First Newsletter of 2020

A message on Covid-19

This has been a truly unanticipated start of 2020 and although Programming Historian continues to work to offer open access lessons on digital methods for humanists, we have slowed down a bit. We want to make sure that our editors, volunteers and users have the time to process through this challenging situation giving priority to care. Stay home if you can. And if you find the mindset for it, use your time to learn some new skills or write a lesson.

In the first trimester of 2020 the project continues to expand in several ways: we have new lessons, two new project team members, and new supporters. We have had over 360,000 visits, with February seeing the most of them (134,722). Users from the city of Bengaluru (India) were the ones to visit Programming Historian the most. To all of you, thank you for relying on our lessons to learn or practice digital methods.

A Multilingual Journal with Specific Settings

Our technical lead and editorial member Matthew Lincoln is at the front of our internationalization effort to have a multilingual journal on a static site in GitHub pages. He has made it possible for the user to switch between languages easily and, at the same time, he has created an intuitive system for our editorial members to populate the journal in one or more languages, as needed.

There are multiple settings to create a bilingual or multilingual Jekyll site and our ways are not recommended for novice level users of Jekyll. However, if you are interested in learning about how our settings work, visit Matthew’s post “Multilingual Jekyll: How The Programming Historian Does That” on his blog (available in English only). Thank you Matt for making this possible and also for training our technical team!

New Honors

We are honored to announce that the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) has recognized Programming Historian’s contribution to open access resources with their Open Scholarship Award. This recognition also included tuition for the now postponed DHSI 2020 in Vitoria, Canada. Thank you!

Our editor Anna-Maria Sichani has been awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship for 2020, an initiative that focuses on improving software sustainability so that research is best supported in the present and the future. Congrats Anna-Maria!

New PH Members

Due to the generous support of the French-speaking DH community to translate lessons, the PH en français team recently decided to grow add a new member. Marie-Christine Boucher joined the editorial board in February. She is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Justus-Liebig University (Germany) where she is also the web and IT administrator of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, and she is also a member of the editorial board of On_Culture.

This month Silvia Gutiérrez De la Torre joined the Spanish team as their ombudsperson. She is the Digital Humanities Librarian in El Colegio de México and also the RLadiesCDMX co-founder, and she had already authored a lesson on PH “Análisis de corpus con Voyant Tools”.

Welcome Marie-Christine and Silvia!

New Supporters

Programming Historian members would like to express their gratitute to the twenty new Patreon subscribers of the trimester. With your $1, $5 or $15 donation per month, you are helping us continue our efforts to provide open access lessons for everyone with an interest in digital methods and a connection to the Internet!

We are also thrilled and honored to announce that KU Leuven Libraries became our founding Institutional Partner Programme member! Their support will strengthen our open access publishing platform. Dank je wel! Vielen Dank! Thank you!

Conference Presentations

Our members were set to present at several conferences these upcoming months. However, in order to keep everyone safe, all these conferences have been postponed or cancelled.

New Lessons

Thanks to our network of authors, reviewers and editors, we continue to publish lessons and translations in different languages. Our new lessons are:

• Working with batches of PDF files by Moritz Mähr

  Learn how to perform OCR and text extraction with free command line tools like Tesseract and Poppler and how to get an overview of large numbers of PDF documents using topic modeling.

• Préserver ses données de recherche by James Baker and translated by Anne-Sophie Bessero-Lagarde

  Cette leçon donne des pistes aux historiens et aux historiennes pour documenter, structurer et pérenniser leurs données de recherche.

• Comprendre les expressions régulières by Doug Knox and translated by Alix Chagué

  Dans cette leçon, nous allons voir une utilisation avancée de la fonction rechercher-remplacer d’un logiciel de traitement de texte dans le but d’exploiter la structure d’un court document historique, qui n’est en essence rien d’autre qu’un tableau en prose.

Collaborate!

Do you use Programming Historian and want to collaborate? We are always looking for new lessons and you can contact us with your own idea for a lesson or a translation, or indicate your interest to peer-review lessons.

To help us make our work more sustainable and to continue being leaders in multilingual open access digital methods lessons, you can also join our Patreon subscriber list now!

The Programming Historian team wishes all of our readers in the southern hemisphere a happy begining of Autumn and a happy Spring to those in the northern hemisphere! Stay safe.