Humanities Data Workshop Series: “What is ‘Data’ in the Humanities?”

“What is ‘Data’ in the Humanities?” will introduce participants to the challenges, contradictions, and possibilities of working with data in the context of humanities scholarship. We’ll explore the many forms that humanities data can take. We’ll learn about the ways source material from text files of primary source documents, oral history audio files, image files of artworks or archival items, library catalog data, and bibliographic citations can serve as data in humanistic research. Along the way, we’ll think about what a humanistic approach brings to concepts from library and information science. Topics covered will include the relationship between data and metadata, the many meanings of “archives” in the context of humanistic research, and the necessity of humanities research data.

Humanities Data Workshop Series overview:
A joint initiative between the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) and Princeton Research Data Service (PRDS), this workshop series will explore what “data” means in the context of humanities scholarship and provide an introduction to key techniques and analytical considerations for data-curious faculty, early-career researchers, graduate students, and library staff. Over the course of six workshops (tentatively, three workshops per semester), participants will learn about the animating methods and questions that go into finding, structuring, cleaning, and preserving data in humanities contexts. Sessions will use case studies from a range of disciplines, and will pay particular attention to the interpretative and ethical decisions involved in creating datasets from objects of humanities research.

Register for the Zoom link: https://libcal.princeton.edu/event/8327079