Digitising the Humanities: a Lecture and Workshop Series

 

Digital Humanities (or DH) has become a buzzword over the past ten years, but many still know too little about the potential of digital technologies and humanities in general to employ advanced digital methods in their own research. We are still experiencing a digital gap within the humanities, even with the younger generation of up and coming scholars.

In this lecture series, Digitising the Humanities, students, researchers and staff of History, Languages, Literature as well as all other disciplines at the Ghent University's Faculty of Arts and Philosophy will hear first-hand through lectures by international scholars about recent developments of digital technologies and methodologies in humanities research, discovering new research questions, resolving them with an adequate and reflected methodology, and resolving old questions in new ways.

In this second series, international scholars have been invited to give talks on their DH projects; which range from natural language processing, deep learning, text recognition and text annotation to neural networks and big data.

The goal of the lecture series is to raise awareness of the state-of-the-art digital methods currently being used and developed by humanities scholars and empower you to put these to work yourself. We hope that these lectures will encourage you to explore the available tools and methods for your own research and help to integrate DH into the curriculum at Ghent University.

Organised by the DH Research Lab of the GhentCDH. 

 

Programme

  • Tues 5/11/19 Transkribus Workshop, Part I: 9 - 11.15h and Part II: 13 - 16h, given by Dr. Annemieke Romein, Ghent University. This is a full-day hands-on workshop learning about Transkribus – an automated recognition, transcription platform that enables OCRed search in manuscripts. The first part of this Workshop is from 9 - 11.15h with a short lecture and an example of automatic transcription; the second part will continue with in an open lab setting from 13 - 16h, where you can bring your own manuscripts and receive further support from Dr. Romein on the platform. Please note, the morning session will be in a PC Lab, but the afternoon you are required to bring your own laptop.
  • Fri 22/11/2019, Lecture Transformative encounters: book history and digital humanities, 13-15h, given by Prof. Katherine Bode, Australian National University. This talk explores the encounter of book history and digital humanities with respect to a project on transnational fiction in digitised nineteenth-century Australian newspapers. This talk is generously funded by the WeChanged Research project and co-organized with the Digitising the Humanities lecture series.
  • Fri 13/12/2019, Workshop Wikidata for Humanities Scholars, Part I: 9- 11.30, Part II: 13 -16h, Dr. Katherine Thornton, Yale University. A full-day hands-on workshop on using Wikidata for research. This talk is generously funded by the WeChanged Research project and co-organized with the Digitising the Humanities lecture series.
  • Tues 11/02/2020, Lecture Poetry by Heart, Prof. Julie Blake, Cambridge University. Talk on the digital poetry platform http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/. This talk is generously funded by the I@H inviative.
  • Tues 31/03/2020, Lecture Understanding Formal Negotiations, Prof. Nicholas Cole, Oxford. This talk discusses the Quill Project (www.quillproject.net and www.quill.pmb.ox.ac.uk), a platform for the study of negotiations of publicly available material relating to Federal and State Constitutional law in the US, and also the pilot projects on U.N. documents, French Revolutionary Assemblies, and the contemporary work of the British Parliament with respect to Brexit. This talk is generously funded by the I@H inviative.

 

Registration

Registration is free, but required for the individual talks: https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/DigitisingtheHumanities