Digitising the Humanities: stimulating an interdisciplinary community in Russia and beyond through an interactive workshop in the international context of EADH

Interdisciplinary collaboration is an increasingly essential skill in the digital humanities and beyond. However, students who are interested in exploring the potential that digital methods can bring to their research are often spread across different research groups; faculties; universities; countries and time zones. This becomes even more important when applied in an international context, especially for people whose first language is not English. The aim of this workshop is, in the context of the international European Association of Digital Humanities (EADH) conference, to provide a community-building opportunity for students, researchers and cultural heritage professionals to come together for an interactive, interdisciplinary, introductory Digital Humanities workshop.

The objectives of this workshop are to:

1. Offer a hands-on workshop around the theme digitising the humanities. This online workshop includes 4 main sessions: 1) What is Digital Humanities?, 2) Digital Cultural Heritage for Digital Humanities, 3) Introduction to Jupyter Notes I - Collections as Data and 4) Introduction to Jupyter Notes II - Visualising your data using Lab notebooks.
2. Stimulate an interdisciplinary digital humanities community from all career stages particularly in the humanities, computer science and linguistics. This builds on the experience of the Ghent University’s DH Research Lab, an informal community of DH-interested students and researchers affiliated with the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.
3. Encourage an international exchange between students interested in Slavic Digital Humanities by establishing a link with Princeton University’s Slavic Digital Humanities Working Group and Ghent University’s Ghent Centre for Slavic and East European Studies (GCSEES).
4. Reach out to the local Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in Krasnoyarsk and the surrounding region, inspired by the International GLAM Labs Network. The network published the Open Access (CC0) book Open a GLAM Lab (Mahey et al. 2019) resulting from a Book Sprint in Doha, Qatar in September 2019. Open a GLAM Lab has also been translated into Russian (Махей и др. 2019).
5. Make the multilingual learning materials (English and Russian) including the notebooks created for this workshop available through DARIAH Campus.

Length

This is intended as an online workshop that will take place over two days (e.g. 20th - 21st September 2021) from 14:00-17:30 in Krasnoyarsk and 09:00-12:30 in Ghent to take into account the different time zones. It will be supplemented by an in-person session at the Siberian Federal University, if possible.

Draft schedule

09:00 Registration and Coffee

09:30 Welcome, from the Siberian Federal University and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

09:45 Introductory Session: Icebreaker

10:15 Session 1: What is Digital Humanities? An International showcase

Gamification 1: Which project inspired you most?

10:45 Session 2: Digital Cultural Heritage for Digital Humanities

This session will explore aggregating digital cultural heritage (including digitised and born-digital) resources for use in digital humanities projects. It will include existing digital libraries (e.g. Europeana), what is already available, both in Russian or about Russian in international resources. It will also explore Siberian cultural heritage in collaboration with local libraries, museums and archives, considering what is already digitised and what is ‘digitisable’?

11:30 Coffee break

11:45 Group work: Co-designing a digital corpus for an interdisciplinary digital humanities project

Gamification 2: Digital corpus roulette

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Session 3: Introduction to Jupyter Notes I - Collections as Data

Inspired by the GLAM Workbench this session will provide a practical introduction to Jupyter notebooks and their application for providing data-level access to digital cultural heritage collections. A specific notebook will be prepared for the workshop providing access to existing digital collections via APIs.

14:15 Group work: Using Jupyter Notebooks to create a digital corpus

15:00 Coffee break

15:15 Session 4: Introduction to Jupyter Notes II - Visualising your data

This session will provide an introduction of how the data collected in the previous session can be visualised using a range of techniques within the Jupyter Notebooks.

16:00 Group work: Visualising your data with Jupyter Notebooks

16:45 Gamification: Wrap up session: evaluation, feedback

17:00 Social Event: Community Building

Contact information

Anna Bukhtoyarova (annabukhtoyarova@gmail.com), Scientific Library Specialist, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Mikhail Bukhtoyarov (mikebukhtoyarov@gmail.com) Associate Professor, School for the Humanities, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Gustavo Candela (gcandela@ua.es), Associate Professor, Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante, Spain

Milena Dobreva (milena.dobreva@gate-ai.eu), Senior Researcher, GATE: Big Data for Smart Society and Associate Professor, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria

Sally Chambers (sally.chambers@ugent.be), Digital Humanities Research Coordinator, Ghent Centre of Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium.

Target Audience

This workshop is intended for 25-30 participants. Participation is open to all with an interest in digital humanities but will be based on a call for participation (see below). Students and researchers in all arts, humanities and social science disciplines plus computer, data or information science at all career stages and cultural heritage professionals are encouraged to apply.

Call for Participation

An international call for workshop participation (in Russian and English) will be published in Summer 2021. Applicants will be asked to submit a biography and a motivation of why they would like to participate in the workshop (max. 250 words). Applications will be received in Russian or English. These will be reviewed by an international group of experts. When selecting applications attention will be paid to gender and disciplinary balance. A target of 50% of participants will be from the Siberian Federal University.

Proposed international experts:

Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator, Digitisation, British Library; Prof. Dr. Julie Birkholz, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium & Lead of the Royal Library of Belgium's Digital Research Lab; Leah Budke, DH Research Lab Coordinator, Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities; Tamara Butigan, Head of the Digital Library Department, National Library of Serbia; Phaedra Claeys, Ghent Centre for Slavic and East European Studies (GCSEES), Ghent University; Dr. Milena Dobreva, Senior Researcher, GATE: Big Data for Smart Society and Associate Professor, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria; Quinn Dombrowski, Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford University; Dr. Natalia Ermolaev, Associate Director, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton; Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal University; Dr. Alba Irollo, Research Coordinator, Europeana; Prof. Dr. Manuel Marco-Such, Professor, University of Alicante, Spain; Dr. Toma Tasovac, Director, DARIAH-EU; Elena Zimina, Chief Librarian, Russian State Library, Moscow.