The Digital Humanities top level category
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?
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
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
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
Today I wanted to share a long-promised second workflow for typesetting an archaeological catalogue in LaTeX. There is a first
read more LaTeX for Archaeologists: An archaeological catalogue from a spreadsheet
Today’s post is something at the interface of rant and rambling. While I love being interdisciplinary, it’s also quite the hassle at times which is why I guess most interdisciplinary scholars sometimes wished they weren’t doing interdisciplinary work. There are so many negative stereotypes, like… “You have it easier being interdisciplinary” vs it’s actually twice the work So do you really think that we have it easier? I hate how we always get this reproach that we’re taking the easy route. Can somebody please explain to me what’s “easy” about having to follow the state of the art in multiple fields at the same time? And then not even knowing where to get published because scholars from discipline A don’t understand half of your research and the same in the other direction. I tend to be somewhat “too historical” for the Digital Humanities but then waaaay to technical for the “normal Humanities”. I think being in the DH and doing
Today I wanted to share a tiny book review of the book I claim to be the most important book you should read if you want to learn any technical topic but are unsure if you are up for it. The book I’m talking about is not Donald Knuth (although his books are highly recommended, especially if you’re a (La)TeX nerd!). It’s not even a computer book! I’m talking about: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (New York: Random House 2006). The fixed mindset versus the growth mindset This will be a short post because Dweck’s message is simple. There are two mindsets, the ‘fixed mindset’ and the ‘growth mindset’ and which one you have greatly impacts your success in learning and self-development. The ‘fixed mindset’ assumes your abilities and talents are fixed. Thus, you are proud of what you’re good at because you link it to your personality (“I’m a person who is good at…”). But
Since you all probably already know that I’m a bit short on time but trying to keep this blog alive
read more Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT
Many Humanities scholars feel like you can’t get a project funded anymore if it doesn’t include DH. Some even ask me “Do I have to include DH to get funded?” Well, that answer lies outside of my expertise. I can, however, answer the probably even more important question of whether you should include DH in your grant proposal for the main purpose of improving your chances at getting funded. And if you decide to do so, how to do it right. In this post, I will give you my thoughts on the topic and also provide a checklist you might want to use to answer this question for yourself at the end. As I trust you have already figured out, I am not the person granting you funding neither am I in any way involved in the progress (at least as of now). So please take the thoughts I share here for what they are: my two cents. I’m just
Having just attended a talk in an event on Digital Humanities and Neo-Latin, I was inspired to share a short list of introductory resources on DH, especially for teachers who feel more like Humanities scholars and don’t have tons of time to learn everything autodidactically. They can use those resources to learn for themselves and pass on this knowledge or pass on this link. But also, since you’ve found this blog, you’re already on a great path to learning DH! 🙂 I’ll try to keep this updated – and it’s not really done yet, so feel free to contribute. Discipline-independent DH dariahTeach: great MOOCs on many topics Source criticism in a digital age DARIAH-EU DH course registry EADH Courses List Digital Classics Article by yours truly in German: Digitale Lernplattformen und Open Educational Resources im Altsprachlichen Unterricht I. Technische Spielräume am Beispiel des ›Grazer Repositorium antiker Fabeln‹ (GRaF). It contains a few resources on digital resources and digital teaching, mostly
read more List of Resources for getting started with (teaching) digital methods
Twitter is an important professional networking platform for the Digital Humanities. But it’s not exactly self-evident how to make it work in your favour. This part explains long-term Twitter Strategy. This involves a few elements which might not seem so important at first but will be to keep your Twitter presence active and at a steady growth rate, without having to constantly put in lots of effort. This includes scheduled Tweets and using analytics and reflection to determine how to best cater to the interests of your followers. As some of you might remember, I did a Twitter Engagement Experiment at some time in autumn last year. Now I wanted to share my most important learnings, so you can make your Twitter presence more effective with just as little work as you want to put in. Actually, this was all just meant to be one post but it got so crazy long that I decided to make it into a
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 