Digital Scholarship Workshops
Materials from our Digital Scholarship Workshop Series at NCSU Libraries
What is Digital Scholarship? An Introduction to Digital Research & Methods
Isn't all scholarship 'digital' these days? This discussion-based session will explore new and emerging characteristics of contemporary research practices that are sometimes referred to as "digital scholarship." Attendees will come away with a sense of what it means to work "in the open," how scholarly communities are contantly engaged with technology, and in what ways digital scholarship fundamentally alters academia as we know it.
Understand and Build Your Scholarly Identity
It is increasingly necessary for researchers to have a professional presence online. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to establish and manage your scholarly identity to help you connect with colleagues, find collaborators, and expose your research to new audiences. You’ll also learn how to boost your scholarly impact using social media and alternative metrics that come with these new methods of knowledge communication and online dissemination.
Creating a Scholarly Website
Have you ever wanted your own professional website but don’t know where to start? In this workshop, you will create a free website for professional use, with options for blogging, hosting syllabi, resumes or portfolios. You will learn three tools, including Jekyll, a static website generator, Markdown, for updating content, and Github Pages for freely hosting the site. At the end of the workshop, you should have your site up and running, and know how to edit it for future use.
Measuring Your Research Impact
As scholarly outputs continue to evolve and more scientific grant proposals require broader impact statements, it is important to gather evidence of how your research will have a greater impact upon society. This workshop will provide an introduction to broader impacts and how traditional and nontraditional scholarly metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor, h-index, Eigenfactor Score, and Altmetrics, are being used to measure research impact.
Tracking Online Research Engagement with Altmetrics and R
Altmetrics tracks how often journal articles with a unique identifier (doi, arxiv id, isbn, etc.) are being discussed, shared, downloaded, or saved on social media platforms, news outlets, policy documents, and online reference managers. Using R, a statistical computing language, this workshop will teach participants how to retrieve and process data from the Altmetrics.com API to visualize and compare online research engagement across multiple scholarly publications. This workshop is geared toward intermediate-level R users, as the basics of R will not be covered. While not required, you may be interested in attending the following related workshops: "Understand and Build Your Scholarly Identity" and "Measuring Your Research Impact."
Public Humanities Data
Data aren't just for data scientists! Aligning with conversations in the digital humanities, this session will introduce the concept of humanities data, what role it plays in scholarly inquiry, and explore how, when, and why humanities data must be publicly accessible. Participants will discuss, argue, define, problemetize, and leave the session with several resources to deepen their research and praxis (ex. public humanities data sets, data analysis tools, skills to develop, etc.).
Harvesting Data from Twitter
This workshop teaches you how to harvest Twitter data using R. You'll learn the basics of working with R and should have a file of tweets to explore by the end of the workshop. There will be quite a bit of time after the learning portion for experimentation.
Simple Text Analysis with Voyant Tools and Antconc
Analyzing textual data with computational tools can aid in both reading and interpretation, allowing us to discover patterns and explore large volumes of data quickly. In this drop-in workshop, participants will gain hands-on experience analyzing textual data with Voyant Tools and AntConc. Workshop activities will be self-directed using provided data and step-by-step instructions. Experience is not required.
Diving Deeper into Text Analysis with R
This workshop will dive deeper into Text Analysis and Natural Language Processing using R. Using some sample data sets, we will learn how to import and export text-as-data, how to use that data to generate word counts and make comparisons, and ultimately how to export our results either as tables or as various kinds of plots. In addition to foundational corpus techniques like keywords, the workshop will touch on sentiment analysis, collocations, and concordances. Given the time constraints, we may not make it through all of the material, but we hope you will come out of the workshop equipped to proceed through the rest at your own pace.
Storytelling with GIS Maps
In this workshop, you will learn how to create a story map using a combination of interactive ArcGIS Online base maps, images and text. Using Esri’s cloud-based story mapping GIS platform, you will learn how to design a web-based map with sample geographic data, text and images. Together, we will take a look at several example story map application templates and build an interactive linear online map that tells your own geographic story.
Slides | Instructions for Map Journal Activity | Instructions for Map Tour Activity | Instructions for Map Cascade Activity
Bringing Historical Maps into GIS
Interacting with historical maps in their proper geographic space allows for a more accurate representation of a particular place and the changes it has undergone over time. This workshop will provide you with the steps to align geographic data to a digitized historical map and create a georeferenced historical map. Participants will work with simple tools like Map Warper and Tableau to overlay the georeferenced historical map on top of a GIS modern basemap for use in an interactive web mapping application.
Introduction to OpenStreetMaps and Humanitarian Mapping
OpenStreetMap is a free and open crowd-sourced map of the world that anyone can contribute to. In addition to being used by government and private companies for web applications, OpenStreetMap is used by many humanitarian organizations who need reliable information about the roads, buildings, and other information about regions experiencing crisis. In this workshop you will learn how to edit OpenStreetMap and contribute data to any region in the world! Together, we will improve the basemaps of Raleigh and other cities in North Carolina, adding sidewalks and information that will be used by apps designed to map accessible routes through our cities. This workshop will prepare you to participate in humanitarian mapping and introduce you to the open source web mapping community.
Introduction to XML and Digital Scholarly Editing with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
This introductory workshop on text encoding in XML will teach you the structure of XML and the principles of text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines makes it possible to create and publish digital scholarly editions by defining a standard XML vocabulary. In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of structuring a TEI document, how to record bibliographic metadata, and how to start creating transcriptions of manuscripts and other primary sources for digital humanities projects. No prior experience with XML or TEI is expected.
Getting Started with Digital Exhibits in Omeka
Omeka is an open source web application used by archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts to create attractive, customizable web exhibits and databases. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll learn how to set up a free version of Omeka from Omeka.net to create your own digital archive of images and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and how to begin building a digital exhibit. Note: The workshop instructions are largely based on a document created by Ronda Grizzle (University of Virginia) for an Omeka/Neatline workshop.
Advanced Omeka
Building off of our previous workshop offering, "Getting Started with Building Digital Exhibits in Omeka," this workshop will provide tips and tricks for customizing Omeka’s themes and how to use Omeka plugins for creating relational data, digital collections, maps, timelines, and annotation tools. Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas for digital research projects and questions about using Omeka. We will use some of the workshop time to offer advice and suggestions on what plugins to use that are specific to participants’ digital research projects. Note: This workshop predominately focuses on Neatline.
Tropy for Archival Researchers
Is your photo collection disorganized? Are you a historian interested in archival research and need to find a way to make sense of all your digital photos? Tropy is a free, open-source desktop application designed to help researchers organize and describe the photos they take in archives in intuitive and useful ways. In this workshop, you will learn best practices for handling rare materials in the Special Collections reading room, how to use Tropy to group photos of research materials, annotate images, add metadata, export them to other applications, and easily search your own digital collections of photos.
360 degree videos made easy
Have you ever wanted to create 360° videos? In this workshop, you will learn how to engage, explore, and tell stories with immersive imagery using 360° videos. This introductory workshop will teach you how to storyboard videos, operate a Ricoh Theta 360° camera, and go over the workflow of planning, capturing, and editing 360° video, adding 360° metadata to published videos, and how to upload the video to YouTube for 360° viewing.
Instructions Part I | Instructions Part II
Creating Compelling Infographics for your Research
Infographics can be powerful tools for communicating research and achieving greater impact. Yet, while a good infographic clarifies and captivates, a bad infographic distorts and distracts. This workshop will cover basic design and narrative principles for creating infographics that balance visual appeal with data integrity. We will discuss multiple resources for generating infographics. Participants will gain hands-on experience creating an infographic with free infographic creation tools.
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