DHSI-EAST 2021

Inaugural DHSI-East: 26-29 April 2021

Join us for the inaugural DHSI-East, which will take place at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, from 26-29 April 2021. Register here (details below).Location: online

Schedule: Monday 26 April to Thursday 29 April

• 9:00 welcome and troubleshooting
• 9:00-4:00 workshop (with breaks!) 
• note: on Wednesday the workshop will end at 3:30 so we can enjoy our keynote lecture (details below)

Databases with Dr. Harvey Quamen

The first DHSI-East course will be databases. This course is aimed at humanists and those with no prior database experience. Dr. Harvey Quamen, an Associate Professor of English and Humanities Computing from the University of Alberta, will offer this course.

Databases are the driving engine behind a large number of classic and cutting-edge digital humanities applications. DH tasks -- such as wielding enormous GIS maps, aggregating the social media of wikis and blogs, building large archival repositories and even generating the semantic web -- all depend on some form of database. This course will introduce the inner workings of databases and demonstrate hands-on work with participants' own data sets to learn more about concepts like data normalization, relational table design, Structured Query Language (SQL), and effective long-term data management. Participants need no prior experience with databases or programming.

At the end of the course, you will be able to laugh at this joke:

An SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables.It saunters over to them and asks, “May I join you?”

Scheduling

The course will be for four full days. Detailed schedule to follow. 

Keynote: Dr. Chelsea Gardner, “Women, Websites, and Wikipedia: Accessible Digital Pedagogy and the Undergraduate Classroom”

Keynote info: Wednesday 28 April 2021, 4-5pm, online 

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89842559679?pwd=OE0rWjZsbzc4djNUbEVZSWtpeEpIUT09

How do you integrate meaningful DH pedagogy into a short, 13-week undergraduate semester? How can we, as educators, empower students to create and mediate digital content responsibly? What specific skills do students need, and what will they learn? In this talk, Chelsea Gardner addresses these questions through the presentation of three case studies that each introduce digital platforms into the undergraduate classroom: Wikipedia Education, Women in Antiquity, and Peopling the Past. These platforms form the basis of classroom assignments that aim to provide students with skills that impart digital literacy and contribute to impactful research through the creation and improvement of globally accessible, open-access resources.

As an archaeologist, her field research focuses primarily on religious space and cultural identity in southern Greece, where she co-directs the CARTography Project and the Southern Mani Archaeological Project. Her digital humanities research centres largely on DH pedagogy and integrating high-impact practices into the undergraduate classroom. She is a WikiScholar, director of the From Stone to Screen project, creator of the Women in Antiquity website and, most recently, the founder of Peopling the Past, an award-winning initiative that hosts free, open-access resources for teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world.  Her DH publications have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal for Interactive Teaching and Pedagogy, and the Debates in the Digital Humanities series.

Credits

DHSI-East is part of the international DH Training Network and takes its name from DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria). DHSI-East is supported by funding from the Harrison McCain Foundation Awards (Acadia University) and the Canada Research Chairs program.

The DHSI-East organizing team is Laura Estill (English, StFX), Richard Cunningham (English, Acadia University), Meghan Landry (StFX Library), Margaret Vail (StFX Library), and Lydia Vermeyden (ACENET)