The Connecticut Digital Scholarship Exchange is a year-long collaborative program hosted by Connecticut College and Trinity College. Designed to create opportunities for faculty to learn about digital scholarship, both institutions will host workshops, tours, and other events to introduce interested faculty to different digital scholarship approaches and discuss core competencies in project management and sustainability. A full slate of events will be announced in this continually updated space throughout the academic year 2021-2022.
Funding and training for the CT Digital Scholarship Exchange have been provided by the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship Lyndsay Bratton and her counterpart at Trinity College, Digital Scholarship Coordinator Mary Mahoney, attended the DHRI as a team this past summer, learning how to use Python for text analysis, QGIS for mapping, and other tools commonly used in computational research in the humanities and social sciences.
External faculty to both institutions are welcome. Both institutions hope the exchange will foster a vibrant digital scholarship community in Connecticut. Co-directors of the project include:Mary Mahoney, Digital Scholarship Coordinator (Trinity College) and Lyndsay Bratton, Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship (Connecticut College).
All workshops will be virtual until further notice.
September
Create Digital Exhibits with Omeka (Trinity College)
Friday, September 17, 11:30-12:45 PM
Presenter: Christina Bleyer, Director of Special Collections and Archives, Trinity College
This workshop will introduce Omeka, a tool that provides web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits. This workshop will be led by Dr. Christina Bleyer, Director of Special Collections and Archives at Trinity College on Friday, September 17th at 11:30 am. No previous experience required. Register here.
October
Building Maps with Hands-On Data Visualization (Trinity College)
Friday, October 1 from 1:15-2:30
Presenter: Jack Dougherty, Professor of Educational Studies, Trinity College
In this introductory workshop, we’ll learn ways to design and create different types of interactive maps to tell your data story. We will focus on two types of maps—choropleth (colored polygon) maps and story maps—and a newer generation of easy-to-learn tools to build them. Concepts and examples are drawn from a new book by Trinity professor Jack Dougherty and alumnus Ilya Ilyankou, Hands-On Data Visualization, available open-access online (HandsOnDataViz.org) and in print (O’Reilly Media, 2021). See workshop agenda at this short link (case-sensitive): https://bit.ly/2021-10-01
Register here.
Data Visualization I: Explore and Clean Data with OpenRefine (Connecticut College)
Monday, Oct 25th at 1:15pm
Presenter: Lori Looney, Connecticut College
This workshop will introduce OpenRefine, a powerful but user-friendly program for exploring and cleaning messy data. With its ability to incorporate textual cleaning techniques such as clustering and faceting, OpenRefine provides an advanced alternative to Excel without needing to understand computer programming. Registrants will be sent instructions for installing OpenRefine prior to the workshop. Register here.
Creating Maps with ArcGIS Online (Trinity College)
Friday, October 29, 11:30-12:45
Presenter: Cheryl Cape, Instructional Technologist, Trinity College
ArcGIS Online is a powerful cloud-based mapping and analysis platform that can be used to create informative and compelling web and story maps. This workshop will demonstrate the features and functionality available through a free public account, with a focus on free data available through Esri’s Living Atlas data repository. During this workshop participants will create a public account, or optionally use an organizational account through their institution, and learn how to create web maps focused on socioeconomic and demographic data, including historic redlining districts for major cities in the US. Register here.
November
Text Analysis with Voyant Tools (part I of II) (Connecticut College)
Thursday, Nov 11 at 1:15pm
Presenter: Andrew Lopez, Connecticut College
Voyant Tools is an open source, web-based application for lightweight text analysis. It functions as a one-stop-shop, offering an easy-to-use interface that processes text in seconds, organizing it into a series of interactive lists, charts, graphs, and networks. The application allows users to play with the resulting visualizations, to explore the text from different angles, such as word clouds, term frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and keywords in context. With no background knowledge or skills necessary, Voyant Tools is conducive to incorporating text analysis activities into the undergraduate classroom to facilitate reading and interpretive practices. This workshop offers a hands-on tour of the web-based application using a pre-established textual corpus. Next semester in part II of this workshop, we will build our own textual corpus to analyze. Register here.
