisation Day, run by the Digital Preservation Coalition is a great opportunity to stop and celebrate what we do as well as see how much else is going on around the world!

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