Getting ready for the course

As you (may) know, our course "Methods in Digital and Computational Humanities" will begin at 2pm on Wednesday, May 11th. I'm excited to meet with you in person, and to work together to move your individual research projects forward. This will be an intensive week, so I hope that you're excited, too. 

My primary objective for our time together is that you each leave with at least one concept or method that directly contributes to your research objectives. This course will mix little bits of lecture with lots of hands-on activity. As someone who is shy by nature, I want to forewarn you: this workshop will require your input and verbal participation, so please come prepared for that. :-)

A few things that will be crucial to our success:

• Many of you participated in our online meetings this winter. For those of you who did not, please be sure to work through Module 1 in its entirety before we begin on May 11.
• Please update/add your project description in this document. I would like to exchange emails with each of you over the next several days, to make sure that you have everything that you need to get started.
• Your computer: you will truly struggle if you are using Windows. Mac OSX or a Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) are ideal. If you have no other options, please see this page (you'll need to install VirtualBox to emulate Ubuntu). 
• Please install all of the software listed on this page before you arrive on May 11th.Forgive me for belaboring this point, but experience dictates that I repeat myself: do not arrive to class without installing all of the software. Start today, and please let me know if you run into trouble so that we can make sure you're ready to go before class starts. In case I forgot to mention it: do not arrive on May 11th without installing all of the software.

This course centers around text collections, including both text content and metadata. If you have a collection of texts that you have in mind for your project, that's great; I would ask that you have your corpus ready to go ahead of time (in Zotero, normalized metadata, plain text already extracted). I'm very happy to help with this, so please reach out ASAP. If you don't already have a corpus, let me know and I'll bring along some materials that you can use.

Please forgive the lengthy email! Let me know if you have any questions, concerns, requests, etc.