Autumn Data/Culture Workshop

Learn to work with big historical data!

Learn more Add to Calendar 09/30/2024 09:00 AM 10/02/2024 05:00 PM Europe/London Autumn Data/Culture Workshop Location of the event
Monday 30 Sep 2024 - Wednesday 02 Oct 2024
Time: 09:00 - 17:00
Free

Introduction

Online participation: This event will not be 'fully' hybrid and we will not be able to provide hands-on support to online participants. However, we will schedule a follow-up zoom call for online participants and make a Slack channel available for some discussion and troubleshooting in the weeks following the workshop. More details about online participation will be shared with successful applicants.

When: 30 September-2 October 2024 (10:00-17:00 GMT+1 each day). You can register for 1, 2, or 3 days.  

Newspapers: Monday and Tuesday, 30 September and 1 October  

Maps: Wednesday, 2 October  

How to apply: 

Applications are now closed.

We will notify successful applicants on a rolling basis. Attendance will be capped at 25 people. 

Cost: None! Bursaries are available to assist with travel/accommodation/childcare/etc. Please indicate your interest on the application form and we will get in touch with details. Bursaries will primarily support people traveling from locations far from London. 

About the event

During this workshop, historians and others interested in historical sources will have an opportunity to learn about and use open software and data created by Living with Machines researchers to lower barriers to working with digitised newspapers and maps. 

Living with Machines was designed as a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library in order to work with the library’s unrivalled collections of historical newspapers. Over the course of the project, researchers worked with Librarians and Research Software Engineers to develop tools to address the many challenges of working at scale with these collections as data as well as other collections, such as Ordnance Survey maps from the National Library of Scotland. 

The tools developed during Living with Machines aim to create new ways to apply critical methods to entire primary source collections, for example by using bespoke, enhanced metadata as well as tools for detecting specific forms of content using methods from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. However, accessing and then processing newspaper and map data is far from straightforward, and we will explore the challenges researchers face, step by step. 

Newspapers. On the first two days, we will take a close look at nineteenth-century British newspapers, walking participants through the workflow from scanning images to using text data for historical research. Building on the ‘environmental scan’ idea in Beelen et al 2023, we'll highlight new resources available to historians to help us understand, for example, what newspapers are available from which times and places in the UK. Come learn to work with enriched newspaper collection metadata, METS/ALTO files, full-text data, and more! 

Maps. MapReader, which received the AHA 2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, is a software library that was designed for humanities research with big, digitised map collections. MapReader allows users to identify concepts of visual interest on maps, and then to define queries for predicting whether those features are present on hundreds or thousands of individual sheets. The power of this approach is its flexibility for any number of spatially-driven research questions. Participants will learn to use MapReader to analyse historical maps - either samples provided by us, or their own. 

Instructors will include members of the Data/Culture team and former Living with Machines colleagues. 

This event is part of a new pilot initiative at The Alan Turing Institute supported by the AHRC: Data/Culture: Building sustainable communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and software. Through this workshop, we aim to build community around tools and data in the arts and humanities, fostering a culture of open collaboration across projects and institutions in our fields. Further bursary support is made possible by the Rosenzweig prize.

If you have questions about these workshops, please contact [email protected]