Yael Netzer: Digital Archives: Reading and Manipulating Large-Scale Catalogues, Curating and Creating Small-Scale Archives
Dr. Yael Netzer, Hebrew University (Chief Director of Research and Teaching Fellow, Center for Digital Humanities, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Consultant and Teaching Fellow, Digital Humanities, Haifa University). Her research areas include Digital and Personal Archives, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, Hebrew. Research Projects: Personal archives as autobiography; Digitization of catalogues; DraCor in Hebrew. Dr. Yael Netzer holds a PhD in Computer Science, MA studies in Hebrew Literature at Ben Gurion University. She teaches Digital Humanities in Israeli Universities and the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Techology”. She develops and implements methods for digital personal archives, knowledge representation for archives, libraries and for the humanities.
Short Description of Workshop
The purpose of this two-weeks workshop is to develop practical and critical skills toward representation of knowledge in digital archives and to build a small-scaled digital archive.
In the first week, we learn how to work with catalogues, performing ‘distant reading’ of our data working with OpenRefine. Using OpenRefine, students will gain critical insights on how to read, inspect the content and structure, clean and enrich digital catalogues and to use regular expressions. We will learn different ways of organizing the archive and enriching the data using authority files and linked open data, such as data from library of congress, VIAF and more.
In the second week, building on the practical experience and critical insights acquired in the first week, students will design and implement a digital archive for their collection of documents and will design its metadata. We will work with Omeka-S and Tropy and get into deeper details, experimenting with various forms of data representation.
The content of the workshop is both theoretical (concepts of archives, authority files, ontologies) as well as practical (hands-on work with specific tools).