Programme

Welcome and Society of Research Software Engineering talk

Mary Chester-Kadwell  - Lead RSE, Cambridge Digital Humanities

DH & RSE in Cambridge

Encouraging Sustainability in Digital Humanities Projects 

Dr Michael Hawkins  - Senior Developer, Cambridge University Library 

Sustainability can be challenging for digital humanities projects. Fixed-term funding means that that you’re often locked within an endless cycle of fund-seeking. Unless you build and manage your own infrastructure, your existence also relies on the good-graces and continued support of your local support team, who are likely understaffed and overstretched. Despite these challenges, there are strategies that you can adopt to encourage the long-term sustainability of your project. Trained as a historian of early modern science and medicine, Michael Hawkins has been the Technical Director of many high-profile digitisation projects over the past twenty years, including The Newton Project (https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/), The Casebooks Project (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/) and the Darwin Correspondence Project (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/). 

Bridging the Gap between Philology of Middle Eastern Texts and Data Science 

Dr Estara Arrant  - Postdoctoral Research Associate, Cambridge University Library 

The linguistic and historical study of the Medieval Middle East is advanced by using data science tools and methods. In this talk I will describe how I have embraced the possibilities, challenges and experiences of working in digital humanities as a data scientist and research software engineer. For my doctoral thesis, I mined physical and linguistic data from a large Hebrew manuscript collection to find patterns in material and linguistic culture from the10th-15th centuries. In my current position, I develop and modify tools from biological sciences to study the evolution of a text as it is copied over time and place. In the future, I plan to explore the interplay between language and society using a combination of natural language processing and categorical data analysis/clustering for a medieval corpus of Judaeo-Arabic letters. Through these projects, I have learnt practices and approaches for sustaining the methods, code and data I have developed. 

Careers Panel 

Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell - Lead RSE, Cambridge Digital Humanities 

Jonathan Blaney - Digital Humanities RSE, Cambridge Digital Humanities 

Dr Estara Arrant  - Postdoctoral Research Associate, Cambridge University Library 

Dr Michael Hawkins  - Senior Developer, Cambridge University Library 

Sustainable code for research

Introduction to Best Practices for Sustainable Code 

Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell  - Lead RSE, Cambridge Digital Humanities 

There is no single, definitive thing that makes code ‘good’ or ‘sustainable’. Rather, there are categories of ‘best practices’ you can choose for your project, depending on what you are trying to achieve and how much time you have available. The ‘one simple trick’ is to be selective and make an informed, deliberate choice. This talk covers a range of options for improving the sustainability of your research code, such as: ensuring that code runs reliably now and in the future; showing how (and why) the code works for yourself and others; and facilitating access to code when sharing with others. Topics include version control (the foundation of everything else), dependency management, documentation of various types, refactoring, testing, open source, publishing and where to look for further resources.  

Evaluating GitHub Repositories 

Jonathan Blaney  - Digital Humanities RSE, Cambridge Digital Humanities 

In this session we will look at some GitHub repositories to see what we can learn about good (and not so good) practices for writing sustainable code. Is the repository well organised and clearly documented? Is the code itself written with an emphasis on readability and consistency? Would you want to use this repository or steer well clear? The discussion aims to prime attendees for the hands-on sessions in the second half of the day. Jonathan supports students on the MPhil in Digital Humanities for Cambridge Digital Humanities. Previously he worked on DH projects at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and before that at the Oxford Digital Library in the Bodleian. 

Applying Best Practices for Sustainable Code 

Dr Lidea Shahidi - RSE Methods Fellow, Cambridge Digital Humanities  

This session will give participants hands-on experience with coding design principles and preparing code for sharing. These practices help to ensure coding projects are reliable, reusable and understandable for you and for others. The session will begin with a demonstration of sustainable coding practices and their practical implementation. The demonstration will be followed by group work in which participants will apply the concepts to an example project, and will include tasks concerning formatting, documentation, refactoring, and publishing code. 

Lidea is a Research Software Engineering Methods Fellow at CDH where she helps researchers in the humanities apply best practices in coding. Concurrently, Lidea is a postdoctoral research associate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and conducts research on hearing, speech perception, and cochlear implants. 

Introduction & SSI Talk

Neil Jakeman - Senior Research Software Analyst, King's Digital Lab

Elliot Hall - Senior Research Software Engineer, King's Digital Lab

Introduction of SSI and its Fellowship Programme

Oscar Seip - Research Software Community Officer for SSI

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) supports sustainable software practices through its Fellowship Programme, which aims to improve and promote good computational practice across all research disciplines and support those who are doing this important work. In this talk, you will learn more about the SSI and the opportunities of the Fellowship Programme.

Digital creative approaches for research and engagement

Neil Jakeman - Senior Research Software Analyst, King's Digital Lab

Elliot Hall - Senior Research Software Engineer, King's Digital Lab

Discover innovative methods to enhance your research and engagement strategies using digital tools in this hands-on workshop. We'll explore cutting-edge techniques that integrate creativity with rigorous research, enabling you to visualize, analyse, and present your data in compelling ways. 

Creative Technologist role in impact and engagement

Understanding data types in 3D technology requires a new vocabulary. We discuss the main data types and the considerations we should make when preparing data for different purposes – e.g. game engine development, or 3D animated render. We will use a capture some 3D data and evaluate it objectively and look at platforms for sharing this data.

Creation and Data types in 3D

Understanding data types in 3D technology requires a new vocabulary. We discuss the main data types and the considerations we should make when preparing data for different purposes – e.g. game engine development, or 3D animated render. We will use a capture some 3D data and evaluate it objectively and look at platforms for sharing this data.

Constructing an Immersive experience from a research scenario

Neil Jakeman - Senior Research Software Analyst, King's Digital Lab

Elliot Hall - Senior Research Software Engineer, King's Digital Lab

Transform your research into captivating immersive experiences in this hands-on workshop.  Gain practical skills in creating immersive content that enhances understanding and engagement, making your research compelling and accessible to a broader audience.

We suggest a typical scenario and request from a small heritage organisation wanting to share their collections more effectively through digital means. In groups, you will develop a strategy to address their requirements and an implementation plan. If time and resources allow, we may move on to proof-of-concept development.

Introduction & DHRSE IEUK network talk

Federico Nanni - Senior Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute

Research Software Engineering in the Arts and Humanities: a community-driven approach

Stavros Angelis - Senior Technical Officer/Digital Officer, Arts & Humanities Institute, Maynooth University

Why do we need and how can we secure Research Software Engineering capability in the Arts and Humanities? We present a Community Interest Group that aims to offer a forum for the Research Software Engineering (RSE) community working and collaborating in Arts and Humanities across UK and Ireland for focused discussion, expertise and knowledge exchange, action, advocacy and policy making towards the development of AH RSE capability.

DH & RSE practices

MapReader, open-source software library for analysing large map collections

Rosie Wood - Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute

MapReader (https://github.com/Living-with-machines/MapReader) is an end-to-end computer vision pipeline for image classification, specifically aimed at researchers looking to work with images of historic maps. It was initially developed as part of the Living with Machines (LwM) project in 2018 and so, when I joined in 2023, MapReader was already a well-defined software package. However, it needed significant work to enhance user-friendliness, integrate new features/functionality, and implement better testing and documentation.
Unlike many of the LwM team members, my background is in Computational Chemistry rather than Digital Humanities (DH) and so joining a DH project was a steep learning curve. Likewise, the transition from research to a Research Software Engineer (RSE) role was a significant change and took some getting used to. In both cases, there were many new concepts to learn, new ways of working to adapt to and many, many, acronyms to contend with!
I have now been working as one of the only core developers on the MapReader package for 1.5 years and in this talk will discuss my experiences and lessons learned throughout this time.

DH & RSE practices: the Seshat Project

Ed Chalstrey - Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute

The “Seshat Global History Databank” tracks over 150 data variables related to technology, language, religion, warfare, economics and more, across roughly 800 historical polities (nations, empires etc), to aid historians conducting data-driven research. As an RSE at The Alan Turing Institute, I have been working on an AHRC funded project that aims to bring the benefits of RSE to research in the arts and humanities. As part of this, I was tasked with integrating a GeoJSON shape dataset of historical polities covering the last 5,000 years into Seshat, which involved extending the Django website code with an interactive world map. I will demonstrate the functionality of the world map on the Seshat website, offering explanations on the decision processes in data visualisation, such as colour choices and how to handle different types of data variable (e.g. boolean, categorical). I will discuss the technical challenges, including loading over 10,000 geospatial shape data objects in the browser and how they are handled. I will also describe the experience in bringing best practices in software engineering to a mixed team of engineers and data-driven historians on a mature research project running for over a decade, and the challenges of doing so.

DH & RSE practices: Living with Machines

Kaspar Beelen - Technical Lead, School of Advanced Study

In this talk, we will discuss collaboration in large-scale digital humanities projects, primarily from the perspective of "humanists who can code." How can we efficiently operate in large interdisciplinary projects and work with scholars from radically different backgrounds? Our focus will be on the Living with Machines project, a radical collaboration involving the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, among others. We will explore the types of collaboration that worked, but also discuss what remained challenging, and why

Collaborative Coding

Federico Nanni - Senior Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute

Collaboratively writing and reviewing code is a crucial skill for working as part of a team. Keeping track of outstanding issues and proposed solutions, as well as ensuring compatibility of code written by different team members becomes challenging as the team size grows. In this hands-on workshop, we will review the "Git flow" framework for efficiently organising and tracking collaborative programming, and practice creating GitHub Issues, Git branches, and Pull Requests.