In my recent post on how to get started doing DH, I basically said that the essence of being DH is looking at data with the eyes of a Humanist and gave some tips on how to get started in just 10 days. However, it’s not that easy. Learning digital skills and the problem of skill transfer A problem I see a lot is that H people fail to transfer their newly won practical DH skills to their own research questions. They don’t know how to look at their own material as data. They don’t know how to leverage digital methods to help answer their own research questions. But if it isn’t compatible with their own research, they’ll never deepen their knowledge enough to actually profit from their DH skills. If you don’t use them, they are forgotten quickly. So how do you make this transfer which I think is, so far, being neglected as a skill which has to
Month: April 2020
The Computational Humanities and Toxic Masculinity? A (long) reflection
Today, I want to talk about the Computational Humanities discussion from last year and finally say something with regard to the gender issues in it. I called this post ‘Toxic Masculinity?’ and maybe that’s provocative to you. But maybe it also correctly describes a situation which could come to pass in the DH – a discipline which considers itself so forward-thinking – if we don’t take lurking issues seriously. So this is my reaction. Some disclaimers and considerations I wanted to respond to this discussion when it originally came up. Then I didn’t dare to post it because I was kind of afraid there would be a bad reaction, especially as the slightly-shitstorm-like situation was still fresh and I didn’t want to offend anyone. So I didn’t and now it’s all kind of too late and not up-to-date anymore. But since the general subject is still relevant to me, I decided to use this Corona situation to write up this
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Learning Programming from Video Tutorials
In these times of corona crisis, I have been receiving many offers for online programming tutorials in my inbox, so I wanted to give my views on one type in particular, that is learning from videos. I’ll share what I think are pros of learning programming watching videos, as opposed to, for example, text-based tutorials like blog entries or books, or also in-person trainings (a list of resources for these scenarios was already discussed here). Pro: Learning by imitation or watching someone else do it at first is a natural way to learn Using video tutorials, you don’t need to run the code yourself to see its results, which is fair, I think, when just quickly going through a tutorial or you’re at the very beginning of your programming journey where even installing a new software might still seem daunting. Generally, you should experiment for yourself and try to tweak example programs but at the same time, you don’t need
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 