Dear all,

Olle Sköld here, director of studies of the Master’s Programme in Digital Humanities. The deadline for international students to apply to the programme is drawing closer. If you want to start your studies in September 2024 you will have to submit an application complete with the requested documents at 15 January at the latest. Students applying in the Swedish admission round have a bit more leeway, and will have to submit their application on or before 15 April 2024.

The upcoming admissions round is the fifth one since the programme launched in 2019. I’m very happy to note that the number of international and national students applying to the programme has increased steadily from year to year. Many things have changed in the programme since it first started. Content-wise, the emphasis on computational methods have become even more pronounced, and in terms of faculty, the team of senior lecturers involved in the programme is presently larger than ever and represents a great variety of technical, pedagogical, and research expertise that benefit our students in many ways.

I have been heading the programme’s admissions committee for five years now and I am always exciting to see the variety of academic skills and competencies in the applicant group. For those of you that are interested in applying to the programme, here are my best tips of how to write a successful application:

(1) Read the instructions in the application guide and the application summary sheet thoroughly and make sure that you follow them when filling out your application.

(2) If you feel you want to know more about the programme, check out the programme page on Uppsala University’s website and the previous posts on this blog.

(3) Keep in mind what the role of the application summary sheet is when filling it in: it is your best way to show us that you fit the programme and that the programme fits you. Be explicit about what you can offer to the student group and what you think the programme can offer you in terms of the skills, knowledge, and insights you want to gain from your studies.

(4) Submit the application and all required documents on time. Late applications are processed separately from those that have been submitted before the application deadline.

I’m looking forward to seeing your applications!

All best,
Olle

The Digital Humanities Uppsala Blog — a blog hosted by Uppsala University’s Centre for Digital Humanities (CDHU) — has just published a post written by Nikolaos Gkizis Chatziantoniou, a second-year student at the Master’s Programme in Digital Humanities. Nikolaos tells about how he worked with the digitization of books as a part of his internship at CDHU and shares his thoughts about what the roles of a digital humanist in the heritage sector might be and outlines some of key contributions that a digital humanist can make in this setting.

Nikolaos’ internship was organized via the DH programme’s secondment course, and is one of many examples of exciting workplace learning experiences that this course makes possible. The full post can be accessed here: https://digitalhumanities.blogg.uu.se/2023/03/17/cdhu-internships-fall-2022-nikolaos-gkizis-chatziantoniou-for-swemper-and-quantifying-culture

The 20th of February the department and the DH-program will be reinforced with at new Associate senior lecturer/Assistant Professor, Amanda Wasielewski.

Amanda Wasielewski’s writing and research investigates the use of digital technology in relation to art/visual culture and spatial practice. Her recent focus has been on the use of artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis and creation of art and other visual media.

Wasielewski has a background as a practicing artist, which has informed much of her research. She has exhibited her videos and installations internationally and was a resident artist at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. She holds an MA in Fine Art (Media) from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and received her MPhil and PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Wasielewski recently completed a postdoctoral position in Art History at Stockholm University. As a postdoc in the Metadata Culture group working within the project “Sharing the Visual Heritage” (funded by the Swedish Research Council), she focused on the impact of digital tools in art historical scholarship and collections.

Wasielewski is the author of three books: Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero, 2018), From City Space to Cyberspace: Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), and Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to this, her recently published articles concern not only artificial intelligence but also the historiography of digital humanities/digital art history and the history, theory, and practice of creating virtual environments.

Wasielewski has also held a number of teaching positions. Over the last two years, she taught visual studies, digital humanities, and Swedish art history courses at Stockholm University. She was a docent in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Media & Information), where her courses focused on social media studies and the impact of the gig economy. She was also an adjunct professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, where she taught modern architectural history, and at Lehman College in New York, where she taught the history of modern art in Europe and North America.

Amanda’s teaching and research expertise will principally be put to use in the DH programme courses focused on visuality, visual analysis, heritage data and heritage institutions and she will benefit these courses significantly. We are looking forward to get to know Amanda and hope she will thrive and enjoy working at the Department of ALM!

Monday next week is the final day to apply to the program for those of you from outside of Sweden! Monday 16th is the last day to apply and the last day to rank your courses if you want to study on the masters level in Sweden.

So what are you waiting for?

Apply to the Master program in Digital Humanities at Uppsala University today through this link!

This week marks the start of the third course for the first-year students of Master’s Programme in Digital Humanities. The course is titled ‘Digital Cultural Heritage’ and here is what teacher Nadzeya Charapan has to say about the course:

This introductory course provides you with a conceptual understanding of digital cultural heritage and fosters critical debates about the role of digitalisation in the production, preservation, and commodification of cultural recourses.

During the course, you will learn about digital approaches to cultural heritage; contemporary legal, social and ethical issues of digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. 

A series of sessions with practitioners as well as a study visit to the digitalization laboratory at Uppsala University Library will promote the intake into contemporary professional practices, as well as existing challenges; and frame a more nuanced perception of digital cultural heritage in making.

The course is thematically connected to the forthcoming course “Digital Implementations in Heritage” and the focus is placed on: 

• philosophical and epistemological foundations of cultural heritage and applications in the context of digital humanities;
• ethical, legal, and social issues of production and dissemination of digital cultural heritage;
• open access and its implications for cultural heritage. 

Following Digital Cultural Heritage is the course ‘Digital Implementations in Heritage’ where methods and tools that can be used to work with and process heritage materials are taught and discussed. Examples of such tools and methods are GIS, AI, text recognition, and OCR techniques.

Information management and information structures, taught week 35-39, autumn 2022

What is this course about? 

The course Information management and information structures introduces multiple theoretical and practical perspectives on knowledge/information/data management. Specifically,  it covers data, information, and knowledge management from information studies’ and digital humanities’ perspectives and explores practical implementations at organizational, cultural, and individual levels. It is offered at the Master’s Programmes in Digital Humanities and Library and Information Science simultaneously and therefore has an intrinsically collaborative nature.

What are two good examples of tasks/assignments/workshops that the students will engage in during the course?

Final group project assignment invites students to practice methods for analyzing and developing knowledge/information/data management – crucial skills for library, information and digital humanities professionals working for example with resource or content management or data curation. The assignment is to analyze a knowledge/information/data management case, paying particular attention to how knowledge/information/data for organizational or scholarly purposes can be managed both by technology and systems and by cultures and behaviors.

What relevance(s) does the course have for a DH student?

As it was mentioned by one of the students in the course’s evaluation survey “Management in organizations was especially helpful [takeaway] and would be a great asset when you start working”. 

Digital Libraries, taught week 40-44, autumn 2022

What is the course about?

In the course Digital Libraries, the students acquire relevant knowledge about methods and theories for approaching issues of information access, digitization, metadata, organization, and user behaviour. The students will also learn to critically examine issues relating libraries and knowledge organizations.

What are two good examples of tasks/assignments/workshops that the students will engage in during the course?

The students are asked to 1) examine and discuss texts relating to important and current research problems within a library information context, e.g., gender and sustainability issues. They are also asked to 2) prepare a presentation on the topic of digitization and approach this topic from a critical perspective.   

What relevance(s) does the course have for a DH student?

The course prepares the students for further studies of information related topics on a PhD level. By providing them with knowledge about the library as a social institution, it also gives the student insight into a job context in which DH skills are very much sought-after.

Foundations of Library and Information Studies, taught week 50-02, autumn 2022

What is the course about?

The course Foundations of Library and Information Studies introduces library and information studies as a research field situated between humanities and social sciences. The course also provides insight into tone-setting research of library and information studies, and into theoretical and empirical approaches common to the field.

What are two good examples of tasks/assignments/workshops that the students will engage in during the course?

The students are asked to 1) compose a research proposal and 2) to prepare an oral presentation. Both assignments constitute valuable skills that are necessary within the academia.  

What relevance(s) does the course have for a DH student?

The students acquire understanding of important information perspectives and research approaches within both information studies and digital humanities.

Our university library course in the introductory course serires we will help you get started using Zotero.

Course contents:

• Save references to Zotero from journal databases, library catalogues and web pages
• Add references manually for material that cannot be automatically imported
• Attach PDF files
• Organise your Zotero library
• Insert citations and create bibliographies in your document
• Add more reference styles and change format for your references
• Use Zotero in Google Docs (if there is an interest)
• Synchronise your references with Zotero.org
• Share references and collaborate
• Create backups

This course is free of charge and available for students and employees at Uppsala University.

If requested, the course will be given in English.

Before the course starts, please download the Zotero software and a Zotero Connector to your web browser: https://www.zotero.org/download/.

Date:

Friday February 25^th 2022

Time:

10:15 – 11:30

Audience:

  Anställd/forskare/researcher     Doktorand/Ph.D. Student     Student  

Categories:

  Zotero  

Online:

This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.

Registration is required. https://libcal.ub.uu.se/event/3831839

Uppsala University Library offers opportunities for DH scholars to develop deep learning of digital tools for DH resarch. There is a workshop on GIS coming soon.

In this workshop you will learn about using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and geodata in your research. We will look into how you can find and/or create geodata and how you can analyse and visualise this data in QGIS.

In preparation of the workshop, you need to install QGIS on your computer. Software and installation instructions can be found here. QGIS is open source software and is therefore free to download and use. If you already have a data set you want to work with, i.e. a list of place names or a downloaded data set with coordinates, please bring this with you to the workshop.

No previous experience is required.

If requested, the course will be given in English.

Related LibGuide: Databearbetning och -analys

Date: Wednesday 10 November 2021 Time: 10:15 – 11:30 Audience:   Anställd/forskare/researcherDoktorand/Ph.D. StudentStudent   Categories:   Databearbetning och -analys / Data Processing and Analysis   Online: This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.

Please see more information on the university library website.

Preparation instructions for those that are interested in Topic Modelling workshops with KBLab (forwarded message from KBLab research co-ordinator:

Hi,

Welcome to KBLab’s workshop on Topic Modeling!

The workshop will be structured as follows:

·       Tuesday 9^th November, 09.00 – 12.00 and 13.00 – 14.00

·       Wednesday 10^th November, 13.00 – 13.45, for a session to discuss a small interpretative assignment that you’ll be given on Tuesday.

All you need to participate on Tuesday is:

1.       Zoom-link:

Meeting URL:	https://kb-se.zoom.us/j/63318805820
Meeting ID:	633 1880 5820

2.       Follow ”Option 1” under Preparations here:

https://github.com/love-borjeson/tm_ws_cloud

To guarantee we can get started straight away, please check you can reach the project page in RStudio Cloud before the workshop. If you have any problems doing so, just drop us a line (kblabb@kb.se).

The Zoom-link for Wednesday’s discussion session is:

Meeting URL:	https://kb-se.zoom.us/j/69532604963
Meeting ID:	695 3260 4963

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday morning!

Kind regards,

Chris

Chris Haffenden, PhD

Research Co-ordinator, KBLab

National Library of Sweden
PO Box 5039
SE-104 51 Stockholm
Visits: Humlegården, Stockholm
Phone: +46 10 709 31 91

E-mail: chris.haffenden@kb.se
Web: www.kb.se/kblab