Archives as Data II

An in-person institute to provide training to archivists and historians in analyzing digitized and born-digital records using open-source tools and methods developed at Columbia University's History Lab.

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 present--either in person or via Zoom -- a range of perspectives on the digital turn. Conversations would continue with discussion seminars based on shared readings followed by afternoon lab sessions.