Month: January 2020

What are ‘real’ Digital Humanities and how to get started?

The title suggests a political discussion, however, this is not what I want to discuss here. (However, I had a ‘more political’ discussion planned for a while.) At a recent conference, I realized many people from the Humanities find it difficult to grasp what the DH even really are – because they are so diverse. I was told a colleague had gone to a short DH summer school but still feels like she doesn’t get what the DH really are. Or that she hasn’t learned any ‘real DH’. How does this happen? How can we make it better? Maybe, as a first step, by trying to answer what the DH are in a way which is easy to grasp for someone who isn’t already part of the DH: It is really an umbrella term for a wide range of topics ranging from digital edition to long-term archiving, digitizing facsimile scans of books or running analyses. I don’t promise to unveil

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Learning to program: What to do if the program doesn’t compile

In this new year, I wanted to make an introduction to programming which mentions all the parts which (albeit being quite essential) many of the other tutorials, books and teaching documents tend to leave out. Things like “How do I even start debugging?” or “How to not lose it if my program doesn’t compile or when nothing works anymore?”. I was fortunate to get taught these skills by friends and helpful colleagues but if you’re a remote-only learner and don’t have access to such people – this series is for you. In this first post, I’ll address the problem that you’re in a situation where your program does not work at all. In the case of LaTeX, this means it won’t compile. Other programming languages which are not compiled will just not run. So what do you do in that dire situation? Step 1: Take a deep breath Stay calm. I repeat, stay calm. Take a deep breath. It’s just

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Strategically Using Search-And-Replace for LaTeX documents. Part I

In an earlier post, we talked about the perks of using search and replace wisely on XML documents. Here I want to argue that search and replace might be even more powerful when used in LaTeX.   The power of search and replace Imagine your thesis advisor decides last minute that they don’t like the way images are typeset in your thesis. It happens. We are speaking from our friend the Noob’s experience here. So imagine your advisor decides the images in your archaeological catalogue are too small, at the very last minute. In Microsoft Word, problem No. 1 you would have already encountered before now is that the document probably wouldn’t even open anymore (what with 200 pages full of images etc.). The second problem would be that you’d have to change each image size by hand, clicking and dragging around, cleaning up after the horrible mess and destruction your changes are leaving behind. In LaTeX, thanks goodness we

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