Category Archives: Events

image_pdfimage_print
Sep 25 2018
2

Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series #7: Geospatial Corpora

By | Events, Seminars | No Comments

Wednesday, October 3rd, 1pm in Locke 611A

Dr Ben Adams (Geography) and Dr Jonathan Dunn (Linguistics)

Dr Ben Adams from Geography and Dr Jonathan Dunn from Linguistics are presenting on “Geospatial Corpora” as part of the COMS and UC Arts Digital Lab “Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series”.

Ben will present his project Frankenplace (www.frankenplace.com), an interactive thematic map search engine that uses geographic context as a means to discover, organize, and interactively visualize the documents related to a search query. Jonathan will present the Common Crawl Global Dialect Corpus, a new dataset for understanding regional patterns in language use that is drawn from ~80 billion web sites and contains examples of hundreds of languages across every country in the world. Ben is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Jonathan is a Lecturer in Linguistics.

Sep 17 2018
1

Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series #6: Network Analysis

By | Events, Seminars | No Comments

Wednesday, 19 September, 1pm in Locke 611A

Dr Wan Chi Leung (Media & Communication)

Social network analysis (SNA) refers to structural research that examines the ties linking social actors. It adds a dimension or set of factors that can explain human behaviours, viewing individuals as actors embedded in thick webs of social relations and interactions, and each person’s connections may affect his or her behaviours. SNA can help us understand more about collective actions, organization behaviours, social influence, and transmissions of diseases, ideas, and information. In this seminar, we will discuss the basic concepts of SNA, and the use of UCINet as a software package for SNA. UCINet: https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/

Sep 05 2018
2

Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series #5: Digital Methods in Practice

By | Events, Seminars | No Comments

Wednesday, 12 September, 1pm in Locke 611A

Dr Geoff Ford (UC Arts Digital Lab)

In previous sessions in the “Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series” we have talked about collecting textual data from the web, analysing texts using corpus methods and visualising data. In this session Geoff will draw some of these themes together and will build on them by talking about digital methods in practice in his PhD research (analysing economic rhetoric using corpus methods) and recent work in the UC Arts Digital Lab (analysing academic research using bibliometrics).

Geoff will focus on three questions:

  1. What are some of the issues with building and analysing large text corpora and how can we address these?
  2. What are the possibilities of “scraping” beyond texts on the web (e.g. radio and television)?
  3. How can we use bibliometric analysis tools to provide new insights into the academic literature we deal with? (or, How to make a pretty network diagram out of a literature search?)

For the last question, if you want to follow along download VosViewer.

Geoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the UC Arts Digital Lab. In his recent PhD research Geoff built a 57-million word corpus of New Zealand’s parliamentary debates and an audio corpus based on 1788 hours of talk radio broadcasts and analysed common features of public rhetoric related to the economy.

Aug 30 2018
2

Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences (DISHAS)

By | Events, Seminars, Uncategorized | No Comments

Digital Humanities Meetups welcomes guest speaker Dr Anuj Misra from the Observatoire de Paris. Details of the talk below.

When: 6th September, 3-4pm
Where: Poutama Room 388, Puaka-James Hight Library, UC Canterbury.

Abstract:

With increasing collections of historical sources becoming accessible to different scholars from different areas of expertise, the advances in digital humanities provide powerful means to analyse, edit, and relate this growing corpus in more meaningful ways that one may have previously imagined. The DISHAS project (Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences) is an ERC-funded research project based at the SYRTE Laboratory, Observatoire de Paris in France that works in designing digital solutions to aid in the study of the history of astral sciences. DISHAS relies on a collaborative network of international projects in Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew traditions as it develops digital tools to store, edit, and analyse different types of `knowledge-structures’ in the history of astral sciences, namely, scientific instruments, prose and versified texts, iconography and technical/geometrical diagrams, and astronomical tables. This talk introduces the current state of DISHAS as it works with astronomical tables as its preliminary developmental focus.

Bio:

Dr Anuj Misra is a historian of mathematics who works on medieval and early modern sources in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy. His research focuses on structural changes in systems of knowledge, in particular, the Islamic influence in Sanskrit astronomical texts and tables of early modern Mughal India. Dr Misra is adept at reading several classical languages of antiquity and mainly works with primary sources (manuscripts) in his study of cross-cultural transmission of mathematical ideas. He is trained in theoretical physics and philosophy and maintains a keen research interest in areas of computational humanities, mathematical anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mathematics. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Systèmes de Référence Temps Espace (SYRTE) Laboratory at the Observatoire de Paris in France.

Aug 21 2018
3

Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series #4 – Analysing Twitter Datasets with NVivo

By | Events, Seminars | No Comments

Wednesday, 22 August, 1pm in Locke 611A

Kerry Gilmore (Subject Librarian, UC Library)

NVivo can assist with qualitative data analysis. This session introduces using NVivo to import, code and analyse datasets. The session will cover capturing and importing social media data through NCapture and importing from other sources (e.g. .xls or .txt), coding by theme and how NVivo can be used for analysis. If you would like to use NVivo during the session, visit the I.T. Help Desk in the Library to install NVivo on your laptop prior to the session.

Kerry Gilmour is a Subject Librarian at the University of Canterbury Library. Kerry has experience using NVivo for qualitative research and offers training and support for students at UC.

Aug 10 2018
2

Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series #3 – Introduction to Web Scraping

By | Events, Seminars | No Comments

Wednesday, 15 August, 1pm in Locke 611A

Dr Christopher Thomson (English & Digital Humanities)

Chris will introduce web scraping, an approach to collecting research data and automating research tasks. First we’ll briefly consider types of data that may interest us, and ask when web scraping may be the right approach for collecting them. Second, we’ll cover some concepts needed to understand how web scraping works. Then we’ll put these ideas into practice with the Web Scraper extension for the Chrome browser (https://tinyurl.com/o9cncoa). We’ll collect some texts that could be used for discourse analysis, as described in Donald’s talk last week. This will be more a ‘walk-through’ than an interactive tutorial, but you might like to bring your laptop with the extension installed if you would like to follow along. If there’s time, we’ll also identify some limitations we are likely to encounter, and provide some starting points for programming your own web scraper.

Jan 16 2018
0

The Canterbury Roll Symposium

By | Events, News, Seminars | No Comments

As well as the discussions and presentations, the symposium gave us an opportunity to examine the Roll in person.

Last Friday, staff and students involved in the Canterbury Roll project, along with a team from Nottingham Trent University here to do a scientific analysis on the Roll, met for a symposium to discuss progress so far and our next steps.

Natasha Hodgson of Nottingham Trent University talks about some of the Roll’s features.

 

Chris Thomson discusses the significance of the Digital Edition, and the work the Arts Digital Lab has been doing.

We had some great presentations from the various people involved in the project: everything from the project’s lead transcriber, Maree Shirota, talking about how the Roll fits into the larger picture of medieval genealogies, to Haida Laing of Nottingham Trent talking about how her team use the latest imaging technologies to discover the secrets of ancient documents and artworks.  Even our Arts Digital Lab interns, Josh Kim and Jayson Boon, gave a presentation, talking about the work they’re doing marking up in TEI the connections between historical figures on the Roll.

An important part of the symposium was a round-table discussion of the next stages for the project – watch this space!

 

Jayson Boon and Josh Kim answer questions about their markup work