University of Helsinki
The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon or DHH is celebrating its fifth year. The week and a half long hackathon brings together researchers and students from computer science, data science, the humanities and social science to work on an interdisciplinary research project. This year DHH welcomed international participants to take part in the event!
In the series of blog posts coming this week from our Genre and Style in Early Modern Publications group, we will recap our experience in the hackathon (including all triumphs and tribulations) with short introductions of ourselves, so stay tuned!
The event started on Wednesday 15th of May with general introductions and division into groups. The day begun with brainstorming and formulating a research question and getting to know each other on the side. Today, on the second day of the hackathon, we continued our brainstorming actions while getting familiar with our eighteenth century publications data. At this point we don’t have a specific research question to present to you yet, but we have been spitballing with ideas about genres and gender, e.g. to compare female and male authors’ style of writing and possibly creating some kind of classifier that predicts the gender of the author of the publication.
We continued with extracting the data from ECCO database through the Octavo API and faced some hiccups with the server crashing a few times but that certainly did not discourage us and we continue to work hard on the this. Next, we are planning on creating some simple statistics of the data in order to explore it more efficiently.
At the end of the day we were treated with an interesting lecture about 4D Modeling and SBIM by Anthony Caldwell from HumTech UCLA.
This is our first hackathon and we are looking forward to the coming days with excitement!
This blog post was written by Selina Lehtoranta, a first year Data Science master’s student from University of Helsinki, Faculty of Science and Veera Oksala, a first year student in the Master’s Programme in English Studies, Faculty of Arts in the University of Helsinki.