Providing responsive and flexible support has been more important than ever this year. We've continued to provide training bursaries and social and informal networking opportunities to our community, moving our established PhD Socials and Fikas online and experimenting with different formats and platforms. We've also flexed to provide new forms of support and guidance in response to changing circumstances, and we've continued to look for ways to develop the research resources available locally.
With our expertise in digital methods and tools, we were in a great position to support colleagues when they had to pivot their research plans and adapt to remote and online working in the summer of 2020. We worked with the College Research Office to support the rapid development of the SERCH Resource Hub, which compiled trusted resources and guidance for carrying out research in the Covid-19 context.
As the situation in the UK begins to stabilise, we are programming a series of research adaptation workshops designed to surface information which will help us develop support that enables our community to remain at the forefront of research despite the ongoing challenges.
To support our PhD and ECR community, we continued facilitating social events online. We experimented with a research roulette evening, where researchers met others across CAHSS at lighting speed! Responding to requests from researchers, we helped organise co-working sessions and held a virtual quiz with prizes!
We've gained a lot of experience in hosting online events this year, and have tried to ensure that our experience benefits others. We've partnered with our friends at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities to offer a number of workshops for colleagues who need to plan events, and have written a series of blog posts on the topic.
Since its launch, CDCS has been bringing our community together at a regular Fika (a Swedish word that means a break, with coffee or tea and a bite to eat: time for colleagues and friends to get together and chat). This year we have continued to do so, just online: we've been joined for coffee and chat by colleagues from all around the world.
Programming4Humanists Summer 2020 Gephi Course, hosted by the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University
Gephi is an open-source network analysis and visualization software package written in Java on the NetBeans platform. Topics covered: Data Formats; Visualization; Exporting graphs to the web.
Naturalistic and Scientific Illustration: Traditional Techniques, hosted by Transmitting Science
A broad introduction to scientific illustration applied to biological sciences and palaeontology.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research
Topics covered: Bayesian Modelling for the Social Sciences; Time Series Analysis; Machine Learning: Applications in Social Science Research; Measurement, Scaling, and Dimensional Analysis
"Attending this course was an amazing experience... I am currently studying different methods in which zooarchaeologists analyse and share information digitally, and this course helped me understand processes of classical and digital scientific illustration"
We are making Proquest's TDM Studio available to our research community. Working with the Library, we have supported a year-long subscription to the TDM workbench, which allows researchers to extract and analyse data from Proquest collections. Two pilot projects are currently underway, and the workbench will be available for other projects from summer 2021.
The Centre for Data, Culture & Society was pleased to provide funding to the TEI By Example initiative, and to take on the hosting of this resource. Funding enabled an upgrade to the training materials and website infrastructure in Summer 2020. The upgrade undertaken by the original TBE team, involved improvements to the website’s back end such as setting up a git workflow, allowing the site code to be shared in a publicly available repository, and incorporating infrastructure that can accommodate translation into other languages.
We are making data available to our community and supporting digitisation. This year we have purchased historical newspaper collections, including The Guardian, The Scotsman and the New York Times. We've also funded more digitisation of more of the Scottish Session Papers, the case papers of the Scottish Court of Session, Scotland's supreme civil court, which will be of broad interest across many disciplines.
This year we have again been pleased to lend our support to the Programming Historian through their institutional partnership scheme. The Programming Historian provides high quality, peer-reviewed online training materials which we use in our programme, and we are keen to ensure the project continues in years to come.
We partner with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities to offer funded Digital Scholarship Visiting Fellowships and Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellowships each year.
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
A scholar of literary and cultural studies of southern Africa, Tinashe Mushakavanhu co-developed the platform readingzimbabwe.com, a webliography mapping the published history of Zimbabwe since the 1950s. His fellowship project, 'Reading Zimbabwe and the Internet', intends to visualise and analyse this corpora of data to better understand the thematic, spatial, and cultural dynamics of black cultural production, and to document the intellectual history of Zimbabwe.
(Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada)
Leith Davis is a professor in the Department of English and Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University, whose research focuses on media change and cultural memory in the British Isles in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her fellowship project uses digital humanities tools to analyse the ‘The Lyon in Mourning' manuscript, a complex site of cultural memory and an act of data-collection and networking in the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rising.
Lois Burke completed her PhD in 2019 at Edinburgh Napier University. Her fellowship project, ‘Scottish Women Writers of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature: Connections, Creativity, and Children’s Cultures’ utilises Edinburgh’s unique collections to reveal the importance of forgotten Scottish women writers of the late-Victorian period, through use of Digital Humanities tools and methodologies.
