Cambridge Digital Humanities Network

About

The Cambridge Digital Humanities Network was the predecessor of Cambridge Digital Humanities, and it remains an essential part of our activities today. The Network was set up in 2011 with funding from the University's Research Policy Committee as part of a series of Strategic Research Initiatives and Networks, designed to encourage research across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Strategic Research Initiatives and Networks build on areas of existing research strength by bringing together a critical mass of expertise from across the Schools, with four key aims:

• to address large-scale multi-disciplinary research challenges
• to strengthen research collaborations and knowledge transfer across disciplines
• to increase research capacity and profile by providing a platform for large-scale funding applications, recruitment and international research partnerships
• to enhance the University's ability to help shape national and international research, policy and funding agendas.

The networking activities of Cambridge Digital Humanities, such as organising events, building links between scholars from different disciplines, sharing information and developing a sense of community across the University around digital humanities research, are now carried out across all four divisions.

The Cambridge Digital Humanities Network Coordinator is Dr Anne Alexander and the co-Directors of the Network are Professor Simon Goldhill and Professor Andrew Webber.

2018-19 Programme

Michaelmas Term 2018

Friday 12 October 2018
Introduction to Podcasting

Monday 15 October 2018
The Library as Data: Introduction to Cambridge University's Digital Collections

Tuesday 30 October 2018
Introduction to Archival Photography

Wednesday 7 November 2018
Blogging for Researchers; behind the scenes with Doing History in Public

Thursday 8 November
Creating Databases from Historical Sources

Monday 12 November 2018
Blogging for Researchers: integrating social media with your blog

Wednesday 21 November 2018
Using Images at Scale to Understand Environments and Behaviours

Tuesday 11 December 2018
Generative Adversial Networks Experimentation Lab

Lent Term 2019

Monday 14 to Wednesday 16 January 2019
Machine Feeling

Thursday 7 and Friday 8 February 2019 (Postponed from 29 and 30 November 2018)
Reuse, Recycling and Ownership in Ancient Egypt: framing our understanding

Machine Reading the Archive Programme 2017-18

Cambridge Digital Humanities and Cambridge Digital History with the support of the Researcher Development Programme and AHRC DTP

Machine Reading the Archive brings together humanities and social science researchers, archivists and computer scientists to explore the challenges of working with archives in the digital age. Through a mentoring scheme supporting digital archive projects and a series of practical workshops, technical demonstrations, field trips and a one day end-of-programme showcase, we hope to seed new collaborations and encourage the exchange of ideas and practices across professions and disciplines.

Registered participants must be PhD students or staff at the University and Colleges of Cambridge.

There are two ways to take part in the programme – through our group sessions and workshops, and by applying for a place on our Projects track.

Machine Reading the Archive Projects provides PhD students and staff at the University of Cambridge individual mentoring and support in developing a digital archives project.
Selected participants for MRtA Projects will be offered 4 x 1 hour individual/paired mentoring sessions with our Digital Methods Fellows, Dr Gabe Recchia and Dr Paul Nulty and 1 x 1 hour individual session on collaboration, networking and funding opportunities with Dr Anne Alexander, Cambridge Digital Humanities Network Coordinator. The sessions will be arranged at mutually convenient times between December 2017 and June 2018. Successful applicants will also be expected to give a short presentation about their project at the end-of-programme workshop in June 2018.

Participants in MRtA Projects are strongly encouraged to attend Machine Reading the Archive group sessions and other relevant digital methods training sessions and workshops.
Applications for MRtA Projects are open from 18 October to 12 noon on 20 November.
Registration for the MRtA programme group sessions is open throughout the academic year.

Useful links:
•    Apply for MRtA Projects: https://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/Methods/mtra/mrta-application-Track2
•    Read our FAQ about MRtA Projects: http://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/Methods/mtra/mrta-projects-FAQ
•    Register here for the MRtA programme: https://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/Methods/mtra/mrta-programme-reg-Track1
Dates for your diary:
Group sessions must be booked online as spaces are limited – please check the website for details: https://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/events
• Curating your own digital archive (16 November) – book here: https://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/events/mrta-curating-own-archive-Nov17
•    Webscraping for beginners (21 November) – book here: https://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/events/mrta-curating-own-archive-Nov17
•    How to turn your PDFs into searchable text (introduction to simple OCR tools)(23 January)
•    Using Python to transform and analyse your data (introduction to Jupyter notebooks)(22 February)
•    Build and publish a simple digital archive or collection (Introduction to Omeka)(8 May)
•    Text-mining the archive – an introduction (24 April and 1 May)