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.

2017-18 Programme

Easter Term 2018

Tuesday 24 April 2018
Text-mining the Archive 1

Tuesday 1 May 2018
Text-mining the Archive 2

Tuesday 8 May 2018
Introduction to Omeka: build and publish a simple digital archive

Tuesday 15 May 2018
Collaborating with the Machine: Opportunities, Challenges, and caveats

Monday 21 May 2018
Lenses or Mirrors? How Algorithms Affect Ways of Seeing Race and Gender

Tuesday 5 June 2018
Digital Collaboration Tools

Monday 11 June
Social Network Analysis in Social Media

Tuesday 12 June 2018
Re:search - do search engines shape scholarship?

Thursday 14 June 2018
Machine Reading the Archive End of Programme Workshop 2018

Tuesday 19 June 2018
'Scores of Scores': Possibilities and Pitfalls with Musical Corpora

Monday 25 June 2018
Academic Social Networking Sites: a user's guide

Summer 2018

Wednesday 4 July 2018
From Sources to Data: Historical People in the Digital Archive

Wednesday 11 July 2018
Searching Questions

Lent Term 2018

Tuesday 16 January 2018
Introduction to APIs: how to get bulk data from websites

Monday 22 January 2018
Democracy by Design: Activists, Apps and Activist Apps

Tuesday 23 January 2018
Introduction to OCR: tools for turning pdfs into machine-readable data

Thursday 25 January 2018
Protest Event Analysis: a practical introduction
Harnessing the power of Big Data to understand collective action

Tuesday 6 February 2018
Beyond Words Workshop 2 (Technical Challenges)

Tuesday 13 February 2018
Social Media Data and Research Ethics: challenges and opportunities

Tuesday 20 February 2018 CANCELLED
Academic Social Networking: a user's guide

Tuesday 27 February 2018 CANCELLED
Introduction to Programming with Python

Tuesday 6 March 2018
Academic Research, Data, and the Law: An Introduction to General Data Protection Regulation

Thursday 15 March 2018
Digital Imaging, Modelling, Making and Interpretation of 3D Cultural Heritage Objects and Replicas

Monday 26 March 2018
Automatic Text Recognition: an introduction to Transkribus

Tuesday 27 March 2018
Automatic Text Recognition: diving into the background

Michaelmas Term 2017

Tuesday 17 October 2017
Digital Research Project Design for Beginners

Thursday 16 November 2017
Curating your own Digital Archive

Tuesday 21 November 2017
Webscraping for Beginners

Monday 27 November 2017
The Ethics of Doing Research in the Digital Age: Understanding Digital Footprints

Tuesday 5 December 2017
Can Social Media Work for Me?

Friday 15 December 2017
Beyond Words: Workshop 1 (Mapping the Conceptual Terrain)

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)