11 Mar 2024
13:00  - 16:00

Hybrid: Zoom, Room TBA

Organizer:
Basel Doctoral Program in Ancient Civilizations (DBAW), Organizers: Victoria G. D. Landau MA & Sarah Siegenthaler MA

Events, Workshop

Workshop: "Exploring Digital Tools and Platforms for Individual Research of History and Antiquity". Part I: Doing/ During research

For PhD Candidates and MA Students, organized by the Department of Ancient Civilizations

Plakat Workshop

Digital history, computational archaeology, digital heritage — the digitization of humanities research processes has arrived at the doorstep of disciplines dealing with the past, both recent and long gone. And though its approach has been gradual, many institutions have only recently realized how little equipped they remain to address it. With ancient civilizations and historical departments often lacking funds for even their regular curriculum, DH-oriented courses for their undergraduate and graduate students, or even more practical tutorials for their postgraduate researchers, remain scant.

While this has caused institutions to stay rather stagnant, scholars themselves have stepped up and adapted to an ever-changing research landscape and job market. This has resulted in self-trained “amateur” users, and trained scholars often feeling like non-experts in tools they regularly and competently use.

This workshop is conceptualized as an informal scientific exchange on the digital helpers and infrastructures we use both every day and for specific needs, where no tool is too rudimentary to work with as long as it gets the job done – everyone is aware of the great potential of easy-to-use collaboration platforms like the online “Google Suite” (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and more), but also the degree of competency one can achieve in tools like QGIS or Obsidian.

Seeing this as a broad exhibition of available tools, we will span open-source tools and platforms, data management structures, universal implementations (e.g. IIIF) all the way to (geographic) mapping and visualization of research results, connections and networks. The workshop is structured into the three sessions “Doing/During research”, “Structuring Research”, and “Presenting research”, but of course these bleed into one another depending on the tool, a point which we will address and discuss during the workshop.

The participants will be contributing as much insight to the workshop as the organizers, who aim to provide a receptacle for exchange and community among researchers facing many of the same issues across disciplines and who have developed their own unique solutions using digital tools. The workshop is therefore not just intended for historians, archaeologists, philologists and related fields, but the case studies we will look at will derive from and focus on ancient civilizations and historical source material. Participants from all backgrounds and prior experience are welcome to join.

Hybrid participation: In-person and via Zoom

For registration and further information: https://ssiegenthaler.notion.site/Workshop-Exploring-Digital-Tools-and-Platforms-for-Individual-Research-of-History-and-Antiquity-1d4d1bc4a54d480f9b58c0e7437b0482


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