(This is an abbreviated version of my original post, which can be accessed on my blog.) 

This was my first time attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, the first of what I hope will be one of many to come. The purpose of this institute is to introduce and train scholars, students, librarians, and other professionals in the humanities, as well as other disciplines, to new computing tools and methodologies through an intensive, week-long training period.

I enrolled in the Understanding Topic Modeling course, led by Neal Audenaert a Senior Software Engineer (Texas A & M University, Texas Center for Applied Technology). This course introduced participants to the algorithms, models, and theories used in Topic Modeling, specifically LDA (latent dirichlet allocation), and a variety of topic models that can provide different understandings of your data, such as modeling topics over time (dynamic topic modeling). I’ll discuss my class experience in greater detail in a future post with examples of the material we covered during this course and some of the data that I worked with. In this post, I will provide a brief overview of my experience and discuss some of the projects, tools, and discussions, which interested me while at DHSI.

What I really liked about DHSI is that it differs from other institutes in that discussion and learning occurs through a community-based approach. Archivists, programmers, librarians, software engineers, faculty, students (etc, etc.) all work and learn together. It is a week-long exchange of knowledge and ideas where we can  ask questions, re-think our own approaches to how we do research in our own disciplines through the use of computational tools and methods, which are being applied in digital humanities. Many of these tools and methods are borrowed or built-upon from areas outside of the humanities–social science, computer science, mathematics–we then think about their application in our own specific disciplines or fields, such as the application of topic modeling on textual data drawn from nineteenth-century music periodicals, which can then show us the trends in music reception, performance, trade, or influence.

During the week at DHSI, participants spent the large portion of each day in their courses, however each day opened with a morning colloquium, in which participants presented their current projects or research, as well as asked for feedback on projects that were in the pre-development stage. These were presented in five-minute intervals (lightning talks) and demonstrated the diversity of approaches, tools, and methods, but also intersections between disciplines or fields. Following the daily classes were Birds of a Feather discussions (#DHSIbof), in which two speakers reflected on the same topic, providing different perspectives before opening the conversation to the audience for discussion and reflection.

The morning colloquia represented a variety of disciplinary areas, including literary studies, history, archaeology, information science, social science, feminist studies, cultural studies, medieval studies, and sound studies. Tools or methods applied or explored for possible application included geo-spatial and temporal analyses, TEI (text encoding using XML and XSLT), database frameworks, web-design, game design/theory, and critical editing. There were a number of projects with a focus on text analysis, as well as textual encoding. For example, Douglas Duhaime (University of Notre Dame) presented on “New Approaches to Digital Text Analysis: Introducing the Literature Online API,” in which he discussed his reason for building an API that would query the Literature Online (ProQuest) subscription database. Another interesting project was “On the Page, On the Screen: Uncovering the Digital Lives of Readers Using Linguistics, Temporal, and Geospatial Analysis” presented by Anouk Lang (U Strathclyde) in which she is studying reading patterns of contemporary readers by examining their literary activity through online reviews and social media comments. She is applying topic modeling to the data that she has been able to pull from various sites, as well as using temporal and geo-spatial analysis tools so that she can see changes in readership over time.

Attending DHSI afforded me the opportunity to reconnect with several colleagues and meet others for the first time, who will now become my colleagues. Attending the week-long course, colloquia, and Birds of a Feather discussions was wonderful in and of itself, because these various interactions allowed me to expand my own approaches and thinking about existent projects, such as Documenting Teresa Carreño, forthcoming projects, and possibilities for application in the library. Outside of these planned events were opportunities to make new colleagues and interact on a non-hierarchical level with graduate students, librarians, programmers, academic administrators, and scholars, which created a non-threatening environment in which everyone was encouraged to interact and learn from one another. DHSI was a truly energizing experience, opening up new paths of inquiry for many, as well as reinforcing an intersecting and cross-disciplinary social network that we can always connect with and hopefully collaborate with on future projects. Next year’s DHSI is already being planned with dates in June 8 – 12, 2015. DHSI conversations were archived by Ernesto Priego (City University, London) and can be found here: Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2014: A #dhsi2014 Archive. figshare.