Session proposal: how to use Zotero?

Zotero is an easy-to-use off- and online bibliographical tool with which researchers can
– organize a personal academic library
– share online libraries with other Zotero-users
– easily insert bibliographical references in one’s texts

This academic year, for the first time, we taught our first bachelor History students how to use Zotero. We believe a systematical use of the program can provide for an easily accessible library for our students, create investigative cooperations between them and also save our student-researchers a lot of time!

As a session, I wish to introduce Zotero to everyone and shortly demonstrate its main functions…

Session proposal: taking the ‘human’ out of digital humanities

With a proposal title like that, this session is sure to get some attention.

In digital humanities, we work with electronic data. The major advantage of this is that we can use computers to enrich it, search it, find structure, etcetera, without having to do all of that manually. In this session, we would like to talk specifically about text, and the integration of natural language processing (NLP) in DH research.

We will give a brief overview of some of the methods, tools and corpora that we know of, and would then like to kick off a discussion about some of the following questions:

  • Which text processing tools do you use, if any? Preprocessing, named entity recognition, clustering, topic modeling, annotation tools, Perl or Python libraries, …
  • Do you think your research could benefit from (more) NLP?
  • What are the barriers to entry?
  • Which tools, courses, … are missing?

Looking forward to a lively session!

Sessievoorstel: digitale geletterdheid van studenten

Ik stel een sessie voor over de digitale geletterdheid van studenten en hoe we die kunnen verhogen.

Idealiter integreren we digitale tools en kritiek in onze onderwijspraktijk op cursusfunctionele wijze. Maar welke tools? Hoe doe je dat zonder dat het te veel tijd van docenten en studenten in beslag neemt? Wat met Minerva?

Er zijn anderzijds ook ambitieuzere experimenten en onderwijsinnovatie projecten die specifiek digitale tools inzetten voor of uittesten op leerwinst. Aan de vakgroep geschiedenis experimenteren we met digitale tijdlijnen als doceer- en leerinstrument maar er zijn ongetwijfeld nog andere initiatieven.

Bedoeling van deze sessie is om succesjes, mislukkingen en vooral bedenkingen bij onze digitale onderwijspraktijken te bespreken en om hopelijk geïnspireerd (en gewaarschuwd?) te raken.

Session proposal: What is DARIAH anyway?

DARIAH-BE logoA question I often hear is ‘so what is DARIAH anyway?’ And I do understand that every good project manager should be able to describe their project in one or two sentences during an elevator ride. However, one of the core values behind DARIAH is that it is an infrastructure developed by researchers, for researchers. Therefore, during THATCamp Ghent, I would like to reverse the tables and ask what would YOU like DARIAH to be?

In this interactive session, we will use a variety to practical exercises (warning: there may be brainstorming and sticky notes involved!) to explore some of the ‘things’ that together could become DARIAH. We will take as a starting point the idea that DARIAH would like offer a portfolio of services that directly benefit researchers in their every day work.  Together we will explore what sort of things would you like DARIAH to provide? Help in setting up a database? A Virtual Research Environment? A place to deposit, manage and archive your research data? Training? Workshops?  Hackathons? Advice and guidance about what standards to use? About legal issues? Tools to support digital methods, e.g. data mining? social network analysis? topic modelling?

Don’t be shy, share your DARIAH dream with us!

The vision of DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities is to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the arts and humanities. It will offer a portfolio of services and activities centred around research communities. Belgium is one of the 15 Founding Members of DARIAH. In 2015, DARIAH-BE, is being coordinated by the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.

Join us and help us make DARIAH what YOU would like it to be!