beginner friendly

A category to post “beginner level” posts to make them easy to find. The topics get specified by other categories and tags.

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

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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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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

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beginner friendly, DH demystified for non-DH, DH tools and techniques, Digital Humanities, Learn DH Crash Course, Productivity, Tech/IT 101, Tutorials, XML & Annotation  3 Comments

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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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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Floating minipages and other wizardry

Inspired by a current issue from my friend the LaTeX Noob, I wanted to give a short explanation on how you can combine floats (i.e. figures) and minipages. Why should you care? Well, if you need tikzpicture or images placed besides eachother or beside text. So most people will probably need this at some point 😉 A great resource is the WikiBook, as always. If you want the lengthy account – that’s the way to go. For everybody else, an explanation of my own. Floats and non-floating boxes What are floats? Some fundamental explanations first: A figure is a float. A minipage is not a float but a box which sits at its fixed place. These are two fundamentally different things. When you combine them in a bad way, LaTeX might get fed up at this. So when planning your minipaging or floating situation, ask yourself which effects are really important to you and which aren’t. Do I even need

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Simple XML to LaTeX Transformation Tutorial

Today, I wanted to share this super simple XML to LaTeX tutorial. Using XSLT, you are going to transform XML data to LaTeX output which you can then go on to compile into your desired output PDF. There will be no fancy stuff whatsoever in this post, just the basics and what to keep in mind with these transformations. It is the quick intro to XML to LaTeX I did with my students a while ago which was done one day after they had their first contact with XSLT, so it should really be beginner-friendly. I labeled it “Advanced LaTeX” anyway because I think starting to automate things is always a step in the right direction 😉 Configuring the transformation scenario in Oxygen I am going to assume you use Oxygen now because that’s what a lot of people in the DH do and this post is directed towards my friends in the DH. Especially those who think print editions

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Fast typing LaTeX

I recently became aware of this post where somebody asked how you can become faster at typing LaTeX. Just a little post with a few recommendations. Experience from constantly using LaTeX for everything I have to say, I think it really gets better with experience. And experience from doing your everyday stuff in LaTeX (like to do lists, taking notes, etc.). Else you probably just won’t get enough experience to become really fast. Raise awareness But then again, slowing down might not be a bad thing if you’re supposed to produce high quality work. Using LaTeX, then, will force you to take the subconscious back into your conscious mind. Maybe not what you want when just quickly taking notes, but maybe something to reflect upon in the long term. I also found that, since I don’t constantly use MS Word’s auto-correct anymore, I’m actually better at spelling and grammar (even though, as someone holding a degree in Latin, I probably

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The power of simplicity, or: How to use tutorials

This is just a quick post, telling you to use tutorials selectively. If you don’t have time, don’t burden yourself with the not-so-short intro to LaTeX or 30 min introductions. Jumpstart in 3 minutes and go. This morning, I realized one thing: depending on what you want to do with LaTeX, you only need a very limited amount of commands. Even I use a very limited amout of commands for everyday tasks. Going through a whole tutorial might actually be a waste of time for you.   You only need 3-5 go-to commands What you always need (and, for example, an Overleaf blank document already supplies): You will typically need the general document setup (minimal example), \newpage, \maketitle, \tableofcontents, and \sections and \emph{}. For teaching documents, I will additionally need \textbf{boldface}, enumerate and itemize environments. Then maybe \href{http://latex-ninja.com}{links} (\usepackage{hyperref}), \texttt{typeface} for code or the verbatim environment. And, of course, I often use my cheatsheet template. For writing scientific articles, I

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Jumpstarting: Learn LaTeX in 3 minutes

Inspired by the learn x in y minutes tutorials, here comes my contribution to starting LaTeX quickly. If you want to jumpstart learning LaTeX, open your Overleaf account (or get one, they just require your email, no other info, takes 30 seconds) and open a blank or example project. A blank project will give you the following output: You can now start typing text. Wherever you want, but for now, preferably below \section{Introduction} and in between \begin{document} and \end{document}. The stuff before is the settings which don’t interest you just yet. There you can see fields for title and author which \maketitle uses to make a title. This is what you can use to generate a title page later on. Now type a sentence below \section{Introduction}, then hit space twice. Write another test sentence. Hit space twice and write \subsection{test}. To see your changes, you need to ‘compile’ this source code into an output PDF. Do this in Overleaf by

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