This workshop will explore the archival and editorial decisions that go into structuring data for humanities research. We'll talk about how humanities scholars take texts, images, objects, and records and make them usable for different kinds of computer-assisted exploration, including encoding, information retrieval, cross-referencing, data visualization, or exploratory analysis (both quantitative and qualitative). We'll discuss the differences between what makes a text or image human-readable vs. machine-actionable. And we'll learn some practical methods for structuring this kind of data, including the concept of "tidy" data and when (and why) people would apply it.

Along the way, we'll explore hands-on activities and case studies drawing on different humanities disciplines including encoding archival and museum metadata, comparing different versions of texts, examining patterns in historical description and cross-referencing patterns in collections of historical materials.

This is the third in the Humanities Data Workshop Series, and all are welcome to register, whether or not they attended the first or plan to attend the rest of the series.