Digital Humanities Lab

Digital Humanities Lab benefits faculty, student projects

Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Mallet are some of the new names introduced recently at the University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Lab. The lab, now offered through the Student Technology Assistance Center (STAC) in 122 Jerome Library, has expanded its offerings to include a wide variety of technology tools for faculty and students working on digital humanities projects at BGSU.

“The goal of the Digital Humanities Lab is to encourage and support innovative, interdisciplinary research projects that make creative use of technology,” said Colleen Boff, associate dean for University Libraries. “We focus on supporting projects that are enhanced by visualization tools, multimedia applications, and manipulating data acquired through application programming interfaces (API).”

Among the new offerings are:

• Programming software: Python, R and R-Studio, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Visual Studio
• Topic modeling software: Mallet
• Data visualization program: Gephi
• Transcription software: Express Scribe
• Annotation: ELAN
• Multimedia Software: Audacity, Garage Band and iMovie

This technology will help faculty and students write code to refine and analyze digitized literature, historical sources or social media from the Web; annotate film clips; publish digital materials; develop applications to make humanities resources available to the public, and transcribe interviews.

Dr. Andrew Schocket, director of the American culture studies program, explained, “A researcher could write a Ruby script that aggregates millions of tweets with a common hashtag and graph them visually on an interactive Google map.

“A student could use ELAN to annotate the occurrence and duration of events in a group of videos, or a researcher could use Express Scribe to transcribe vintage audio recordings to text and then use Python to parse and analyze the transcription.”

The Digital Humanities Lab is accessible for drop-in, independent use during regular STAC hours, which are available at regular STAC hours. If assistance is needed, make an appointment by contacting STAC at 419-372-9722 or stac@lists.bgsu.edu.