September Newsletter

September marks a subtle change of the seasons as well as a new phase for learning and teaching in our community. This is a moment to learn from newly published lessons, celebrate new partnerships and welcome new team members.

New Lessons

Since our mid-year newsletter, we’ve published two new and original lessons in Spanish, as well as a new Portuguese translation of Miriam Posner’s popular Up and Running with Omeka.net, which is also available in Spanish.

Reutilizar colecciones digitales: GLAM Labs de Gustavo Candela, María Dolores Sáez, María Pilar Escobar y Manuel Marco Such, muestra cómo reutilizar colecciones digitales publicadas por instituciones de patrimonio cultural.

Introducción a la codificación de textos en TEI (parte 1) de Nicolás Vaughan te enseña los rudimentos de TEI-XML para codificar textos.

Introdução ao Omeka.net por Miriam Posner e traduzido por Gabriela Kucuruza você aprenderá a criar sites na web para mostrar coleções de itens com o Omeka.net.

Research and Outreach

The months ahead at Programming Historian promise to be equally busy, and rewarding. Not only will we continue our work of publishing lessons that inspire scholars across the humanities to learn new technological skills and expand their digital knowledge, but we will also keep working hard to further our academic research, while engaging new audiences through imaginative outreach activities.

We launched a new call for lesson proposals at the beginning of this month, focused on inviting tutorials that support humanities researchers to develop computational analysis skills for use on large-scale data. This initiative is coordinated in partnership with The National Archives and Jisc. Read more about the project, and learn how to submit your proposal in our blog post. The deadline is Friday 8th October, so hurry!

Colleagues in our Project Team have published new research exploring the challenges of teaching and learning digital history, meanwhile harnessing opportunities for outreach to dismantle and surmount them.

Daniel Alves wrote an article titled ‘Ensinar Humanidades Digitais sem as Humanidades Digitais: um olhar a partir das licenciaturas em História’ for Revista EducaOnline that argues the importance of teaching digital skills across humanities departments at universities. Adam Crymble and Maria José Afanador-Llach contributed a chapter ‘The Globally Unequal Promise of Digital Tools for History: UK and Colombia Case Study’ to the book Teaching History for the Contemporary World, edited by Adele Nye. In their text, they consider some of the social, technical and infrastructural barriers that open access, multilingual projects like Programming Historian are designed to break down.

Later this September, Jessica Parr and Nabeel Siddiqui will contribute to Sharing Digitally, an online seminar organised by the Center for Urban History at Lviv, Ukraine, where they’ll lead a workshop and discussion about ‘Programming Historian and the Challenges of Globally Distributed Learning’. Through October and November, Jennifer Isasi and Brandon Walsh will co-host two special Programming Historian Book Club events lead by The Association for Computers and the Humanities. The Book Clubs are an opportunity to work through our lessons on R and Python together. Newcomers are welcome – the sessions will provide a supportive space to learn a new skill and ask questions from experienced participants.

Keep an eye on the research/investigación/recherche/pesquisa pages of our website for further updates on our activities.

Supporters

As ever, this work of publishing and publicising open access, peer reviewed, multilingual tutorials represents a collaboration between authors, translators, reviewers, editors, and educators.

We are grateful to each of our individual and institutional partners for their invaluable support, which helps ensure the project can continue into the future. Today, we say thank you to Cambridge Digital Humanities who have joined our Institutional Partner Programme and bring us one step closer to sustainability.

Team News

This September we bid a fond farewell to our brilliant colleague Brandon Walsh from the University of Virginia, who is retiring from the project. He has worked as part of our editorial and technical teams since 2017, and has written about his experiences of the project in a reflective blog post. Thank you, Brandon, for your energy and tireless commitment to this project!

Nos alegra presentarles a nuestros tres nuevos compañeros en el equipo de Programming Historian en español: Isabelle Gribomont, Nicolás Linares y Nicolás Vaughan. ¡Bienvenidos! Aprende más sobre ellos en nuestro blog.

We also warmly welcome Tiago Sousa Garcia, who has joined the Project Team to support our collaboration with The UK National Archives and Jisc. With a long-held interest in how methodologies for analysing big data can be applied to humanistic datasets, he’s an ideal addition to our team co-ordinating this call for new lesson proposals on the subject. When not working with Programming Historian Tiago works for Newcastle University’s Research Software Engineering lab. He describes himself as an early modernist, with a specialist interest in early modern translations into English from vernacular languages.

Another hello, to four students from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa who are joining our Portuguese team this September. As part of their fellowships awarded by Instituto de História Contemporânea, they will be working with us on new translations of lessons, covering themes as varied as GIS, digital archives and platforms, data management and Python. These fellowships are generously supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia’s special Verão com Ciência 2021 initiative. We’re looking forward to working with you!