Tag Archives: research

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.

What difference does digital make? The present (and future) of Digital Humanities in the UK

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Recently we welcomed a distinguished guest speaker to the DH Lab, Professor Jane Winters of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, to give a seminar on the current landscape of Digital Humanities (DH) in the UK.  Prof. Winters discussed the results of a major new survey, commissioned by the School of Advanced Study, the British Academy, the British Library and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, into DH research, teaching and practice in universities, GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and the creative industries. The aims of the report were to document the current landscape of DH research, teaching and practice; identify what kind of support this needs; and explore possible demand for a UK-based DH network or association and the nature of the role that such an organisation could play.

Interpreting the statistics of the report for a highly engaged audience, Winters drew out from the facts and figures a picture of a diverse DH landscape, in which respondents identified themselves as belonging to almost forty different research areas.  More than three quarters also had extensive involvement in teaching, either in their subject area or in DH.  Winters noted that not all digital research and digital scholarship is described by its practitioners as ‘Digital Humanities’, even when it is firmly rooted in the study of Humanities sources and their related areas of specialisation.  As researchers within universities, we therefore need to ensure that when we collaborate with creative partners or GLAM institutions, we try to use a common language to describe what we do: this will help not only in the project itself, but also in how we communicate what we do to those outside our particular areas of expertise.

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Our Digital Humanities Interns bid us farewell – Alumni of 2018

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What we’ve been up to…

Over the past six months, we have settled into life as interns for the DH Team. Throughout the internship, we’ve become accustomed to supporting and facilitating the research of staff in the College of Humanities, and acting as the first point of contact for all the types of people coming in to use the lab spaces. We’ve undergone training in photogrammetry, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and 3D printing… all whilst attempting to formulate an answer to the question “what exactly is digital humanities?”

We’ve been supporting numerous research projects such as Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth’s digitisation of Early Modern Bristol women’s wills, digitising Ronald Duncan micro-cassette tapes and the 2D digitisation of a collection of historic posters from the Northcott Theatre.

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Meet our Digital Humanities interns!

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In December, the Digital Humanities team recruited six new College of Humanities undergraduates to advisory intern positions, based in the Digital Humanities Lab. The interns commenced work with us at the beginning of the new term. We received an impressively large number of applications and, following a competitive interview process, we were pleased to appoint candidates with a keen interest in the field, enthusiasm, strong problem-solving skills, and an interest in careers within the Digital Humanities.

The team have put together an introduction to their roles below, and some background on their own interests. The team bring with them positive energy and new perspectives on our projects and we welcome them and their ideas to the Digital Humanities Lab research community:

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First impressions: light, sound and a new vision

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New team member Emma Sherriff, outside the DH Lab

A warm hello to our blog readers, my name is Emma Sherriff and I am the newest addition to the Digital Humanities (DH) team. I am embarking on my DH journey at the beginning of an exciting new era of digital research, collaboration, and preservation for the College of Humanities; and ahead of the official opening of the Digital Humanities Lab on 23rd October by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Steve Smith.

My experience at the University of Exeter to date has involved supporting the work of Postgraduate researchers, as a member of the Doctoral College. My former role led me to discussions with the DH team around how the Lab can offer specialist expertise alongside cutting edge equipment, creating an opportunity to engage with, and connect an existing body of researchers across disciplines and themes. I am pleased to be involved in shaping the planning and delivery of training, digital projects and technical support in my new role.

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Report on the Digital Humanities Congress 2016, Sheffield

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In contrast to the huge scale of the previous conference in Kraków, Autumn has offered an opportunity to attend something a little more manageable. The Digitial Humanities Congress is hosted biennially by the Humanities Research Institute in Sheffield, and is a national conference that attracts international audiences.

In a very varied programme, the speakers covered topics such as musicology, text mining and analysis, semantic encoding and infrastructural issues. An early highlight was a series of papers, introduced by Marilyn Deegan, on the ‘Academic Book of the Future’, which discussed the potential shape of academic outputs, and specifically monographs, as the move to digital and open access opens up new possibilities. Creating works with greater interactivity and engagement, that can link directly to open access source material, and provide insight through well-designed interactive visualisations and access to raw data were all high on the wish-list, with some intriguing experiments.

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