The H-France Digital Humanities Committee, constituted in Summer 2023, conducted a survey of member needs in March 2024. The English-language report on the results of the survey is available here, and the French version is here.
Among other things, we learned from the survey that H-France community members would like support for their digital humanities efforts, whether they are beginners or working at more advanced stages. As an initial response to this need, we offer this selective list of in-person and online workshops and tutorials in coding and various DH methods. Please click on one of the following three categories to view the support options that we recommend.
- In-Person, Fee-Based Summer Workshops
- Online, Open Access Introductory DH Courses
- Online, Open-Access Coding Courses, Textbooks, and Videos
In-Person, Fee-Based Summer Workshops
1. Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria, Canada)
Description: The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) is an annual digital scholarship training institute that is organized for its community by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. Every summer, DHSI brings together faculty, staff, and students from the arts, humanities, library, and archives communities as well as independent scholars and participants from areas beyond. DHSI provides a community-based environment for discussing and learning about new technologies and how they influence teaching, research, creation, and preservation in different disciplines. Around 800-900 participants attend this time of intensive coursework, seminars, and lectures, where participants share ideas and methods as well as develop expertise in advanced technologies.
2. Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School (Oxford University)
Description: This summer school is part of the Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc) initiative to explore, enhance, and enable work in this field. They define their work as follows: “we are building a team of specialist research software engineers, working with other teams from around the University, providing networking and knowledge exchange events, supporting researchers in developing funding proposals, and providing funding for demonstrators and prototypes to help this process. Through these, we are leading national and international conversations, and establishing agile infrastructures for our researchers to build upon. We are pleased to be collaborating with our colleagues across the Digital Scholarship landscape: DiSc’s mission in transforming Digital Scholarship sits in the broader digital transformation programme across the institution, embracing culture and processes as well as the underpinning technologies.”
3. European Summer University on Digital Humanities (Sponsored by DARIAH-EU)
Description: The European Summer University is directed at an international audience and offers a range of parallel weeklong workshops on important areas of Digital Humanities to students in their final years, (post)graduates, doctoral students, postdocs, teachers, librarians and technical assistants from all over Europe and beyond, who are or wish to be involved in the theoretical, experimental or practical application of computational methods in the various areas of the Humanities, in libraries and archives. It aims to bring together up to 60 (doctoral) students, young scholars and academics from the Arts and Humanities, Library Sciences, Social Sciences, the Arts and Engineering and Computer Sciences as equal partners to an interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience in a multilingual and multicultural context and thus create the conditions for future project-based co-operations.
Online, Open Access Introductory DH Courses
Description: The Programming Historian is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal of digital humanities and digital history methodology. It covers digital humanities research methods and also publishes tutorials that help humanities scholars learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. The Programming Historian team is committed to open source values. All contributed lessons make use of open source programming languages and software whenever possible. The Programming Historian team is committed to diversity, and we insist on a harassment-free space for all contributors to the project, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or technical experience. Online lessons are available in English and in French, as well as in Spanish and Portuguese.
Description: The PARTHENOS cluster of humanities research infrastructure projects has devised a series of training modules and resources for researchers, educators, managers, and policy makers who want to learn more about research infrastructures and the issues and methods around them. The modules, which released on a rolling basis from late 2016, cover a wide range of awareness levels, requirements and topic areas within the landscape of research infrastructure. You can access the modules from the menu above, where you can also find specific guidance for independent learners and for instructors looking to incorporate this material into existing courses. The project has been funded by a 2020 European Union grant.
3. Dariah Teach: Open Educational Resources for the Digital Humanities
Description: #dariahTeach is a platform for Open Educational Resources (OER) for Digital Arts and Humanities educators and students, but also beyond this aiming at Higher Education across a spectrum of disciplines, at teachers and trainers engaged in the digital transformation of programme content and learning methods. #dariaTeach has two key objectives: sharing and reuse, thus developing a place for people to publish their teaching material and for others to use it in their own teaching. Content on #dariahTeach is designed to be asynchronously accessed by both lone learners, especially those who do not have access to digital arts and humanities teaching and training, as well as educators who can embed content into their own course offerings. #dariahTeach was initially funded by an ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership (2015-2017) with partners from 8 countries: Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Serbia, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland. Content is available in English, French, and other European languages.
Online, Open-Access Coding Courses, Textbooks, and Videos
Description: The Carpentries teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. They believe that the skills needed to do computational, data-intensive research are often not included as a part of basic research training in many disciplines. They build global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. They train and foster an active, inclusive, diverse community of learners and instructors that promotes and models the importance of software and data in research. They collaboratively develop openly available lessons and deliver these lessons using evidence-based teaching practices. We focus on people conducting and supporting research.
2. Computational Historical Thinking, With Applications in R (Textbook)
Description: Computational Historical Thinking is a textbook that teaches you how to identify sources and frame historical questions, then answer them through computational methods. These historical methods include exploratory data analysis, mapping, text analysis, and network analysis. These methods are taught using the R programming language, commonly used by digital historians and digital humanists. Chapters on individual methods ground you in particular approaches, and chapters on case studies of historical research walk you through the process of asking and answering computational history questions.
3. R Tutorials for Digital Humanities (YouTube channel)
Description: On this channel, we start our exploration of the programming language of R. The initial series of this channel, Introduction to R for Digital Humanities (DH) is designed for those who have no prior programming experience. It is prepared specifically with digital humanists in mind. The material we explore and how we explore it, will be with data specifically relevant to the digital humanities, i.e. letter collections, people, networks, and text-based data.
4. Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python (Textbook)
Description: Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python is a textbook that offers an introduction to the programming language Python that is specifically designed for people interested in the humanities and social sciences. This book demonstrates how Python can be used to study cultural materials such as song lyrics, short stories, newspaper articles, tweets, Reddit posts, and film screenplays. It also introduces computational methods such as web scraping, APIs, topic modeling, Named Entity Recognition (NER), network analysis, and mapping.
5. Python Tutorials for Digital Humanities (YouTube Channel)
- Description: This YouTube channel provides tutorials for working with Python in a digital humanities project. Videos and tutorials are designed for humanists who have no coding experience. The creator is a medieval historian by trade, but creates videos with all humanists in mind.