The Idea
GIRES, the Global Institute for Research, Education and Scholarship and the Oral History & Digital Humanities Academy (ODA), committed to support the endeavors of global scholarly community, offer a new workshop for those who wish to enter and explore the fascinating world of Digital Humanities (DH) under the guidance of expert Dr. Rada Varga.
The Aim
This workshop series addresses humanists and social sciences students or researchers interested in acquiring or deepening knowledge on Social Network Analyses.
The identification of liaisons, groups and networks formed of historical actors has been a constant historiographic preoccupation. Nonetheless, some of the obscured ties can nowadays be revealed in a more ostensible manner by employing technological and sociological tools and methodologies. Social Network Analysis allows one to build networks, highlight ties, reveal the power of weak ties, identify clusters and much more.
At the end of the course graduates will be able to structure and overview a dataset according to social network analysis rules, to visualise it in an optimal manner and to draw valid scientific conclusions.
The Structure
The workshops will be taught both asynchronously and synchronously, with three envisioned steps:
- registered lectures and tutorials for each topic; their approximate duration will be one hour, generally fragmented in 2–3 parts
- exercises based on these tutorials, which are to be allocated an approximate 1–2 hours duration per week
- on-line meeting, where we will discuss the exercises and any other connected problems the attendees might raise; their duration will be 1-2 hours
The sessions will imply individual exercises, team exercises, as well as discussions and individual and group feedback. Given the nature of the course, we will unavoidably use Open Educational Resources (OER) and a blended learning system.
Being an advanced workshop, participants will be encouraged to use their own datasets, so that the results are both familiar and relevant. Regarding the employed software, we will use open access programs and platforms.