Understanding the material aspects of historical books is crucial. Unlike modern books, copies from the same print run of historical
read more Why Do We Need to Digitize the Materiality of Pre-Modern Books?
Everybody is talking about “materiality” but what does that even mean? It’s actually kind of hard to understand the materiality
read more What do we mean by ‘materiality’ in the context of rare book digitization?
Today’s blog post is a teaser for a video class called Computer Vision for Digital Humanities (funded by CLARIAH-AT with the support of BMBWF). The self-learning resource (video lessons plus Jupyter notebooks) is an introduction to Computer Vision methods for Digital Humanists. It addresses some Humanities issues that many typical introductions to computer vision do not cover. This post is an example of such reflection. It gives an insight into the first exercise of the class, filtering a list of metadata to create a ground truth dataset for training a classification algorithm. This blogpost does not contain the actual data (so you stay tuned for the video class!) but discusses the issues which arise when creating a ground truth data set for computer vision using Humanities data. Citation suggestion: Suzana Sagadin & Sarah Lang, How to create a ground truth data set for computer vision using Humanities data, in LaTeX Ninja Blog, 04.07.2023. https://latex-ninja.com/2023/07/04/how-to-create-a-ground-truth-data-set-for-computer-vision-using-humanities-data/ Further links to the whole school:
read more How to create a ground truth data set for computer vision using Humanities data
During the annual conference of the DHd Association, the Empowerment Working Group organized a workshop on the topic of Data Feminism in the Digital Humanities (organized by Luise Borek, Nora Probst & Sarah Lang, technical support: Yael Lämmerhirt)[1]. This short blog post aims to present preliminary results to document the event and raise awareness for this essential topic. Everyone is invited to participate in the project and should contact the Empowerment Working Group if interested. Citation suggestion: Luise Borek*, Elena Suárez Cronauer, Pauline Junginger, Sarah Lang, Karoline Lemke & Nora Probst, Data Feminism as a Challenge for Digital Humanities? [English version], in LaTeX Ninja Blog, 01.07.2023. https://latex-ninja.com/2023/07/01/data-feminism-as-a-challenge-for-digital-humanities/ *All authors contributed equally. Disclaimer: This is a machine-translated version of the original German article (found here), powered by ChatGPT 4. I read over it to make sure there’s nothing wildly inappropriate in there but since terms used are crucial when it comes to this topic, the German version is the one we
read more Data Feminism as a Challenge for Digital Humanities?
Modelling is central to the Digital Humanities. Even so much that some claim it is what unites the DH as a field or discipline! But what is modelling? What do we mean by it anyway? This post will hopefully provide you with the primer you need. Sorry for the very sporadic blogging lately. I still haven’t figured out how to include blogging into my PostDoc life. I think I want to get to a rhythm of around 1-2 posts per month. More than that is absolutely not realistic but, as you may have realized, I didn’t even manage that consistently over the last year. Then again, it’s not like I’m not producing teaching materials anymore. Most of my efforts this year have gone into all the classes I have been teaching (I’m hoping to share slides and teaching materials for all of them once they are cleaned up) – I have taught an intro to text mining, my usual information
read more What’s the deal with modelling in Digital Humanities?
Today’s post is a short introduction to digital scholarly editing. I will explain some basic principles (so mostly theory) and point you to a few resources you will need to get started in a more practical fashion. I’m teaching a class on digital scholarly editing this term, so I thought I could use the opportunity to write an intro post on this important topic. How does a Digital Edition relate to an analogue scholarly edition? Unlike analogue scholarly editons, digital editions are not exclusive to text and they overcome the limitations of print by following what we call a digital paradigm rather than an analogue one. This means that a digital edition cannot be given in print without loss of content or functionality. A retrodigitized edition (an existing analogue edition which is digitized and made available online), thus, isn’t enough to qualify as a digital edition because it follows the analogue paradigm. Ergo: It’s not about the storage medium. A
read more What you really need to know about Digital Scholarly Editing
Today’s post is a quick introduction to version control as a concept and version control systems. It explains what they are and why you should be using them. I was just sending one of my best old-timey blogposts to a friend (How to quit MS Word for good), ended up re-reading it and realized that therein, I had promised that I would write a blog post on version control some day. And, if I’m not mistaken, I never followed up on that. So here you are, a short post on version control just to keep things going on the blog. What is Version Control? So I read this book a few years ago. The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide: How to Learn Programming Languages Quickly, Ace Your Programming Interview, and Land Your Software Developer Dream Job by John Sonmez (Simple Programmer 2017). While I’m not that fond of its author anymore since I realized that he uses his platform to
Today’s post is my long-awaited take on typesetting scholarly editons using the reledmac package. Not only does it introduce the
read more Enough reledmac to be dangerous: Scholarly Editing with LaTeX & XSLT
This post is another reflection on the relationship between teaching and self-directed learning. It focuses on how to find a balance with making learning too hard or not hard enough. Thus the title: How can we deliberately make ourselves and/or our students fail just hard enough to learn? Context: I just found this post in the huge number of unfinished drafts in my WordPress. It was almost done, supposedly from early fall 2021. Some of it are reflections on my own (online) teaching in the summer term of 2021. I thought this was an interesting reflection still, so I decided to fix it up a little and post it now, despite the text not being “new” and some of my thoughts on my own teaching having changed over the last year where I have been teaching more than before as a Postdoc. Because the draft of this post was already so long and got a little longer with some 2022
read more Failing just hard enough to learn [Learning & Teaching / Riding higher waves Pt. 2.1]
It’s been awfully quiet on this blog but actually, there’s lots of Ninja activity going on right now: I’m excited to announce that I will give the first ever official LaTeX Ninja workshop, in person at Harvard in about two weeks! It’s called “Beyond TEI: Digital Editions with XPath and XSLT for the Web and in LaTeX”. (Apart from that, there’s a short book review coming up in TUGboat.) Since there probably are a good number of people who would be interested in such a workshop but can’t attend in person, I will share the slides and teaching materials on Github later on. That way, they can be reused for self-study. This blogpost gives somewhat of an outline of the contents of the workshop and contains links to related posts on this blog. Participants might want to read some of them in preparation or as an additional resource. [Get to the github repo with all the materials (`additional resources’ directory)
Today’s post is just a short essay describing my experiences with Transkribus Lite and creating my first custom Transkribus model
read more Training my own Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model on Transkribus Lite
As some of you might know, I have written about my Twitter bots on this blog a number of times. Now I decided to shut them all down and wanted to give at least a short explanation of why that was. TLDR: It got unexpectedly expensive and I reasoned the benefit wasn’t really worth the price. Off-topic note on posting schedule: As my devoted readers have probably noticed by now, we’re down to a bi-weekly posting schedule at the most. I have been thinking about it and I’m aiming for two posts per month for now. Actually that’s less than every second week. The point is, I have been reflecting about what makes this blog what it is and I think that’s the good posts I come up with every once in a while. When those add up, that makes the blog a useful resource for time to come. It’s these posts that I want to focus on. And frankly,
As some of you might know, I have been promising to provide an intro to XML for a long time.
read more A shamelessly short intro to XML for DH beginners (includes TEI)
Because I’m a classicist by training, I have been wanting to broach the topic of how to typeset Ancient Greek in LaTeX for a long time. So today comes a short post on the topic. There are a number of ways you can approach this but most importantly, you need to decide whether you need just any Greek letters or Ancient Greek letters. Because Ancient Greek has diacritics which aren’t featured in all (“normal”) Greek keyboards. This blogpost covers the three sub-topics I deemed relevant to the question and they are: How do I get my Greek letters in the first place? (related to 1) How/Where do I get a Greek keyboard and which one to choose? How to typeset Greek in LaTeX? How to get your Greek letters If you’re just adding, say a note on the origin of a word to your text, you might not even need to install a Greek keyword at all. When I just
Conference paper submissions in LaTeX are becoming increasingly popular in fields outside the technical disciplines (which have embraced them a long time ago already). Be that the Digital Humanities or historians wanting to contribute to events such as HistoCrypt, LaTeX templates for submission are getting more widely adopted. That’s why I wanted to dedicate this first post of 2022 to this important topic, so you are ready for LaTeX conference paper/abstract submissions in 2022! How to get started quickly and what to be aware of Find the template to use. The conference will have probably prepared a template you’re supposed to do. Since a principle behind TeX/LaTeX is the separation of form and content, you really only need to focus on writing your text. The layout will be provided by the conference organizers in said template. If this template isn’t on Overleaf yet, download it and upload it as a new project in the online LaTeX editor Overleaf. This will
read more The LaTeX Newbie’s Guide to Using Overleaf for Conference Paper Submissions
Most productivity advice is essentially always the same. If you’re new to self-help, you will be familiar with the most important concepts after reading this post. It will sum up the best advice I have found reading a ton of productivity books over the past ten years. More importantly, I have tried out many of the concepts suggested and these are my top picks. Different productivity methods generally won’t be equally beneficial for everybody. There are some which work for you and some just don’t. But the central aspects always remain the same. So here they are. The motivation: The best of productivity advice without the “hustle culture” In the post The Right Mindset for Learning Challenging New Skills, I menioned how some blogposts (like Steve Pavlina’s Do It Now) have massively influenced me when I first got into personal development and productivity books. I’m not on board with the “hustle culture” associated with the productivity movement any longer but
read more The 33 most effective productivity hacks I’ve come across in 10 years
Have you heard of the concept of “deliberate practice”? It’s a method for rapid skill aquisition through practicing in a certain way. The concept is discussed in detail in a highly recommened book: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (2016). So here it is. At last. The long promised book review and summary of the most important takeaways from Peak. Ever wonder why you’re not improving at skills despite using them every day? You’re not using deliberate practice is why. So what is deliberate practice anyway? […] deliberate practice [is a] a term coined by Ericsson to refer to the specific learning method used by experts to achieve superior performance in their fields, and mental representations. (Wikipedia entry on Peak) The book resulted from one of the top reserachers in the science of expertise, K. Anders Ericsson, cooperating with science communicator Robert Pool to make his research understandable to the masses. Malcom
read more How to use Deliberate Practice to reach your Peak [Book Review]
In today’s post, I wanted to pick up again on a topic I had adressed previously in The most important book to read if you want to learn Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Maths, Programming or LaTeX. The general gist was that when you want to learn a new skill which you perceive as challenging or difficult, maybe even anxiety-inducing (up to a degree that you’re seriously doubting your ability to learn it all), the most important thing to work on before doing anything else is changing your mindset. Today I will elaborate what your self-image and/or identity has to do with that and how you can use it to your advantage when learning daunting new skills. Do you enjoy posts on learning and skill building? Let me know! I feel that people are actually enjoying my posts on learning how to learn because they generate likes months after they have been posted. I guess there really isn’t enough material out
read more The Right Mindset for Learning Challenging New Skills
Academic Twitter can be an important tool for networking, we get it. But I’ve talked to more and more colleagues who have given up on Twitter because they felt that they couldn’t make it work and also didn’t want to spend unreasonable amounts of time on it. I get that too. Apart from the Twitter experiment I did in November 2020 and times where there’s relevant stuff going on, I also want to minimize time spent on social media/Twitter as much as possible. But, to my great surprise, I realized my accounts are still growing even though I’m not doing much. That’s when I thought “Wait, this could be relevant for my readers” and decided to explain to you what I did. The goal: Setting your Twitter account up right for a relatively low-maintenance Twitter presence with some growth In my experience, many academics sign up for Twitter and then never get on Twitter again because they don’t know how
Actually I wanted to write about something different today and had a post already prepared. But then I came across yet another instance of people making negative comments about LaTeX (for apparently no reason and without explaining why they think so) and I guess that made me angry, so here’s today’s post about today’s topic: Why is it so normalized to make snarky side comments about LaTeX? Both in the DH community and otherwise. What is people’s problem with LaTeX? So the offending post, in this case, was this – but I really don’t mean to shit on it because it’s a great post otherwise (I have actually written something similar in Where can I *actually learn* programming? (as DH and otherwise). I guess that’s part of the reason why it makes me so angry. It’s an overall great post by people who are influential in the DH, with a considerable audience and otherwise doing great work. And then a
read more Why is it so normalized to make snarky side comments about LaTeX?
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 