Archives as Data: An Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

FAIN: HT-288201-22

Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York (New York, NY 10032-3725)
Matthew Connelly (Project Director: March 2022 to present)
Courtney Chartier (Co Project Director: March 2022 to present)

A series of workshops for historians and archivists on approaches to working with large-scale collections of digitized and born-digital historical records.

Columbia’s History Lab has developed new open-source tools and workflows to meet the challenge of archiving, aggregating, and exploring large collections of digitized and born digital records. We propose to leverage our experience to offer training to archivists and historians, encourage dialogue between them, identify common concerns, and work toward innovative solutions in processing and making text data accessible for digital humanities research. The Institute would consist of in-person summer workshops, featuring morning classes with hands-on training, with about twenty people in each cohort. During lunches all participants would come together while experts Zoom in to present a range of perspectives on the digital turn. Conversations would continue with discussion seminars based on shared readings. The Institute would conclude with a two-day in-person conference in January 2025, featuring panel discussions and keynote talks, to showcase innovative projects by workshop participants.