DVS Workshop: Structuring Humanities Data

Have you ever wondered what medieval scribes, ancient artifacts, historical paintings and Victorian fiction have to do with data? Have you ever thought about how social media data can be used to document and analyze groups, events and moments in history? Digital tools can open up new and exciting possibilities for Humanistic inquiry, as long as you see people, places, dates and relationships as data and know how to "speak" in the way a computers understand. Through a series of case studies, the Structuring Humanities Data workshop will help Humanists see the data in their subjects and provide guidelines for how to structure and gather data in simple spreadsheets, including ways to deal with tricky but common situations like uncertainty in dates. The workshop will also show examples where computers were used to help gather data automatically, and look under the hood at some data driving visualizations on the web.