Digital Humanities

A common challenge of humanities research is to address a complex web of loyalties, interests, influence, and the alignment of key actors around vital issues. What methods facilitate the research that aims to capture the structure of personal networks within complex systems, to track the evolving relationships among cultural agents and objects, and to visualize a matrix of ideas, relating individual concepts to the bigger picture? Kumu is powerful, open-source network analytics software that has a variety of applications for the humanities and beyond. In this workshop, participants will learn how to build a project from the ground up, compiling, structuring, and styling data to visualize a web of affiliations with an interactive network map. This workshop shows how Kumu may be leveraged in collaborative inquiry activities among scholars and students and explores some of the possibilities that network analytics offers to humanities scholarship and pedagogy.

In the research process, the acquisition stage can be overwhelming, especially when researchers need to capture vast amounts of digital images in a short period of time. What strategies can add structure to a digital image archive? What methods can make this archive searchable? How can an organized archive help scholars write a chapter of their next book or a lesson plan of their next course? In this workshop, participants will learn how to create an archive of visual materials for research using Tropy, an image management toolkit that allows users to organize images, record metadata about them, transcribe text from manuscripts or printed material, and export data for other uses. This workshop demonstrates how Tropy can be an integral part of your archival research workflows and explores the processes and organizational strategies that allow users to make the most of the software.