COVID-19 – Digital Humanities Lab

Digital archives of the COVID-19 pandemic: research notes

How will historians tell the history of the COVID-19 pandemic? At first, they will do so based on historical sources, as always. But how is the vast number of vestiges of such a global and traumatic event being archived? I am starting a fellowship at the IEG DH Lab to help answer questions like that as part of my PhD research, The pandemic and the digital: digital archives and memory of COVID-19 in a global perspective, conducted at the University of Campinas, Brazil. This short report will present the main topics and questions surrounding the project.

„Digital archives of the COVID-19 pandemic: research notes“ weiterlesen

RSA 2022 in Dublin

By Jaap Geraerts

Two weeks ago, from March 29 until April 2, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference took place in Dublin. It’s probably the largest conference for academics interested in the early modern period and it customarily attracts scholars from various historical disciplines and fields from all over the world. Over the last couple of years, the number of papers and panels on the digital humanities has been steadily increasing at this conference. For me this is good news: RSA now offers me a platform to share both my latest archival findings and to showcase the technical side of my project. „RSA 2022 in Dublin“ weiterlesen

Exploring connections: Digital workshop on Network Analysis with Python

by Sarah Büttner

In times of covid-19, virtual workshops can be quite hard for organizers as well as for participants. On the other hand, they offer a unique opportunity to try unconventional methods to improve the situation for both sides. Dr. Demival Vasques Filho, in cooperation with Anna Aschauer, grasped such an opportunity at the DARIAH-DE-workshop Network Analysis with Python for Beginners, when he decided to simultaneously code and explain the basis on network analysis. Furthermore, he managed to address academics from different research areas with the help of some well-known fictional characters.
„Exploring connections: Digital workshop on Network Analysis with Python“ weiterlesen

Research in times of COVID

by Jaap Geraerts

COVID-19 has posed a challenge, to put it mildly, to how most of us go about living our lives. Either in our personal life or work life, most if not all of us had to make significant adaptions in order to deal with a world that still is in the grasp of pandemic. The experience I’d like to focus on in this blog post, is that of doing research at these unprecedented times. Fairly soon after COVID-19 broke out, it became clear that it would have huge implications for researchers and teachers. Due to travel bans and other restrictions, virtually all conferences were either canceled or were held online in some form or another. In a short time span, teachers across the world had to go to extraordinary lengths to move their courses online. As libraries and archives closed their doors and traveling to or from particular countries became severely restricted or even impossible, the access to primary and secondary sources, the very fuel of our research, was hampered to a large degree. „Research in times of COVID“ weiterlesen

Research visit in New Zealand: Modelling the spread of COVID-19 on higher-order networks

At the beginning of March, I went to New Zealand for a research visit with a planned duration of four weeks. This visit was part of a collaboration involving the IEG DH Lab and Te Pūnaha Matatini, a New Zealand centre of research excellence for complex systems and data science hosted by the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics.

The main goal of the visit was to further develop our research on the structure of higher-order networks, that is, networks which account for interactions between individuals stemming from their membership to groups. Higher-order networks are usually represented by either bipartite (two-mode) networks, or hypergraphs, or simplicial complexes. Our last publications on this topic can be seen in the Journal of Complex Networks and the Physical Review E (also available on arXiv, here and here).

I arrived about one week before New Zealand closed its borders to the world, allowing only citizens and long-term residents to enter into the country. „Research visit in New Zealand: Modelling the spread of COVID-19 on higher-order networks“ weiterlesen

The Archaeology of Reading, COVID-19, and online teaching

by Jaap Geraerts

Prior to taking up my current position at the IEG, I was based at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) at University College London where I served as the postdoctoral fellow on the digital humanities project “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe” (AOR). An international collaboration between CELL, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, the project team, consisting of historians, computer engineers, and librarians, aimed to enable a more structured analysis of historical reading practices through the creation of an online resource. The end result is a modified IIIF-compliant viewer comprising a corpus of 36 early modern books annotated by Gabriel Harvey and John Dee and the fully searchable transcriptions of all the “interventions” they made in these books. This viewer is accompanied by a WordPress site which contains contextual information of the scholarly and technological aspects of the project.
„The Archaeology of Reading, COVID-19, and online teaching“ weiterlesen