Digital Humanities
@ Pratt

Inquiries into culture, meaning, and human value meet emerging technologies and cutting-edge skills at Pratt Institute's School of Information

Category: Skillshare Tutorials

Skillshare is an open-access knowledge resource of instructional posts and tutorials covering tools, skills, and templates for digital humanists.

Editing Book Images with Photoshop

Photoshop skills are an important aspect of every DHer’s toolkit, and are even more crucial for those that rely on in-house photography. Almost all raw image files of artifacts must be edited in some way or another.  This SkillShare shows the novice Photoshop user a few skills to enhance his or her repertoire through editing fairly simple objects — books.

This skillshare is intended for those projects focused on displaying a collection of book images online or through print. It can be especially useful to small archives, museums, libraries, or collectors that are in the process of creating an online repository of their collection. Additionally, the skills learned in this video may also be used to edit and enhance other raw images of items and artifacts aside from books.

Archive-It Overview and Tutoral

This presentation covers the web-archiving application Archive-It. Created in 2006 by the Internet Archive, this subscription services allows institutions to crawl and archive websites, which are hosted on the Internet Archive’s servers. In this podcast, I provide a brief overview of what Archive-It is, what it does, and why it might be a useful application for institutions interested in creating projects in the digital humanities. Drawing from my experience with Archive-It at Columbia University, I walk through the process for selecting and crawling websites, creating records, examining reports, and assessing the quality of crawls.

Screenhero Tutorial

As DHers know, research cannot always happen face-to-face. Working out a research-issue over the phone or Skype can be incredibly frustrating. Enter Screenhero, a relatively intuitive interface that allows researcher’s a solution to distance: the choice to superimpose their own computer screen or the application through which they’re working onto that of their colleague (and vice versa). Imagine the possibilities: help w/ creative coding, graphic design, website development, research, etc.

Download the application for free here: http://screenhero.com

Nevertheless, as you might notice upon visiting the site, the company ‘tutorial’ is really more of an advertisement than a critical demo of the application’s functions. So below I’ve included one of my own. In it, I explain the tool’s usefulness to DH, the application’s embeddable API (an incredible resource), it’s current limitations, and Screenhero’s possible future application.

SCREENHERO from DHSkillshare on Vimeo.

Encoding MP3s Using RazorLame/LAME

Encoding MP3s is essential toward making download-able sound recordings used for research and cultural studies in both scholarly and public humanities. Access to oration of literary works and musical sound recordings are an important factor in digital humanities. RazorLame is a free open source software for encoding MP3s that gives you more control and better options for perfecting sound-quality than…

TimelineJS

TimelineJS is a tool that helps create a timeline with various media content. It can also be described as an aggregator of online materials that pertain to a certain theme with a chronological time set.

TimelineJS can be useful for a number of purposes, especially for a digital humanist. Timeline allows one to create according to their project needs. It also proves a s useful tool for teaching and learning because of the level of interactive material that can be added and the visual aspect of it. Instead of just having a traditional timeline it allows users to get more information and explore that information to a great extent.

The video below shows one how to get started in order to create their own timeline (using a google spreadsheet) and the various media content that can be added.

I have included a screenshot that may help to understand exactly how the cells work:

Screen Shot 2013-04-29 at 4.28.10 PM
Retrieved from: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-timelines-to-create-great-content-and-build-links

Video:

Creating a Verite Timeline with a Google Spreadsheet from DHSkillshare on Vimeo.

Google Refine

Google Refine is a desktop application that allows you to tidy up messy data. Google Refine allows you to set up filters and allows you to view more rows than an ordinary spreadsheet would. Google Refine can help the Digital Humanities when going through large, unorganized data sets.

Basic Gephi Tutorial

Gephi Tutorial from DHSkillshare on Vimeo.

This is a basic Gephi tutorial (apologies for the coughing not being totally edited out yet, having trouble getting the export settings right in my editor for a screen cap video). Here are some notes about data prep for Gephi:

Gephi Tutorial from DHSkillshare on Vimeo.

There are two tables: edge and node. Nodes are each of the points on the network map and the edges are the links between them. You can import one or the other first depending on what data you have, and while you can use the data lab in the same way as a spreadsheet manipulation program I would recommend getting your data in order before importing it to Gephi, because the program can crash often and takes lots of processing power to run so it can be slow.

The nodes table should have all the data about your points that you might want to use in Gephi. Most important is a value called, ID. ID is what the node is to Gephi, i.e. identifies, the nodes as distinct. You can set one of the columns in your spreadsheet as ID when importing the data, but it’s easier to pick a column ahead of time and let Gephi discover it on its own. ID is also important because it must correspond to the values in the edge table in order to create the correct edges. ID can be a number; it can be a name; it can be a place; it can be anything so long the values are repeated across the tables.

The edges table has two columns: source and target. Like an arrow, source is where the edge is coming from and target is where it goes. Both of these columns must be named and the values must correspond to the ID values. If you import the edge table first it will create a nodes table using the values in the two columns and you can click the “create missing nodes” box to tell it do so.