CFP: Computational Analysis Skills for Large-Scale Humanities Data

The Programming Historian invites proposals of new tutorials dealing with computational analysis of large-scale digital collections, as a part of a special series developed in partnership with the National Archives and Jisc. From the call for proposals:

Scholarly research has changed thanks to the proliferation of digital collections and the rapid emergence of computational methodologies and tools.

Awareness of digital methods is growing within the humanities. However, there is more work to be done to bring together scholars and cultural heritage organisations, especially with regards to aligning the skills of researchers with the size and characteristics of digital collections.

To address these challenges, The National Archives (a leading national archive), Jisc (an established provider of digital services for higher education), and the Programming Historian (a publisher of multilingual tutorials that support humanists in learning digital tools and methods) have formed a partnership that aims to publish a series of articles to aid humanities researchers wishing to use digital tools and methods in their analysis of large-scale digital collections.

As a result of this partnership we are delighted to invite authors to submit proposals for article-length tutorials on the computational analysis of large-scale digital collections. We anticipate that proposed articles will seek to achieve one or more of the following:

• Teach humanities scholars how to solve humanities problems related to working with digital data;
• Use digital collections as test beds for explaining a computational technique, and/or workflow;
• Show how a computational methodology or technique can be applied to a digital collection in order to generate initial findings it as a precursor to in-depth research;
• Demystify ‘big data’ analysis techniques for a humanities audience;
• Describe methods that advance humanities research questions through the analysis of large-scale digital collections;
• Demonstrate ‘Minimal Computing’ approaches to the analysis of large-scale digital collections and thereby meet the needs of scholars working ‘under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors’.

Examples of the kind of large-scale collections that would be in scope are digitised texts, email archives, social media data, web archives, bibliographic datasets, image collections, and catalogue data. This is not exhaustive, however, and no type of large-scale research collection is a priori excluded.

The submission deadline is October 8, 2021. To submit a proposal, email proghist.data.cfp@gmail.com. Please see the CFP for submission details. Articles selected for publication should be submitted by January 24, 2022 “using the Programming Historian publication workflow (see the Programming Historian Author Guidelines, available in four languages). Publication of articles is subject to peer review. All published articles will be published under a CC-BY license. All published articles will be translated into a second language by a translator.”

This call is organized by James Baker, Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex, and Anna-Maria Sichani, Research Fellow in Media History at the University of Sussex.