DH resources beyond UCLA

Conferences

To learn about conferences and other DH-related events, view or subscribe to the Digital Library Federation community calendar.

DH, sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is the main international conference, but the Association for Computing and the Humanities (the North American DH organization) has also begun holding a bi-annual conference. You might also look at Digital Frontiers, HASTAC, and the Global DH Symposium.

Training events

I have benefited from a number of local meetups and training events, even if they’re not specific to digital humanities. Some organizations to keep your eye on:

CrashSpace is a “hackerspace” in West LA that holds a variety of events (everything from robotics to Dungeons & Dragons), often for free.

If you’re willing and able to travel for training, two DH institutes in North America have excellent reputations:

Both institutes offer scholarships.

Journals

There are two main journals of digital humanities: DHQ and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. However, a number of journals specialize in particular methods, such as Cultural Analytics (text analysis) and [in]Transition (videographic film criticism).

Tutorials

In general, these are my favorite sources of tutorials, although this tends to be very tool-specific:

Getting started with programming

Many DH-related tasks are actually easier if you can do some simple programming. A lot of people favor Python as a first language, and it’s particularly useful for manipulating documents and data. The best resource for starting out with Python (and, increasingly, other languages, too) is probably The Programming Historian, although I also like Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. Ruby is also a popular choice. People seem to like Learn Ruby the Hard Way, although I haven’t used it.

R is designed for statistical analysis and visualization, and there are several good resources for learning it. (I actually think R might be a little easier for beginners than Python, but this is Highly Controversial.)

For data visualization on the web, the JavaScript library D3 is probably your best bet; see this book. If your main objective is to customize WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka sites, you’ll want to learn PHP, which is the language these CMSs are written in. (You’ll also need to know HTML and CSS.) P5, based on the artistic programming language Processing, is a JavaScript library that is pretty easy and fun to learn and lets you make cool, interactive visualizations that can be a little more flexible than D3. This book is the best intro.