The Plant

Working with spatial data – a beginners’ workshop
2023-04-26 10:30 - 12:30 (Europe/Amsterdam)
Instructor: Monika Barget, Assistant Professor in HistoryDate: 26 April 2023Time: 10.30-12.30Venue: The Plant, FASoS building 76, ground floor

In this joint AMC/The Plant workshop for beginners, participants will explore the possibilities and challenges of working with spatial data in the humanities and social sciences. Spatial analysis is an important research objective in disciplines from history to politics and literary studies. However, collecting and analysing spatial data can be difficult and time-consuming as most spatial information comes in unstructured text from which place names must be extracted. To plot place names on maps, they also need to be geocoded, for which different tools are available, but not all are free or easy to use. This beginners’ workshop will introduce the potential of spatial data and will highlight some strategies to automatically collect them from existing databases. It will also demonstrate how Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can be used to read place names from maps or collect them in a spreadsheet. In the hands-on part of the workshop, participants will have the chance to geocode sample data using Python scripts and different geocoding APIs. You are welcome to bring your data in table format (CSV or EXCEL) or use sample data provided by the instructor.

Requirements: You do not need any previous knowledge of spatial data or GIS to participate. We ask you to bring your own laptops. Code and sample data will be shared in the following Github Tutorial prior to the workshop: https://monikabarget.github.io/GeoHumTutorials/ Further instructions which data to download will sent to the participants in due time. For running the Python code, we will use Google Colab, so please sign in on https://colab.research.google.com/ with an existing Google account or create a new account specifically for this purpose. You will also need Google Drive (linked with the same account) to read and write data. Advantages and risks of working with proprietary software will be explained in the detailed instructions.

CLARIAH Media Suite
2023-03-28 12:00 - 16:00 | The Plant
The Plant in collaboration with Clariah, the national infrastructure for the digital arts and humanities, is organising a half-day workshop on the Media Suite, on of the Clariah research environments for audiovisual content. The workshop will be delivered by Megan Phipps and Christian Olesen.
The Media Suite is one of the research environments developed within the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure. As an innovative digital research environment, the Media Suite is a networked, university-level access point to a large variety of digital collections – comprising key broadcast, film, paper and oral history collections from NISV, Eye Filmmuseum and DANS. Moreover the environment offers new ways of browsing, searching and analyzing the collections made available with digital tools developed specifically for the environment. The environment’s tools facilitate among other approaches exploratory research and browsing, close reading and qualitative analysis based on video annotation tools as well as data-driven modes of distant reading and visualization of collection data. Beyond digitized collection items – amounting to a couple of million of audiovisual items – the environment is also the unique access point to automatic data enrichments, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) data of broadcast collections and optical character recognition (OCR) of historical paper collections. Working in the Media Suite you will learn to work with the environment’s tools in order to create, annotate and analyze your own corpus.
Registration can be done on The Plant’s UMployee group page: https://umployee.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/group-menu/the-plant/events

Open Consultation
2022-12-06 15:30 - 17:00 | The Plant
