Workshops
Expand your research toolkit throughout the academic year! Taught by talented scholars, our workshops provide hands-on training and discussion for interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the community. All workshops are free and take place on Friday afternoons.
Fall 2019
Digital Textuality
Caroline McCraw | Friday, October 18th, 12:00 - 1:30 PM | CTSDH, Loyola Hall 318
What are the possibilities of a digital text? What are its limitations? In an attempt to open ourselves up to the poetic potential of text in a digital space, this event is one part crash survey of the history and context of electronic literature, one part screening/viewing of contemporary digital text work, and one part creative workshop in which participants will utilize the provided templates to experiment with creating their own digital-born text pieces.
Podcasting: Why, How and You
Jonathan B. Singer | Friday, October 11th, 11:30 - 12:30 | School of Communications, Water Tower Campus
Podcasting has been around since 2004, but entered a golden age with the Serial Podcast. Millions of people are podcasting and advertisers are pouring millions of dollars into them. So why would an academic want to podcast when you could write a book, a chapter, an article, or just have coffee with your colleague? Is it really as easy as everyone says it is to create a podcast? If so, why am I not doing it already? Questions to these answers and more from Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D., LCSW, associate professor of social work and founder and host of the award winning Social Work Podcast.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Best Practices for Research and Pedagogy
Sarah Ketchley | Monday, Sept. 30th | 3:00 PM-5:00 PM | Information Commons 120
The University Libraries invites you to attend a hands-on workshop introducing the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a new library resource that enables students and researchers to do text mining and analysis on materials from Gale Primary Sources, which includes digitized texts from the 16th century through the 20th century. This workshop will give attendees a chance to familiarize themselves with the Digital Scholar Lab, and ask questions about the interface and workflow. It is also an excellent opportunity for discussions related to text mining, particularly related to how to obtain texts to work with, and questions of representativeness – what makes a good textual corpus? The workshop will include a discussion of pedagogy and ideas for upcoming classes, and current research use cases for the Lab.
This workshop will be appropriate for researchers from a range of disciplines, and requires no prior experience with digital research methods. Prior to the session, you’re welcome to access the Gale Digital Scholar Lab via the library website to log-in and explore the resource. We’ll also use this session to gauge interest in a faculty learning community for digital research and pedagogy.
Spring 2019
Workshop: Introduction to Foundation Relationships...Beyond Grantwriting
Stephanie Kimmel, Olena Marshall, and Denise Du Vernay | Friday, January 18, 12:30-2 PM | CTSDH
Loyola University Chicago’s Corporate and Foundation Relations team strengthens relationships between the university and private philanthropic organizations. In this workshop for Loyola faculty, learn more about how CFR can help faculty identify key fundraising prospects, provide assistance with outreach to targeted foundations and corporations, offer support on proposals (editing, organizational content, and more).
Data Analysis Workshop: Interpretive Techniques for Social Media
Jenna Drenten | Friday, January 25 | CTSDH
Modern life is deeply intertwined with social media—people share life stories on YouTube, offer political opinions on Twitter, and post hashtagged selfies on Instagram. As online and offline spaces increasingly converge, social media platforms offer opportunities to better understand society. Widely available tools for capturing large-scale quantitative datasets allow researchers to count and measure social media content.
While such metrics are important, they do not necessarily account for lived experiences or symbolic meaning within the data. Studying social media through interpretive methods is critical to understanding culture, beyond automated analytics. For instance, on image-based sites like Instagram, what users say in their captions complement what they show in their photos. Therefore, text analyses alone may not fully capture the meaning embedded within social media images.
The aim of this workshop is to equip attendees with skills to collect, analyze, and interpret qualitative data from popular social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Drawing on interpretive methods, we will address the following:
* Benefits and opportunities for engaging in qualitative social media analyses for humanistic inquiry
* Methods for capturing social media data, including hashtag tracking and manual approaches for troubleshooting API roadblocks
* Approaches for examining image-based social media data, including narrative analysis, autodriving, and visual content analysis
* Critical questions around ethics and privacy in social media research
Jenna Drenten (PhD, University of Georgia) is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. Jenna's research centers on understanding technology-mediated consumer culture. Jenna’s research has appeared in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Business Research, and Consumption Markets and Culture, among others.
Archiving in the Modern World: Digitizing the Mundelein Photo Collection
Tina Figueroa and Hannah Overstreet | Friday, February 8, 1:30-3 pm | CTSDH
What considerations are important to cover before digitizing history? Learn about the process that the Women and Leadership Archives uses to preserve Mundelein's history.
Workshop: Teaching the Unessay in the Humanities Classroom
June Coyne & Liz Hopwood | Friday, February 15, 1:30 - 3 PM | CTSDH
While many humanities courses default to the scholarly essay for major assignments each semester, in many contexts this format may not be particularly well suited to fulfilling the goals of the course. In this workshop we’ll discuss the alternative to the traditional scholarly essay, the Unessay, which challenges students to use their own unique skills and talents to choose a topic, present it any way they please, and be evaluated on how compelling and effective they are. The Unessay, created by Daniel Paul O’Donnell, has been used effectively across many history, literature, and writing classrooms, by a variety of instructors and students. In this workshop, Elizabeth Hopwood and June Coyne will discuss how they implement and assess these projects, and will guide a discussion on how the assignment may be adopted and adapted in other classrooms.
Workshop: Gale-Cengage Digital Scholar Lab
Mark Cormier | Tuesday, February 19, 11:00 AM-12:45 PM | Information Commons 120
The University Libraries is initiating a trial of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a platform that enables students and researchers to do text mining and analysis on materials from Gale Primary Sources, which includes digitized texts from the 16th century through the 20th century. This workshop will include an interactive introduction to using the lab and a discussion of best practices. Attendees will learn how to perform searches, manage data sets, apply analysis tools, and review results. This workshop will be appropriate for researchers from a range of disciplines, and requires no prior experience with digital research methods.
Prior to the session we ask that session participants access the Loyola University Gale Digital Scholar Lab link to ensure a seamless start!
Lunch will be provided by Gale-Cengage.
11:00 – 11:45 AM
- Interactive walk-through of the Digital Scholar Lab
11:45 – 12:15 PM
- Best Practices Discussion with Digital Humanities Specialist Sarah Ketchley Ph.D
12:15– 12:45 PM
- Lunch with interactive Q&A (12:15 – 12:45 PM)
Fair Use
Margaret Heller and Niamh McGuigan | Wednesday, February 27, 12:30-2 pm | CTSDH
Get ready for Fair Use Week (February 25-March 1, 2018) with a guided discussion with Niamh McGuigan and Margaret Heller from the University Libraries about what fair use really means and tips for telling if your intended use is allowed. Get some ideas about how to use fair use in teaching and research, and share your own experiences with your colleagues. We will focus on digital projects, but all types of research are welcome.
MUDDLE with Me: Using a Digital-Periodical Framework to Facilitate Meaningful Connections
Taylor Brown | Friday, March 29, 1:30-3 pm | CTSDH
How are our digital environments affecting the connections we make with others? Is social media the detriment of modern society? The MUDDLE_mag Project brings purpose to the quasi-social media environment, GitHub, to facilitate better, more meaningful conversations about art and the creative process using a digital-periodical framework. Join us as we tour the backyard and vote on submissions for the May 2019 issue!
Fall 2018
What is a Server and How Do I Set One Up?
Tyler Monaghan | Friday, November 30, 2:30 - 4:00 pm | CTSDH, Room 318
For scholars in the humanities, servers can feel like inaccessible black boxes. This workshop for beginners will demystify servers and walk participants through the process of turning their own computer into a mini-server that can be used for a variety of big data humanities computing tasks.
No experience is required, but participants should feel comfortable installing software on their computer. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required to attend.
Turnaround - Experiencing a Story in 360 Virtual Reality
Jamason Chen | Friday, November 16, 1:30 - 3:00 pm | School of Commmunication Room 100, Water Tower Campus
When a camera covers all angles in a shot, how may a story be scripted in narrative? When nothing can be hidden around the camera, how may technical setup enhance storytelling? 360 VR visual production and presentation are facing challenges both in the methodology of telling a story and technology of implementing storytelling. This presentation will be trying to explore some new ideas and methods of storytelling in a virtual reality environment. Water Tower Campus.
Digital Video
Nick Liberatore | Friday, October 26,2018 | Digital Media Services, Information Commons
Nick Liberatore, Manager of Digital Media Services, will lead a digital video workshop on Friday October 26th. This presentation will include an overview of all that Digital Media Services has to offer, equipment loan program recommendations with video in mind, and an introduction to video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. This presentation will also offer tips and best practices throughout regarding planning, capturing, and organizing your video footage. No prior video editing experience required!
Introduction to HTML and CSS
Abdur Khan | Friday, September 21, 2018 | CTSDH, Room 318
Curious about why a webpage displays the way it does? Heard the terms HTML and CSS but not sure what they mean or how they work? Want to learn more about the basic building blocks of web design?
Join us Friday, September 21st in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities to learn the basics of HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) from Abdur Khan, second-year Digital Humanities MA student and CTSDH Fellow.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required for participation.
Introduction to TEI
Rebecca Parker | Friday, September 7, 2018 | CTSDH, Room 318
Are you a historian interested in digitizing archives? A librarian who wants to learn how humanists are preserving texts in XML? A coder who wants to learn what literary studies has to do with XML? Come learn the basics of XML and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, http://www.tei-c.org/) and how you could use it in your archival or digitization project. This workshop by Rebecca Parker, second-year Digital Humanities MA student and CTSDH Fellow, will introduce the basics of XML encoding, the how-tos when it comes to working with XML, and the must-knows of starting a TEI Digital Humanities project.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required for participation. Those that wish to encode alongside Rebecca should come to the workshop with a text or XML editor downloaded on their computers, such as oXygen - a sophisticated and powerful XML editor available with a free 30-day license (https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/download_oxygenxml_editor.html).
Podcasting: Why, How, and You
Jonathan B. Singer | Friday, September 14 | LUMA, Simpson Room
Podcasting has been around since 2004 but entered a golden age with the Serial Podcast. Millions of people are podcasting and advertisers are pouring millions of dollars into them. So why would an academic want to podcast when you could write a book, a chapter, an article, or just have coffee with your colleague? Is it really as easy as everyone says it is to create a podcast? If so, why am I not doing it already? Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D., LCSW, associate professor of social work and founder and host of the award-winning Social Work Podcast will answer these questions and more.