The Digital Humanities Travelling Roadshow aims to demonstrate state of the art computational methods for textual studies and to offer hands-on development for personal field expertise.

The Making Books Research Centre will be hosted the Digital Humanities Travelling Roadshow on 13 April 2018. This is an AHRC-funded collaboration between Professor Gabriel Egan (Director of the Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University) and the universities of Oxford, Leeds, Strathclyde, Liverpool John Moores, and Bath Spa. Professor Egan has a long-standing expertise in digital humanities and computer-aided textual analysis. 

As part of this project, in November 2017, link tutors from each institution attended a week-long series of workshops on the quantitative analysis of texts, including introductory training in statistics, text mining, and XML encoding and querying.

The travelling roadshow itself will visit each institution and will comprise of two parts.

  • The first part will take the form of free demonstrations and hackathon-like workshops to introduce and train attendees in the techniques of computer-assisted analysis of large amounts textual material.
  • The second part will be a public performance by entitled ‘Yes, No, Maybe’ - a creative research performance project that examines the relationship between computer language the language of human dialogue.

It is open to academics, students, and researchers and its aims are twofold: first, to introduce and inform those unfamiliar to this field what is possible by using computers for the analysis of texts and, second, to give practical hands-on training in the use of computers for such analysis.

No programming skills are required and you can bring your own laptops if you wish. The event is for the curious and for those who want to try it out for themselves.

This event is supported by the Centre For Culture and Creative Industries.