2019-2020 Working Groups
The Center hosts a number of working groups for scholarly discussion, project development, and skills training. See below for schedules and details.
Spatial Humanities
The Spatial Humanities working group will investigate technologies, scholarly methods, and political practices related to geospatial data in humanistic research. It will survey a range of tools, including ArcGIS, QGIS, Story Maps, and Mapbox, as well as representative projects in the digital humanities. In addition to each group member pursuing their own mapping project, the group will also work to create a collective toolbox of resources for Spatial Humanities beginners, which will be made available to broader audiences.
Fall Meeting Schedule:
10/1/2019: Introduction to Story Maps
10/15/2019: Introduction to GIS
10/29/2019: Mapping Project Comparisons
11/12/2019: Geocoding
12/3/2019: Topic TBA
Gaming Group
This working group operates at the intersection of the fields of games studies, critical theory, and digital humanities. In Fall 2019, this group will read theoretical texts and examine several key questions in these fields. First and foremost, what are the differences between games and other forms of digital storytelling? What is the value of understanding games as critical objects of study versus creating games as critical scholarship? How can theoretical analyses of digital storytelling media influence scholarship at large? Starting in Spring 2020, this group will put these questions into practice, playing and creating games and other digital media as a means of understanding the possibilities of the form.
We meet in Buttrick Hall, Room 344 from 12:00-1:00 pm on select Fridays.
Meeting Schedule, Spring 2020:
1/31/2020: Critical Game Theory
2/7/2020: Twine, Designing Games
*this meeting will take place at 2:00pm and is being hosted by the Center for Second Language Studies (ground floor, Furman Hall)*
2/21/2020: Metagaming and the Politics of Game Culture
3/13/2020: Topic TBA
Meeting Schedule, Fall 2019:
10/3/2019: Lunchtime talk with Ian Bogost (Part of DH Colloquium; Group members should have received an e-vite)
10/17/2019: Topic TBA
11/7/2019: Meeting Cancelled
12/5/2019: Twine Games
Text Analysis
This working group offers a practical introduction to computational tools for text analysis including OCR, data cleaning, coding, text mining software, and network visualization platforms. We welcome participants at all skill levels currently working on or designing a text analysis project. Fall meetings are scheduled on every other Tuesday in Buttrick 344 from 10:00-11:00am.
Spring Meeting Schedule
2/4/20: GitHub and Professional Websites
2/11/20: Jekyll, Programming Historian
2/25/20: CSS Tutorial and HTML, prep for webscraping
3/10/20: Co-working Time
**Check back here in March for details regarding a webscraping lesson**
Fall Meeting Schedule
9/24/19: OCR, Atom, and Abbyy FineReader
10/8/2019: Data and OpenRefine
10/22/2019: Co-Working
11/5/2019: Voyant
11/19/2019: Network Analysis
12/3/2019: Fall Wrap-up and Planning for Spring 2020