ME.Digital Humanities Institute: Home

Do you have a digital storytelling project that you'd like to tackle, but feel overwhelmed by how to begin?  If so, consider applying to participate in the ME.Digital Humanities Institute. This free seven-week online workshop is aimed at creating a collaborative space for humanities professionals to work with others in developing a digital project.  

The workshop is scheduled to run for from mid-January to mid-March.  We will use the Slack.com platform to communicate and share, and will focus on building a project using easy-to-access tools like Story Maps, Knight Lab tools, Google Maps, and others, and will explore basic HTML, and the command line. We may also explore more advanced tools, such as QGIS mapping, depending on participant interest. We seek participants from both secondary and higher education, libraries, and museum professionals. Applications that propose a specific project will receive first consideration. 

The workshop will include lessons and materials, but we will also rely upon each other to share information, skills and knowledge.The ultimate goal of the ME.Digital Humanities Institute is to foster a network of practice in which participants build expertise as they work on their project and through their interactions with each other.  Participants who complete the 7-week program will feel more confident in their knowledge of specific digital skills and in working with developers in defining and developing digital-based projects. 

The Institute is supported by York County Community College, CUNY Grad Center of New York, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The workshop will be limited to 12 participants. No specific technical expertise is required, except that applicants should generally be comfortable with using the Internet, setting up accounts, and uploading photos. These are the baseline requirements:

• Participants must have access to a desktop or laptop computer with some available storage space required, as we will be downloading various free software tools (Ipads and other tablets will not support these tools).
• Participants must propose a multimedia project that they will focus on developing during the workshop. This project doesn't have to be complicated or "big", and could be as simple as working with a small set of digitized photos and text. We'll aim to create projects with a professional look and feel, but definitely won't let "perfect" get in the way of "good." 
• Participants commit to participating asynchronous weekly sessions, as each week will build upon another.  There is no set time for the workshop -- participants will determine what works best for them -- but we will have weekly deadlines to move forward. 

Keep in mind that participants won't necessarily need to master all of the material -- the goal is to introduce a variety of tools, build our knowledge, and complete an interesting project .

If you are interested in participating, please complete the attached short application form below and return to Dianne Fallon at dfallon@yccc.edu.

Below is a preliminary list of skills we will explore during the ME.Digital Humanities Research Institute. To review my presentation at the October MAM conference (Maine Museums and Archives), scroll to the bottom of this list!

Ready to use mapping tools: Participants will survey and play with ready-to-use mapping and presentation tools, including GoogleMaps, StoryMaps, the KnightLab tool suite, and MapWarper. These tools will be our main focus as we develop our digital projects. 

Using the Command Line:  Participants will become more familiar and confident in using the command line function in their computers.  Command line skills -- which are NOT rocket science -- form the basis for using a variety of other tools and applications.

Intro to HTML/CSS - This workshop introduces two mark-up languages: HTML and CSS. Beyond learning HTML and CSS, users will leave the workshop with a clearer understanding of how the internet works.

Advanced Topics (which we may dip into if participants are interested)

Mapping - This workshop will offer an approachable introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a digital tool that allows to create maps and analyze data in a geospatial context. Institute participants will complete lessons online, and we will have a follow-up one-day in-person workshop to do further work on mapping.

Python for Humanists - Python is a general-purpose programming language suitable for a wide variety of core tasks in the digital humanities. Python provides a gateway to analyzing data, creating visualizations, composing interactive websites, scraping the internet, and engaging in distant reading of texts.

Intro to Git/GitHub  - This workshop will introduce participants to version control and collaboration using Git and GitHub, and demonstrate their use in digital projects.

Twitterbots and APIs - APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a structured way for programs to communicate with other programs. A knowledge of APIs allows your programs to communicate with major services such as The New York Times and Twitter and collect data from organizations such as the Library of Congress.

Dr. Dianne Fallon is the English Department Chair at York County Community College.  Currently, she is involved with integrating more digital tools into English and Humanities classes, both to stimulate interest in humanities subjects and to boost student confidence in using digital technologies.

In June 2018, Dianne participated in the Digital Humanities Research Institute at CUNY-Grad Center in New York.  This Institute, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is aimed at developing core computational skills among humanities faculty and building communities of practice for consultation and collaboration.

Participants in the Digital Humanities Research Institute are now organizing their own "digital humanities institutes," as part of an effort to expand expertise and networks of practice. 

At York County Community College, Dianne teaches a variety of writing courses, including College Composition, Creative Writing and Creative Non-Fiction, as well as Humanities courses such as Multicultural America. In spring 2019, she will teach a new course, "Witches and War, on the Web", in which students will investigate the connection between the Salem Witch trials and Abenaki-colonial warfare in Maine, and will develop their own local history research and digital presentation projects.