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
beginner friendly
A category to post “beginner level” posts to make them easy to find. The topics get specified by other categories and tags.
The most important book to read if you want to learn Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Maths, Programming or LaTeX
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
LaTeX for thesis writing
Having re-read my LaTeX for PhD students post, I realized I hadn’t mentioned a lot of things I would like to impart to you. So here comes LaTeX for thesis writing – a few more arguments in favour of starting to learn LaTeX now. Just to sum up what has already been said in the last post: The main points speaking in favour of you typesetting your thesis in LaTeX are the citation management, tables, maths and images which can be more of a hastle in MS Word. In the aforementioned blogpost, I also added that you should take into account that a thesis will yield two PDF outputs with very different requirements from the same document – another reason to use LaTeX. But there are many more things to take into account. LaTeX for maths, images and the like (in short, everything MS Word isn’t good at) A lot of people say that the “LaTeX is great for maths”
Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT
Since you all probably already know that I’m a bit short on time but trying to keep this blog alive
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List of Resources for getting started with (teaching) digital methods
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
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Machine Learning for the Humanities: A very short introduction and a not-so-short reflection
Machine Learning is one of those hot topics at the moment. It’s even starting to become a really hot topic in the Humanities and, of course, also in the DH. But Humanities and Machine Learning are not the most obvious combination for many reasons. Tutorials on how to run machine learning algorithms on your data are starting to pop up in large quantities, even for the DH. But I find it problematic that they often just use those methods, just show you those few lines of code to type in and that’s it. Frameworks have made sure that ML algorithms are easy to use. They actually have a super-low entry level programming-wise thanks to all those libraries. But the actual thing about ML is that you need to understand it or it’s good for nothing. (Ok, I admit there are some uses which are pretty straightforward and don’t need to be fully understood by users, such as Deep Learning powered
Amateurishly beautifying event photographs
Do people think that you, as a DH person, are also responsible for your project’s outreach activities yet nobody considers
An amateurish but functional tutorial to make (logo) vector graphics from photos
Do you need to make a vector logo for your project but have no idea how? Do you want to
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Easy and quick strategies to #scicomm your DH project
Your digital project is great, I’m sure of that – but does it even exist if nobody knows about it? Science communication is the answer to avoid this philosophical dilemma. In this short post, I wanted to share a list of quick-and-easy-to-implement ideas to add some science communication to your projects. This is just a short post to give you some ideas, not tutorials on how to do it. However, I am open to any tutorial requests you might have on the topics involved. As for the Twitter bot, there is a short post available already. So let’s get to it! Quick and easy strategies to #scicomm your DH project Create a better / thematic / facetted search interface. Maybe people aren’t using your data because the interface is not intuitive and they can’t find things or don’t know what to look for and where to look. This is the basic building block to build all the following things on.
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Create your Tweepy/AWS-powered Twitter bot in a day
This post wants to convince you to try out creating a Twitter bot using Python Tweepy and AmazonAWS Lambda because it’s easy and fun. Of course, you can use any other utilities but Tweepy and AWS Lambda are the ones I tried. This is not a full tutorial but I can make one if anyone is interested. Inspired by the #100DaysofDH challenge In this post, I will just give you some basic Twitter knowledge, links for what you need to know to get it done and a link to the github of my #100DaysofDH challenge for which I implemented such a bot. If you want more guidance, please let me know. Also, read the post on the challenge because I noted down some restrictions I realized the Twitter automation guidelines impose on bots as I went along. In my example, I think I’m in fact doing one or two things which you actually shouldn’t do (I think bots shouldn’t like
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Join the #100DaysofDH Challenge!
I have been following the #100DaysofCode community for a while now and thought that it was sad that there didn’t seem to be a connection with the DH community. 100 Days of Code is such a great project which is motivational for those willing to learn but also a great way to foster a community. So I thought, why not start #100DaysofDH and I did. Looking forward to your contributions! The main activity around this will be happening on Twitter (account is @100DaysofDH, hashtag #100DaysofDH) but there is also a minimalist github.io page: https://100daysofdh.github.io/ On the github, you can also find the current state of the Tweepy and AWS-powered bot. The story behind the creation of this challenge Before getting into the details of how the challenge works, let me share some thoughts that I had in mind for the adaption of the 100 days challenge to the DH (skip this part if you just want the rules which can
Looking at data with the eyes of a Humanist: How to apply digital skills to your Humanities research questions
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
Formulating Research Questions For Using DH Methods
In the feedback forms I did on the DH classes I have taught over the last years, I got one feedback I didn’t expect: People were extremely grateful I had practiced with them how to formulate valid research questions which, apparently, no one had ever (really) done with them before. I found that quite astonishing because the DH are all about methods and methods are like specizalized tools. You need to know what you can use them for. So here’s the crashcourse. The Hammer and the Nail I want to start off with an analogy. A hammer is a specialized but not an extremely specialized tool. You can use it for a range of tasks, however, not all tasks are going to work equally well. Some might work but would actually require a more specialized tool if you had one. You can really use the hammer on about anything and almost always, something is going to happen. For example, you
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Teaching Materials: Intro to basic NLP in CLTK for Classicists
Dear people, today I wanted to point you to a new github repository where I started to share some of
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An easy intro to 3D models from Structure from Motion (SFM, photogrammetry)
Using photogrammetry to obtain 3D models has become one of those ‘hot topics’ lately. For that reason, I wanted to
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Understanding Scalability and Relative Values
What is the difference between 12pt and “format as heading“? Between 50px or 0.5\textwidth? Most of us know that we should always prefer relative to absolute values. But many who are new to webdesign or LaTeX don’t really get why. All of us who typeset papers and conference proceedings know that years of using MS Word does not necessarily teach you that difference either. This short post will try to remedy this in a quick and painless way 😉 In a WYSIWYG texteditor: Fontsize 12pt or “Format as Heading” In the case of a text editor, it is advisable to use the format templates rather than manually changing headings and so on for simple reasons: The information is stored as markup and if we tell the program what we want formatted as a heading, the machine gets semantic information about the text. Most people will understand that something is meant to be a heading when the font size is manually
Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
Annotation is a fundamental part of the DH. But often, us DH people don’t actually do the annotation. We do
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How to historical text recognition: A Transkribus Quickstart Guide
Today I wanted to share a little quickstart tutorial for the Transkribus Software. Its purpose is Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR)
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Algorithms, Variables, Debugging? Intro to Programming Concepts
Since I am about to prepare a workshop on natural language processing and a pre-workshop-workshop where I need to quickly/crashcourse introduce my (non-digital) Classicist friends to some basics on programming, let me share a list of programming concepts I compiled with you. I would be happy for your suggestions and comments regarding mistakes. I will probably publish this together with some key concepts of quantitative text analysis (blogpost to come) on a cheatsheet or as slides for you later 😉 Intro to key concepts of programming This list of concepts is not super-structured and meant to work as a ‘reference tool’ as well as a text to be read, so I tried to give it a more or less useful ‘chronology’, meaning that later parts kind of build on earlier ones. I start off with what a computer program or algorithm actually is and how we translate between source code (the code we write) and the code which gets fed
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Academic Posters – How to design: My favourite tips
This is a post dealing with some simple tips to keep in mind when making academic posters. I have gotten into the habit of not posting very regularly over my fellowship this summer, but I will get back into the rhythm of approximately one post a week 😉 So I decided to give you a quick post with some tips on academic posters here. There will be follow ups on how to make them either using GoogleSlides (if you’re really stressed and can’t learn LaTeX first) and another version where I explain how to create a poster in LaTeX using an Overleaf template for complete beginners. So, without further ado. How to get a nice poster without a lot of skills and little effort: Have a color scheme. Probably best start with your project colours (from the logo, project website) if you have some. This ensures you have some sort of brand identity and your project is recognized more easily.
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LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 