We are already three months and a half into 2021 and it is time to recap on what Programming Historian has been working on. No hemos parado de recibir lecciones originales. Nous avons édité la première leçon originale en français. E continuamos trabalhando muito para trazer mais lições em português.
As usual, none of these achievements would have been possible without the support of our communities around the globe, and the wide host of volunteer editors and collaborators of the journals. To all of you, Thank you, gracias, merci e obrigados.
Public Outreach
These first months of the year have been specially busy with virtual events, as we have presented our work on Programming Historian in different venues all over. Nos gustaría en especial felicitar y agradecer a nuestra editora Riva Quiroga su gran esfuerzo en marzo, pues ha participado en casi todos estos eventos.
Early in January, Brandon Walsh presented our project at the Modern Languages Association Conference 2021. His talk, ‘The Programming Historian and Editorial Process in Digital Publishing’ focused on the technical side or how we use GitHub for the editorial process to submit and edit new lessons or translations for publication.
Programming Historian en español organizó dos talleres para el 6 de marzo, con motivo del Día de los Datos Abiertos y con la financiación de la Open Knowledge Foundation. Riva Quiroga presentó el proyecto y dio paso a Silvia Gutiérrez, quien dio un taller sobre Voyant-Tools con textos en español. Tras un descanso, Jairo Melo nos enseñó a descargar, procesar y visualizar datos abiertos a través de un cuaderno Jupyter. Ambos talleres quedaron grabados y puedes verlos en opendataday-2021. También puedes leer un resumen del evento en este hilo de Twitter.
A few days later, on March 10th, Riva presented on the “Multilingual Digital Humanites” at the Digital Humanities Long View Seminar, a series of events organized by UCLDH and CESTA. If you missed it, you can watch the talk, read a summary of the event on a thread on our Twitter account or on a newspaper article by Anuka Mohanpuhr at The Stanford Daily.
Our global team members Sofia Papastamkou, Jessica Parr and Riva Quiroga presented at NewsEye’s International Conference. Their paper was titled “Challenges for Digital Literacy in the Humanities: The Open, Community-Based and Multilinguistic Approach of The Programming Historian” and centered on the community we have formed to make digital methods available to more people in the world.
El 25 de marzo, nuestras editoras Jennifer Isasi y Riva Quiroga presentaron el proyecto a la Red INTELE (Infraestructura de Tecnologías del Lenguaje) de España. Con “Programming Historian: Un proyecto colaborativo para poner la programación al alcance de los humanistas” dieron buena razón de las directrices éticas que guían el proceso editorial en la revista y mostraron un ejemplo de cómo preparar una lección para su publicación. La charla quedó grabada en video y podéis verla en la colección de webinarios de INTELE.
On April 12th, Programming Historian team convened in a panel at Global Digital Humanities Symposium 2021 to present its achievements and challenges in our inclusive, four-language journal initiative. During this session the presenters focused on the strategies each journal has adopted to bring digital scholarship methods to a global audience that reached 1,5 million in 2020. In turn, it served as an overview of the changes the journal has undergone in its twelve-year history in order to become the flagship journal in DH methods. The audience responded positively to the presentation and asked about the addition of new languages.
Upcoming events
We are not stopping there with our public outreach. We have more events already lined up:
And on April 29, Adam Crymble is offering a free Programming Historian teaching workshop to celebrate the launch of his new book, Technology & the Historian: Transformations of the Digital Age. He will offer practical classroom-ready solutions that bring together history and technology for students today.
We hope to see you at this event!
Lessons/lecciones/leçons/lições
Have you seen our new lessons? Hemos seguido publicando. Nous avons plusieurs nouvelles leçons pour vous.
- OCR and Machine Translation by Andrew Akhlaghi covers how to convert images of text into text files and translate those text files.
- Creación de sitios estáticos con Jekyll y GitHub Pages de Amanda Visconti ha sido traducida por el equipo HD CAICYT Lab, Gimena del Rio Riande, Nidia Hernández, Romina De León, Gabriel Calarco y Raffaele Viglianti, y te ayudará a crear un sitio web seguro completamente gratuito, fácil de mantener y sobre el que tendrás control total, como un blog académico, un sitio web de proyectos o un portafolio en línea.
- Análisis de sentimientos en R con ‘syuzhet’ de Jennifer Isasi te enseña una forma de obtener y analizar datos sobre las emociones y los sentimientos de una narración.
- Installation de bibliothèques Python avec pip par Fred Gibbs et traduit par Lucas Terriel, il explique l’une des méthodes les plus courantes utilisant pip.
- Calibrer des âges radiocarbone avec R par Nicolas Frerebeau et Brice Lebrun est notre première leçon originale en français! Cette leçon explique pas à pas comment réaliser la calibration d’un ensemble de dates et comment explorer et présenter les résultats avec R.
- Preservar os seus dados de investigação por James Baker e traduzido por Márcia T. Cavalcanti irá sugerir maneiras pelas quais os historiadores podem documentar e estruturar os seus dados de pesquisa, a fim de garantir que continuem sendo acessíveis no futuro.
Do you have an idea for a lesson? Drop us a line!
Our supporters
We launched our Institutional Partner Programme and Patreon in 2020, and in these months we have been able to amass a good number of new supporters to whom we would like to give a strong shout-out! This support allows us to have a wide array of resources, free at the point of access to readers everywhere.
So far in 2021, we got six sign-ups to contribute to our Institutional Partner Programme for libraries, universities and research centers:
- Software Sustainability Institute, United Kingdom
- Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- Princeton University, United States
- Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, United States
- Transkribus - READ COOP, Austria
- RStudio, PBC, United States
- CESTA, Stanford University, United States
- University of Waterloo, Canada
On the individual side of things, we are also grateful to the many dozens of sponsors who support our project through a monthly contribution on Patreon or one-time Paypal donations.
Collaboration
In order for us to be able to better address the needs of our community, Adam Crymble is working with the Centre for Data, Culture and Society, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and the Digital Humanities program at the University of the Andes to build knowledge about how different institutions are using Programming Historian in teaching settings. This will allow us to share experiences within our IPP network and cater to pedagogical needs they find in teaching digital methods.
Nouveaux membres/novos membros
Notre comité de rédaction continue d’évoluer et de croître dans plusieurs directions. Nous avons recruté trois nouveaux rédacteurs pour l’édition en francais de la revue. Veuillez vous joindre à nous pour accueillir Antoine Henry de Université de Lille, Gwenaëlle Patat de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme en Bretagne et Matthias Gille Levenson de l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Bienvenue à toutes et à tous!
A equipa em português está a receber muitas propostas e adicionou também um novo membro ao seu grupo. Assim, gostaríamos de dar as boas-vindas a Ricardo Pimenta! Ele vai ajudar no projeto de trazer o PH para a sala de aula no Brasil e em Portugal.
Convocatoria para nuevos editores
Por su lado, el el equipo editorial en español no para de recibir propuestas de traducciones y de lecciones originales y por eso, están buscando a tres nuevos compañeros. Puedes consultar la convocatoria para sumarse al equipo editorial de Programming Historian en español y enviarnos tu postulación antes del 30 de abril. ¡Anímate!
New features
Our technical team is working non-stop to improve our front-end service, the website, to make it more easy to navigate and accessible for our user-base. For instance, they recently added a night-mode switch that allows users to seamlessly change from a light to a dark mode to accomodate to their working environment.
In a similar line, Brandon Walsh has started an accessibilty audit to address several issues that are preventing our web from being fully accessible. We are missing some alt-text in our avatars or profile pictures, and some items are not contained within parent elements.
We will address the issues that we can fix ourselves and seek help for those for which we are lacking expertise on.
Acknowledgments
A year ago, and before leaving the team, Matthew Lincoln wrote a blogpost about one of the ways in which one can produce a complex multilingual static site using Jekyll and GitHub pages. The post was nominated for the Best DH Blog Post or Series of Posts category in the Digital Humanities Awards 2020. Unfortunately, it didn’t win, but the nomination showed how important this resource is for the DH community. And congratulations to the winners!
Jennifer Isasi, PH comms manager and editor, was nominated and elected to be part of the 2021-2025 Executive Council for The Association for Computers and the Humanities. ¡Felicidades, Jennifer! And we would also like to congratulate Kim Gallon and Lorena Gauthereau, who will also be part of the Executive Council.
And last but not least, we would like to offer our biggest congratulations to Adam Crymble for the publication of his book Technology & the Historian: Transformations of the Digital Age, in which he offers an overview of histories and philosophies of the field of History, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. We can’t wait to read it.
To learn about the work we did in 2020, we invite you to read our end of the year newsletter.
About the author
Jennifer Isasi is an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship and Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative at Penn State, and a PhD on Hispanic Studies.