<oo>→<dh> Digital humanities

Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2016-09-25T12:22:18+0000

Course materials

Administrative

• Course description, autumn 2016 (2171)
• Syllabus, autumn 2016 (2171)
• Course blog and discussion board (enrolled students only)
• DH eXam Center (self-teaching and self-testing, for enrolled students only; ignore the security warning)
• File-naming conventions (see also the special conventions for the two HTML/CSS assignments)
• Guidelines for collaboration on homework assignments

Course projects

• Course projects (current and past semesters)
• Project planning guide (how to think about your research question and its relationship to your project when you’re starting to organize the project)
• Project structure guide (how to set up a directory structure, filename conventions, etc. when you’re starting to build the project)
• Project requirements checklist (during development of your project)

General

• Can humanities undergrads learn to code? Guest posting by undergraduate teaching assistants Janis Chinn and Gabrielle Kirilloff on Techne, the former blog site of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education [NITLE], 2012-01-31
• Interesting digital humanities projects
• Digital humanities organizations, conferences, publication venues, and scholars
• Uploading your project files
• Configuring <oXygen/> for XSLT development and debugging
• Project development with agile
• Git and GitHub: GUI client, command line shell, and Sven Hoffmansven’s Using Git command-line cheat sheet
• A short tutorial on how to give good peer feedback on writing (Christian Schunn)
• Zotero: managing bibliography (Maxim Romanov)
• The programming historian (miscellaneous tutorials: Zotero, Python, data manipulation, GIS, Omeka, topic modeling, scraping)

Required software

• All users:
  • <oXygen/> (XML editor and development environment; enrolled students will find a license key in the announcements section of CourseWeb)
  • GitHub (includes GUI clients, but see also third-party Git Extensions Windows client)
• Windows users: SSH Secure Shell Client 3.2.9 (make the changes described at the top of our syllabus page so that you will be able to share files within your project group.)
• Mac users: Fetch (students may obtain free licenses at http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/free)

XML

• An even gentler introduction to XML
• XML test (answers)

Relax NG

• Introduction to Relax NG
• Patterns, anti-patterns, and other Relax NG details
• Mixed content and empty elements in Relax NG
• Relax NG test

Regular expressions

• Regular expressions quick start (with links to other tutorials) at http://www.regular-expressions.info/
• regexpal (on-line regular expression tester)
• Regex tips and Autotagging with regular expressions (at our sibling newtFire site)
• <xsl:analyze-string> tutorial
• Regex assignment #1 (answers)
• Regex assignment #2 (answers)
• Regex assignment #3 (answers)

HTML

• HTML basics
• Server side includes (SSI)
• Easy imagemap generator (calculates coordinates for image maps in HTML)

Cascading style sheets (CSS)

• Introduction to Cascading style sheets (CSS)
• Learn CSS Layout
• Using <span> and @class to style your HTML
• The old HTML <frame> element is obsolete, and a paneled interface should now be created entirely in CSS. Learn how in our Website layouts tutorial
• Using Webfonts tutorial
• The CSS zen garden
• W3C on-line CSS validator
• Color-hex gives information about colors including color models (RGB,HSL,HSV and CMYK), Triadic colors, monochromatic colors and analogous colors calculated in color page.

XPath

• What can XPath do for me?
• The XPath functions we use most
• fables.xml (Selected Aesopian fables, in class activity)
• XPath assignment #1
• XPath assignment #2
• XPath assignment #3
• XPath assignment #4

XSLT

• XSLT basics
• XSLT basics, part 2: variables, conditionals, keys, and push and pull
• The XSLT paradigm and Default template rules (slide sets from TEI XSLT workshop at Brown University)
• Thinking in algorithms (how to conceptualize an XSLT transformation before you begin to write the code)
• Developing an XSLT stylesheet (the workflow of writing XSLT)
• Using the XSLT identity transformation
• How to convert Bad Hamlet from XML to an HTML tables that counts the number of speeches in each act
• Modal XSLT
• Attribute Value Templates (AVTs)
• There are two basic ways to transform XML in <oXygen/> and save the output. We usually use the first one in our own work:
  • Saving generated output from XSLT transformations
  • Transforming XML with XSLT using transformation scenarios
• XSLT assignment #1
• XSLT assignment #2
• XSLT assignment #3
• XSLT assignment #4
• XSLT assignment #5
• XSLT assignment #6

XQuery

• Getting started with XQuery
• XQuery Wikibook (general and eXist-specific XQuery documentation and examples)
• XQuery: a guided tour (excerpted from XQuery from the experts: a guide to the W3C XML query language; see especially the discussion of FLWOR expressions at the Combining and Restructuring Nodes in XQuery subsection)
• Using PHP to query the eXist XML database
• See also the XML to network visualization by way of XQuery exercises in the Network analysis listings
• XQuery assignment #1
• XQuery assignment #2
• XQuery assignment #3

Schematron

• Introduction to Schematron
• Examples of schematron from our projects
• Russian movie theater project
  • Sample interview (xml) alyrzaeva.xml
  • Relax NG schema schema_interview.rnc
  • Schematron schema exampleSchematron.sch
  • Reference index index.xml
• Validating references with Schematron
  • Skyrim XML, Relax NG, and Schematron
  • Analysis
• Using Schematron in editing
• Schematron assignment #1
• Schematron assignment #2

SVG

• w3schools introductory SVG tutorial (good, basic introduction; start here for a quick initial overview with brief examples of the most common features)
• Jakov Jenkov SVG tutorial (also introductory, but longer and with more detail than the preceding; start here for something more comprehensive)
• SVG cheat sheet (Washington State University)
• How to scale SVG (Amelia Bellamy-Royds’s tutorial about how scaling SVG doesn’t work like scaling othe types of images).
• By Sara Soueidan:
  • Building better interfaces with SVG
  • Understanding SVG coordinate systems and transformations (Part 1) — The viewport, viewBox, and @preserveAspectRatio
  • Understanding SVG coordinate systems and rransformations (Part 2) — The @transform attribute
  • Making SVGs responsive with CSS
• On-line SVG editors: Method draw | svg-edit
• Software: Inkscape (open-source vector graphics editor)
• We don’t permit the use of libraries or other external resources in course projects because we want you to know what every line of code means in your projects, but for ideas about visualization see:
  • Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart’s Principles of information visualization (part of their The historian’s macroscope: Big digital history)
  • Angela Zoss’s Introduction to data visualization
  • Wikipedia pages for diagrams and charts
  • Google graphs Chart gallery and Additional charts gallery
  • Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky’s Tour through the visualization zoo
  • Michael Bostock’s D3 visualization gallery
• Embedding SVG in XHTML
• Trigonometry refresher (in case you need to plot circular locations)
• SVG assignment #1
• SVG assignment #2
• SVG assignment #3

JavaScript

• Our tutorials
  • Introduction to JavaScript
  • JavaScript piece by piece tutorial
• External tutorials, portals, and other resources
  • Mozilla development network JavaScript Guide and JavaScript reference
  • Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent JavaScript (open-access on-line textbook)
  • JavaScript Kit (a comprehensive resource for JavaScript tutorials, scripts, and more)
  • JavaScript garden (JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes and subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices, that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language. JavaScript Garden does not aim to teach you JavaScript. Former knowledge of the language is strongly recommended in order to understand the topics covered in this guide.)
• Debugging tools
  • David Smith’s JavaScript debugging for beginners (introduction to using built-in browser debugging tools)
  • Advanced guides to debugging in Chrome, Firefox, Internet explorer, Safari, and Opera
• Sample code
  • Highlighting text sample (2009 Obama inaugural address)
  • Using JavaScript to change text (2012 US election results; illustrates JavaScript show/hide and innerHTML, as well as embedding SVG in XHTML)
  • JavaScript toggling with classList
  • Setting a value based on two dropdown lists
  • Show/hide and styling with JavaScript
  • Popups that permit markup, including clickable links
• JavaScript assignment #1
• JavaScript assignment #2

The R statistical package for digital humanists

• Statistical methods for studying literature using R (Jeff Rydberg-Cox; general tutorial)
• The Sound and the fury stylizer tool (Caitlin Crandell, Emily Gong, Rachel Kraus, Jacob Mason-Marshall, and Tiffany Lieu; application)
• Executing R in php (Matthew Jockers; how-to, based on the preceding tool)
• Sample R script to generate scatterplot from CSV input
• Clustering and dendrogram visualization (bibliography)

Topic modeling

• Mallet (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit; software for topic modeling)
• Mining the Dispatch (Topic modeling in action)
• Getting Started with Topic Modeling and MALLET (Topic modeling tutorial)
• David M. Blei’s introductory and teaching materials
• Ben Schmidt about topic modeling and similar technologies
  • Words alone: Dismantling topic models in the humanities (cautionary notes about the assumptions that underlie topic modeling, especially with diachronic data, and suggestions for using it more effectively)
  • Vector space models for the digital humanities (differently from topic modeling, this word-embedding model [WEM] represents relationships among words as a spatial analogy)

Network analysis

• Social network analysis: an introduction (includes David Krackhardt’s Kite network)
• Introduction to social network methods (Robert A. Hanneman and Mark Riddle)
• Networks demystified (Scott Weingart)
• An introduction to network analysis and Cytoscape for XML coders (Elisa Beshero-Bondar)
• The following two exercises, from our sibling newtFire course, illustrate how to use XQuery to extract data from your XML files and visualize it using Cytoscape:
  • XQuery to network
  • Graphing a network in Cytoscape
• Software: Cytoscape | Gephi | Pajek (pronounced PAH-yeck) | yEd

Geographic information systems (GIS)

• Keyhole Markup Language
  • Introduction to KML (our tutorial; see also our samples)
  • KML documentation (Google tutorial and reference)
  • Using XQuery and XSLT together to produce KML for mapping (from Elisa Beshero-Bondar’s Pitt-Greensburg DH course)
• Geocoding
  • Geocoding utilities at GPSVisualizer.com
  • GeoNames geographical database
• Datasets and maps
  • Natural Earth (public domain map dataset)
  • OpenStreetMap (collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world)
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
  • Perry-Castañeda Library map collection (University of Texas, Austin)
• GIS visualization software
  • QGIS (visualization, editing, and analysis of geographic information; see also QGIS Tutorials and Tips)
  • WorldMap WARP (open-source online tool for digitally aligning [geo-rectifying] scanned historical maps)
• Other resources
  • Comparison of geographic information systems software (article from Wikipedia)
  • e-Perimetron (e-journal on sciences and technologies affined to history of cartography and maps)

Natural language processing

• FreeLing: An open source suite of language analyzers
• Natural language tool kit (NLTK)
• Stanford NLP Group tools

Music

• Music analysis software
  • Software music analyzers (Mac OS)
  • Sonic Visualiser is a free, open source application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. For tutorial guidance see especially Nicholas Cook and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s A musicologist’s guide to Sonic Visualiser. The Mazurka plugins for OSX are available at http://kaspars.co/2015/01/06/mazurka-plugins-os-x-yosemite-binary/.
  • Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
  • music21: a toolkit for computer-aided musicology
• Music encoding initiative (MEI)
  • MEI main project page
  • Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data (MerMEId)
  • MEI Score Editor (MEISE; Musical Note Editor)
  • Sample MEI projects

Unicode

• Unicode Consortium (includes code charts)
• Unicode checker (MacOS only; explore, analyze, and convert text among encodings)
• Unicode code converter (on-line, by Richard Ishida; see also his other Unicode utilities)
• shapecatcher.com (draw a character and find it in the Unicode database)

Photograph of Whitby Abbey by Mike Peel (http://www.mikepeel.net).