EMPOWER: Digital Humanities Programme

Escalator has created an 8-step programme for to learn new digital technologies and skills that enhance research.

The programme is specifically targeted at womxn in humanities and social sciences in South Africa who want to learn and enhance their digital and computational research skills. Folks from any career stage are welcome to join. This includes researchers, postgraduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, librarians, IT staff, research support positions, and related areas. The programme caters for any experience level: from complete novices to those with advanced skills.

Escalator is an exciting addition to the South Africa Digital Humanities (DH) landscape. It launched last year, and has been working closely with members of the community to understand the needs for upskilling and re-skilling and learning new tools/technologies and methodologies to enhance research in an increasingly digital world. They are excited to announce the launch of this programme, based on intentional learning principles, through which they will support learning and growth.

More information is available: https://bit.ly/empower-2022.
The first event takes place on 19 May 2022 from 11:30 – 13:00.
Register at https://bit.ly/empower-2022.
The session will be recorded and shared afterwards.

For the full programme, see the Eventbrite page: https://bit.ly/empower-2022
To stay informed of upcoming events through the EMPOWER track, JOIN THE MAILING LIST.

Seminar Series in Digital and Public Humanities

The Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDHP) hosts a series of seminars which are opportunities to present research projects related to Digital and Public Humanities.

The series includes a fascinating selection of research topics. Previous seminars include We Need a Database! Digitization Practices in Contemporary Art Ventures and Emergent Trends and Principles of Cyberarchaeology, and upcoming seminars include Computational Methods for Tracing Word Meaning Across Time. The next seminar will be Advanced Imaging to Support the Digital Humanities on 3 March.

Register at https://www.unive.it/data/agenda/2/56627. All previous seminar recordings are available at https://vedph.github.io/seminarseries/ and published on VeDHP’s YouTube channel.

Introducing ESCALATOR

An exciting addition to the South Africa Digital Humanities (DH) landscape, ESCALATOR has recently launched, and aims to establish a local community of practice within DH. SADiLaR (the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources) is behind the project which will focus on the adoption of digital research methodologies and practices to the Social Sciences and Humanities.

“Humanities and Social Sciences research and education are in dire need of strong coordinated interventions to enable the pervasive adoption of digital research methodologies and practices. Over the past few years several capacity development initiatives were implemented within various institutions and communities, but South Africa still lacks a national, integrated active community of practice in this space”.

SADiLaR

Working groups like Python study group and the R study group provide valuable long-term learning opportunities and supportive communities. Additionally, the ESCALATOR Digital Champions Initiative is a multi-track mentorship and networking programme that complements other activities, and is open to researchers, professional staff, and students from the 26 public universities and research councils in South Africa.

Find out more about the project.