This June, I had the privilege of attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, BC. Hosted by the University of Victoria, DHSI is a renowned digital humanities training program that brings together participants from various backgrounds to explore the intersection of technology and the humanities. After being fully remote for the past years, DHSI for the first time offered a hybrid version, allowing both in-person and online attendance. I was lucky enough to do both, and fully embraced the two weeks of courses, lectures, the conference & colloquium.

During my time at DHSI, I had the opportunity to enroll in two courses that both enhanced my understanding of computing and the many possibilities it allows for humanistic research. The first course was Fundamentals of Programming for Human(s|ists) led by Marie Burle, Grace Fishbein, and Meghan Landry. Like the title suggests, the course provided an introduction to programming (with Python) as well as web scraping and API querying. We also had a chance to develop and present our own projects, and in doing so, gained some valuable hands-on experience.

For the online portion of DHSI, I enrolled in NLP Coding Libraries and Network Analysis for Text Corpora by Chris Tanasescu. In this course, I learned more about automated text and corpus analysis, network science and graph theory applications, as well as vector space and topic modeling. In terms of content, this course held significant relevance for me as it equipped me with some of the concrete skills necessary for my own work on online communities and discourse.

Overall, these two weeks proved to be incredibly enriching for me, and it is safe to say that there were not just a few, but many highlights. A major one of them was the Show & Tell event at the end of week one that gave me a chance to get a sneak peek into other participants’ experiences and what they learned throughout the course. I also really enjoyed the conversations I had with other humanists, librarians, PhD students and seasoned practitioners from various backgrounds. It was very enriching to be in community with them, learn about their work and the opportunities they see in the Digital Humanities and their respective fields. 

I now look forward to sharing some of those learnings with my colleagues at Greenhouse Studios and beyond, and to delve deeper into coding, and in particular, Natural Language Processing. Ultimately, my goal is to apply the knowledge and skills to my dissertation and future research endeavors.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium, the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages as well as Greenhouse Studios for their support, which made my participation in this endeavor possible.

And, of course, I would also like to thank the instructors of my courses for their guidance (and patience!) throughout the program as well as the organizers of DHSI for setting up such an inspiring community in the first place. 

I hope to be back sometime!