HMN 303—Digital Humanities Intro Workshop: Building and Using Data Sets

HMN 303 teaches students how to access, interpret, transform, and create digital humanities data sets from sources such as collections of historical texts, databases of audio records or videos, image collections, survey results, and others. Students will learn how to assemble multiple sources and formats into usable forms such as spreadsheets, arrays, and databases, while also exploring tools such as computer vision and machine learning that allow for media such as digital photography or video to be translated into quantitative and qualitative data that can, in turn, be processed and analyzed computationally or further processed into other outputs, such as visualizations and graphs. This workshop will focus primarily on the preparing and manipulation of data sets, rather than on their processing into other outputs, as these different alternatives for processing data sets into higher-level research products is covered in other workshops such as HMN 302 : Digital Textual Analysis and HMN 307 : Humanities Data Visualization. The use of quantitative data and methods to process humanistic information and make analytical or argumentative claims about it requires special attention to the assumptions made about the scope, accuracy, precision, and completeness of the evidence being drawn upon, as well as the ways it is processed and interpreted. These issues will be discussed in relation to examples and the exercises students undertake, and will be required to be addressed in the workshop reflection. This workshop will require preparatory reading, in-class participation, independent research, and the submission of a workshop assignment and reflection as part of each student’s submitted final digital portfolio. Open lab hours following the workshops will offer students additional support in completing their assignments, reflections, and portfolios. HMN 30X workshops are designed as basic or introductory and require no previous skills or knowledge. Students must have passed HMN 201 with a grade of C or higher prior to enrolling in this course. The schedule of upcoming workshop offerings by semester will be posted on the Digital Humanities program website to help facilitate planning and advising.