Workshop

Experimenting in the Digital Research Lab: a hands-on introduction to using digital collections for digital humanities research

KBR, Royal Library of Belgium, 8 May 2019, 09:15 – 18:30

Venue: The DATeCH pre-conference workshop takes place in the Royal Sky Room 1, which is located on the 6th Floor of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). Please note: due to major building works, access to the KBR is via a temporary entrance on Boulevard de l’Empereur, 2 in Brussels.

Libraries and other cultural heritage institutions are increasing providing data-level access to their digitised and born-digital collections. In parallel, the use of digital tools and methods in humanities research is on the rise. Alongside this, the number of ‘labs initiatives’, such as those in the British Library-initiated Building Library Labs network, which encourage and support researchers to experiment with digitised collections, is growing. It is this context that provides the basis for this year’s DATeCH pre-conference workshop.

This workshop, hosted by the KBR, Royal Library of Belgium, is intended to introduce humanities researchers, cultural heritage professionals and IT-experts to the various interconnecting (and sometimes non-linear) stages in a digital humanities research project.

It will focus on three core stages common to most digital humanities projects: a) data access: using APIs to access digital library collections, b) data preparation: preparing the data for analysis and c) data analysis: tools and methods for analysing your data. These sessions will be led by experts in the field. A number of pre-prepared datasets will be made available for hands-on experimentation.

Audience: humanities researchers, cultural heritage professionals, information, data and computer scientists and research infrastructure experts.

Programme

The DATeCH pre-conference workshop takes place in the Royal Sky Room 1, which is located on the 6th Floor of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). Please note: due to major building works, access to the KBR is via a temporary entrance on Boulevard de l’Empereur, 2 in Brussels.

For those of you who wish to tweet, we will be using the hashtags: #datech2019 #kbrlab

09:15 – 09:30 | Registration and coffee

09:30 – 10:30 | Welcome and Introductions, aims of workshop

10:30 – 11:00 | Session One: Getting access to the data – Part 1

Collections as data: getting access to digitised and born-digital collections for digital humanities research with Sally Chambers, Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

11:00 – 11:30 | Coffee

11:30 – 12:30 | Session One: Getting access to the data – Part 2

Exploring the National Library of Luxembourg’s Open Data Platform through the Historical Newspapers Dataset with Ralph Marschall, Digitisation Project Manager, National Library of Luxembourg

12:30 – 13:30 | Lunch

13:30 – 14:30 | Session Two: Data Preparation – Part 1

Data-driven research using digitised newspapers with Simon Hengchen, University of Helsinki and Ruben Ros, KNAW Digital Humanities Lab

14:30 – 15:30 | Session Two: Data Preparation – Part 2

Introducing Transkribus: a comprehensive platform for the automated recognition, transcription and searching of historical documents with Sinai Rusinek, Haifa University and OMILab, Israel and Annemieke Romein, Ghent University

15:30 – 16:00 | Coffee

16:00 – 18:00 | Session Three: Data Analysis

Introducing Digital Text Analysis through Topic Modelling with Julie Birkholz, Ghent University and Simon Hengchen, University of Helsinki

18:00 – 18:30 | Wrap-up

19:00 – 21:00 | Social Drinks @ À La Mort Subite, Rue Montagne-aux-Herbes Potagères 7, Brussels (self-paid)