Newsletter #1

Starting in June 2019, as part of our communication strategies, we will publish a newsletter every three months to summarize our community’s progress throughout the year. It is our hope that in this manner we will keep our users informed of lessons and translations, changes in the editorial board, upcoming events organized by our editors and, in all, to keep nurturing a welcoming and multilingual digital humanities community.

In this first newsletter we would like to highlight the following achievements, which would have been impossible without the help of our great community of editors, reviewers and users.

Launch of PH in French

Le Programming Historian en français est en ligne! 

In order to expand our project internationally, Programming Historian en français officially launched in April 2019. The addition of a third language was only possible thanks to the hard work of the French editorial board and our technical team. Sofia Papastamkou, Marie Puren and François Dominic Laramée worked for more than ten months on the translation of the journal’s infrastructure before its launch. At the same time, the technical team restructured and made the site trilingual.

The team is working on translating existing tutorials. So far, they have published two of our most popular tutorials: François Dominic translated his own lesson Introduction à la stylométrie en Python and Sybille Clochet translated Nettoyer ses données avec OpenRefine. The team is currently reviewing four other tutorials.

First Original Lessons in Spanish

Half a year after our successfull Writing Workhop in Bogotá, Colombia, Programming Historian en español published its two first original lessons in Spanish. Armando Luza wrote Creación de corpus paralelo con LF Aligner, a software to help in translation, and Silvia Gutiérrez published Análisis de corpus con Voyant Tools, a guide to the popular text analysis tool.

The publication of original lessons come at the second year anniversary of the beginning of Programming Historian en español and we couldn’t be more proud and thankful of our Spanish-speaking community!

New Members

In order to achieve our goals of publishing more original lessons in Spanish and to keep translating from English, Riva Quiroga and Joshua Ortiz Baco joined the team of *The Programming Historian en español. They both participated in the review process of translations before joining the editorial board and are very interested in the development of digital methodologies that place the contexts of Latin America at their core.

New Publications

• Introduction to Populating a Website with API Data by Go Sugimoto

  This lesson introduces a way to populate a website with data obtained from another website via an Application Programming Interface (API). Using some simple programming, it provides strategies for customizing the presentation of that data, providing flexible and generalizable skills.

• Extracting Illustrated Pages from Digital Libraries with Python by Stephen Krewson

  Machine learning and API extensions by HathiTrust and Internet Archive are making it easier to extract page regions of visual interest from digitized volumes. This lesson shows how to efficiently extract those regions and, in doing so, prompt new, visual research questions.

• Introduction to Gravity Models of Migration & Trade by Adam Crymble

  This lesson introduces gravity models as a means for determining the probable distribution of entities across space in historical datasets. It does so through a case study of historical migration patterns.

• Analyzing Documents with TF-IDF by Matthew J. Lavin

  This lesson focuses on a foundational natural language processing and information retrieval method called Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf). This lesson explores the foundations of tf-idf, and will also introduce you to some of the questions and concepts of computationally oriented text analysis.

• Creación de corpus paralelo con LF Aligner por Armando Luza

  Esta lección enseña a crear corpus con traducciones a distintas lenguas, de forma que queden perfectamente alineados para una mejor visualización y consulta.

• Análisis de corpus con Voyant Tools por Silvia Gutiérrez

  En este tutorial se aprenderá cómo organizar y analizar un conjunto de textos con Voyant-Tools.

• Análisis de redes temporal en R por Alex Breay (traducción)

  Aprende a utilizar R para analizar cómo cambian las redes a lo largo del tiempo.

• Nettoyer ses données avec OpenRefine par Seth Van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh, et Max De Wilde (traduction)

  Ce tutoriel se concentre sur la façon dont les chercheurs et chercheuses peuvent évaluer et agir sur l’exactitude des données.

• Introduction à la stylométrie en Python par François Dominic Laramée (traduction)

  Ce tutoriel vous apprendra comment appliquer diverses méthodes stylométriques pour déterminer les auteurs de textes disputés. Trois méthodes sont abordées: les courbes caractéristiques de composition de Mendenhall, la méthode du khi carré de Kilgariff et, enfin, la méthode du Delta de John Burrows.

Upcoming Events

On July 11, Antonio Rojas Castro, Anna-Maria Sichani and Sofia Papastamkou will present their poster “Designing Multilingual Digital Pedagogy Initiatives: The Programming Historian for English, Spanish, and French speaking DH Communities” at the DH 2019 Conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands. They also participate to the pre-conference workshop “Accelerating DH Education”, on July 8, where they present “Three Challenges in Developing Open Multilingual DH Educational Resources: The Case of The Programming Historian”.

Part of the team of The Programming Historian en español will present at the ACH 2019 Conference on July 25, in Pittsburgh. Maria José Afanador-Llach, Jennifer Isasi and Antonio Rojas Castro are presenting “Retos en la producción de tutoriales de HD en contextos hispanohablantes” or “Challenges in DH lesson production in Spanish speaking contexts.”