¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 During the NYC Digital Week, I attended four different workshops, which offered me – one more time – the opportunity to touch the different potentiality offered by Digital Humanities tools.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The first workshop I attended was “Sampling for the Digital Humanities”, offered on February 7th by Angus Grieve-Smith. Studies and researches into the Humanities can be very time consuming: a solution to the problem can be the use of a labor-saving device such as a sample, which has – of course – to be big enough to be employed as a proof of the hypothesis we are following in examining a huge amount of data. To build a sample we need the material (the data we want to analyze), a numbered catalogue of our data, a random number generator, and one or more input variables that divide the data into different categories. There are three different kinds of samples: systematic (which break up the data in smaller parts, testing a small part to understand the statistical significance and repeating the test if it is not significant), opportunistic (which find empiric evidence), and random (based on establishing a sequential index number for all the data and an initial sample size, and on the analysis of only a part of the total amount of data). The random can be also stratified, when data already present internal divisions and input variables to divide dataser in different strata of sub-data.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 On February 8th, I attended my second workshop, “Making a Minimal Digital Edition of a Historical or Literary Text”, with Alex Gil. We discovered how to create minimal digital editions using Ed, a Jekyll theme designed for textual editors based on minimal computing principles. We discovered how to build a digital edition readable and with footnotes, based on plain-text technology, which constitutes also a static Webpage.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The third workshop was held by our GC Digital Fellow Jojo Carlin on February, 15th, and it was an introduction to GitHub. The workshop was really useful, especially for me because I have no experience of this tool. Thanks to her patience and to her detailed explication, at the end of the workshop we were all able to build our first repository.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 The fourth and last workshop I attended was “Planning and Prototyping a Digital Humanities Project”, which Joshua Korenblat moved from Februart 9th to 16th because of the snow storm. This workshop helped me to deal with the concept of space, especially with a two-dimensions space where to represent ideas or processes that are (or will take) taking place in a three-dimensional spaces. This is very useful because it forced my mind to find a logical representation of a process by using digital tools, and the last activity was very relevant because he asked us to draw a hypothetical infographic from a huge database constitued by the most famous people from 4,000 BC to modern times.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0