[{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/announcement/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Announcement"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"DHTech"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"On April 30, 2026 at 10am ET/4pm CET (find your local time). Register here.\nAt our last meetup in February we had a lively discussion about generative and agentic AI and the impact of these shifts in DH software development, with some attendees making the case for agentic AI as a “sea change” allowing DHers to focus more fully on the research, and others raising caution about the ethical and environmental risks.\nAs a follow up, our next meetup on April 30 at 10am ET/4pm CET will focus on sharing practical demonstrations of specific practitioners showing us how they use AI for their humanities research and software development work.\n","date":"2026-03-31T11:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2026/03/31/dhtech-april-meetup-2026/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech April Meetup"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/event/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Event"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/meetup/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Meetup"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/news/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"News"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Tags"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/whatshappening/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"WhatsHappening"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"As we are heading out of March and into April, we want to share the latest updates from the DHTech community with you. And because it’s almost Easter (for those of you that celebrate it), here is an Easter Egg just for you!\nNew DHTech Meetup Recently, the Code Review Working Group gave a workshop that went over the basics of Git and GitHub. The success of the workshop convinced us to pilote a new type of meetup. In these meetups, we will provide 1-hour tutorials on topics of interest. To plan these meetups, however, we need your input! What would you like to learn about? What would you find useful and interesting? Please let us know by filling out this Google form or get in touch with us via email or on Slack.\nDHTech April Meetup - AI Workflow Demonstrations At our last meetup in February we had a lively discussion about generative and agentic AI and the impact of these shifts in DH software development, with some attendees making the case for agentic AI as a “sea change” allowing DHers to focus more fully on the research, and others raising caution about the ethical and environmental risks.\nAs a follow up, our next meetup on April 30 at 10am ET/4pm CET will focus on sharing practical demonstrations of specific practitioners showing us how they use AI for their humanities research and software development work.\nRegister for the meetup and join us!\nContribute to the DHTech Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group The DHTech Education and Training Working Group is looking for contributions! We specifically need:\nAuthor(s) for a lesson on Project Management with GitHub. Reviewers for a lesson on Open Source. Have another idea? We’d love to hear it! All our lessons are peer-reviewed and receive a DOI, ensuring your contribution is recognized and citable. Connect with us on Slack or write to dhtech.community@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing!\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on March 31 (ish). A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there. Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form. Contribute Lessons: The Education and Training Working Group is looking for contributors! If you have some time to spare, please consider volunteering to write or review a lesson. All of our lessons go through a review process and receive a DOI. If you want some ideas of what our lessons look like, read our author guidelines and existing lessons. Please connect with us on Slack or write to dhtech.community@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing! Latest Publications Organizing Your Project by David Ragnar Nelson – A new lesson published by the Education and Training Working Group\nDHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2026-03-31T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2026/03/31/2026-march-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech March Newsletter"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/newsletter/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Newsletter"},{"author":null,"body":"Are you currently writing code for your research project? If so, have you thought about where it’s stored? If you aren\u0026rsquo;t already using GitHub or a similar version control service, now is the perfect time to start. Moving your work to GitHub offers more than just cloud backup; it provides a \u0026ldquo;time machine\u0026rdquo; for your project. With version control, you have a complete history of every change, allowing you to experiment freely and revert to previous versions if something goes wrong.\nWe know that Git and GitHub can feel intimidating at first. To help you bridge that gap, the DHTech Code Review Working Group is hosting a one-hour virtual workshop designed to help you publish your research code with confidence. We will start with a brief introduction to the core concepts of Git, followed by a hands-on walkthrough to get your specific project uploaded.\nWorkshop Details\nWhen: March 25, 2026, at 9:00 AM ET / 2:00 PM CET Where: Hosted on Zoom (Registration required) What to Bring: Your code, ready to be uploaded What to Expect: A beginner-friendly guide to Git basics and a live walkthrough of the GitHub upload process. Please share with your colleagues and anyone else who might be interested!\n","date":"2026-03-10T13:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2026/03/10/workshop-publishing-your-research-code-on-github/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"Workshop: Publishing Your Research Code on GitHub"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"On February 26, 2026 at 10am ET/4pm CET (find your local time). Register here.\nWith AI coding agents and chatting computers the landscape of software development as a profession in DH is shifting. How does this shift reflect in the perspective for students, how are professionals adjusting their day to day business? How do we balance the potential loss of quality in research software with the benefit of making software development more accessible?\nIn our February meetup we invite perspectives from the academic and for-profit sector with diverse levels of seniority to reflect on new challenges and old problems for research software development in the age of AI.\n","date":"2026-02-20T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2026/02/20/dhtech-february-meetup-2026/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech February Meetup"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"It’s a little late, but we still hope you had a happy new year! Clearly, it took us a while to get organized enough to send this “January” newsletter. Nevertheless, we hope it will bring some joy to your day (or at least some interesting pieces of information). And for the daily chuckle, here is the joke of the month:\nWhy did the integer drown?\nBecause he couldn’t float.\n🙈\nDHTech February Meetup With AI coding agents and chatting computers the landscape of software development as a profession in DH is shifting. How does this shift reflect in the perspective for students, how are professionals adjusting their day to day business? How do we balance the potential loss of quality in research software with the benefit of making software development more accessible? In our February meetup we invite perspectives from the academic and for-profit sector with diverse levels of seniority to reflect on new challenges and old problems for research software development in the age of AI.\nWhen? February 26 at 10am ET/4pm CET (find your local time).\nWhere? On Zoom (please register)\nA Warm Welcome to our new Steering Committee Member! We are delighted to welcome David Ragnar Nelson as a new Steering Committee member of DHTech!\nDavid Ragnar Nelson serves as Digital Scholarship Programmer in the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society, an independent research library and archive. His work focuses on integrating digital humanities methods into the library\u0026rsquo;s research agendas and collaborating with external researchers on digital scholarship. A self-taught developer, he holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures. He is also an active member of the DHTech Education and Training Working Group. On the technical side, he mainly works on network analysis and visualization, machine learning methods for extracting text and metadata from archival materials (largely Automatic Text Recognition and Automatic Speech Recognition), and web applications using static sites (Jekyll/Hugo) and Django.\nACH Request for Feedback ACH is inviting feedback for ADHO’s ad-hoc peer review committee. If you have thoughts on ADHO’s peer review process and would like to share them, please respond using their Google form. This is also a chance to share some thoughts on the impact a chosen peer review model can have on technical submissions that include code.\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on March 31. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nBecome a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form.\nContribute Lessons: The Education and Training Working Group is looking for contributors! Two planned lessons, one on documentation and one on project management with GitHub, are in need of authors. If you have some time to spare, please consider volunteering to write one of these lessons. All of our lessons go through a review process and receive a DOI. If you want some ideas of what our lessons look like, read our author guidelines and existing lessons. Please connect with us on Slack or write to dhtech.community@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing!\nDHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2026-02-10T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2026/02/10/2026-january-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech January Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech Meetup: Building a Python Package Community for the Humanities\nOn December 4, 2025 at 10am ET/4pm CEST. Register here.\nImagine this: You are working on a Python package for a research project. Your code could easily be used by others if you had more use cases, but you don’t know how to connect with others, or maybe you are even wondering if your code is “good enough.” Now, imagine, there is this online community. You sign up for their Slack and they provide you with some guidelines and tips on how to make your project more stable and maintainable. Once you have cleaned up your code, you submit it to this community, it gets reviewed, and then added to the community website as a supported project. More people notice your work now, and maybe there are even people who are interested in helping you maintain it! How awesome would that be!\nBefore 2025 comes to a close, DHTech is planning one more meetup to discuss exactly this vision! Are you a developer of a Python package for DH research? Or maybe you are not the developer but you are using someone else’s Python code? Do you wish there was such a community to support you in your efforts? Do you wish there was a way of sharing your work with others so it could be reused? If so, then join us on December 4, 2025 at 10am ET/4pm CEST!\nIn our December meetup, we plan to talk about strategies to build a community similar to pyOpenSci or rOpenSci, but for the humanities. The goal of the meetup is to have a better understanding of what kind of support projects would benefit from, what kind of projects would be good candidates for such a community, and what project selection criteria and guidelines could look like. What a proper way of ending 2025 with some dear colleagues from DHTech!\n","date":"2025-11-26T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/11/26/dhtech-december-meetup-2025/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech December Meetup"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"We hope you had a great start into the month of November! Since we now officially switched from end-of-the month newsletters to beginning-of-next month newsletter, here comes the last DHTech newsletter of this year. The next one will be waiting in your inbox for you in early 2026. So enjoy these latest DHTech news one last time this year!\nDigital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025 Proceedings We are extremely excited to announce that the proceedings of our symposium at DH2025, “Digital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025”, are now published in the new ACH journal Anthology of Computers and the Humanities. The proceedings include seven articles and an introduction spanning from tool presentations, over architecture descriptions, to technical community initiatives. Our heartfelt thanks go to all the authors, reviewers, symposium attendees, and anyone else who was involved in making this happen! We especially want to thank Taylor Arnold, Editor-in-Chief of the Anthology, for his support in this endeavor and giving us this opportunity.\nNominate yourself for the DHTech Steering Committee It’s that time of the year again! Nominations for the DHTech Steering Committee are open, and we need to fill at least one spot. If you want to get more involved in this community and help shape its direction, this is a great opportunity. Wondering what it takes? Read our blog post for more information or just go and fill out the nomination form here.\nTechnical track at DH2026 We are very pleased to let you know that for the first time, the DH conference allows submissions for a technical track! Specifically, the CfP reads:\n“Authors may designate their submission as part of the Technical Track. Submissions in this track, in line with the mission of the DHTech SIG, emphasize the development, sustainability, and reuse of software and infrastructures for the digital humanities. These proposals will be reviewed by members of the DHTech SIG.”\nThis is very exciting news for our community! We hope it will create new opportunities to connect, collaborate, and share our work and expertise. To help the program committee match technical submissions with the right reviewers, please remember to check the box indicating that you’re available to provide technical reviews.\nSubmission deadline for DH2026 is December 8, 2025, 11:59 PM KST. You can find the CfP on the DH2026 website.\nDHTech Posters at DH2025 and USRSE’25 DHTech presented posters at two conferences this year: DH2025 and USRSE’25. Our poster “Surveying the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Landscape” presented the results of the DHTech survey we ran earlier this year. Fun fact: the “typical” DH developer works in a small team of no more than three people, is (at least in part) self-taught, and programs in Python. Who would have thought? 😉 Our second poster, “Community Code Review in the Digital Humanities,” presented the efforts of the DHTech Code Review Working Group. It described the community code review process overseen by the group and provided an overview of its impact, current challenges, and future work. Both posters are available on Zenodo.\nDamerow, J., Koeser, R., \u0026amp; Crawford, C. (2025). Surveying the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Landscape. Digital Humanities Conference 2025 (DH2025), Lisbon, Portugal. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15863899\nDamerow, J., Koeser, R., Vogl, M., \u0026amp; Carver, J. (2025). Community Code Review in the Digital Humanities. US Research Software Engineering Conference 2025 (USRSE'25), Philadelphia, PA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17315401\nDigital Humanities Tech Symposium at DH2026: Call for Organizers and Participants The DHTech SIG is once again planning a “Tech Symposium” to be held at next year’s DH2026 Conference in Daejeon, South Korea! We are currently looking for members of the community or participants who expect to be at DH2026 who would like to volunteer to be part of the Organizing Committee for the DH2026 Tech Symposium. If you are interested and/or would like more information about this opportunity, please send a quick email to Jeffrey Tharsen at tharsen@uchicago.edu containing the subject “DH2026”.\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on December 31 A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nBecome a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form.\nLatest Blog Posts Let’s take a moment to celebrate ourselves! by Julia Damerow\nDHTech Steering Committee Nominations 2025 by DHTech Steering Committee\nThe Digital Humanities Tech Symposium Proceedings are Published! by DHTech\nDHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2025-11-18T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/11/18/2025-november-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech November Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, Volume 2, October 2025\nDigital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025\nEdited by Julia Damerow and Rebecca Sutton Koeser\nWe are pleased to announce that the proceedings from the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025 have been published! The Digital Humanities Tech Symposium was a one-day workshop organized by DHTech and held at the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) 2025 conference in Lisbon, Portugal.\nCheck out the proceedings on the Anthology of Computers and the Humanities journal website! These proceedings are the first-ever official publication from a DHTech event. Ever since its founding after a workshop at DH2017 in Montreal, DHTech has been active in organizing workshops, mini-conferences and meet-ups to foster community and share knowledge. We have organized pre-conference workshops every year for the annual ADHO conference and always make an effort to document and share the outcome of our events. But it wasn’t until now that we had an official venue to share the work of our community. We are grateful for the leadership of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and editors of the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities journal for their “inclusive and generous sense” of Digital Humanities work and offering opening this space for us to document and share more widely the work of the technical community represented by DHTech.\nThe papers included in these proceedings are based on presentations included in the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium. The symposium inverted the typical format of presentations at the DH conference by focusing on the technical aspects of digital humanities projects, while still situating them within their specific research and disciplinary contexts. Presentations ranged from implementation details of research projects, to tool presentations and live demonstrations touching on infrastructure, authentication, and publication platforms. The proceedings papers underwent a separate review process, which not only strengthened the quality of the submissions but also raised important questions about how best to write about and review technical work, since DH projects cover such a wide range of humanities disciplines, technologies and methods. We look forward to continuing the discussion and refining these questions together as a community of technically oriented individuals.\n","date":"2025-11-03T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/11/03/2025-dhtech-symposium-proceedings/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening"],"title":"The Digital Humanities Tech Symposium Proceedings are Published!"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Nominate yourself for the DHTech Steering Committee! DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group since 2021. The group is led by a Steering Committee—an international group of seven dedicated volunteers. Each member serves a two-year term, with no limit on reappointment. For the upcoming 2026–2027 term, five seats on the Steering Committee need to be filled. Any member of DHTech is eligible to nominate themselves for one of these seats.\nTo help potential candidates understand what serving on the Steering Committee involves, we’ve written a blog post outlining the key responsibilities and typical activities of the role. If you have time, energy, and enthusiasm for strengthening the DHTech community, we encourage you to nominate yourself and help us steer the DHTech ship forward!\nTo submit your nomination, please fill out this form by November 15, 2025.\n","date":"2025-10-31T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/10/31/2025-sc-nominations-open/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening"],"title":"2025 DHTech Steering Committee Nominations are Open"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/","section":"blog","tags":null,"title":"Blogs"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":" It\u0026rsquo;s been eight years! It’s 2017 at the DH conference in Montreal. At a workshop “to connect different tools and services in order to build a tool infrastructure for historical research” organized by me, Dirk Wintergrün, and Robert Casties, a couple of the attendees decide that it would be worthwhile to try to connect more frequently in order to exchange ideas and experiences. We start out simple: a GitHub organization, a Slack workspace, and a mailing list. But that’s all that it takes. DHTech is born. Now, 8 years later, a short retrospective seems in order to reflect on how far we have come since then and where else we want to go.\nMany people have contributed to and supported DHTech over the years. Some have left the digital humanities space or even academia since then, others needed to focus on other aspects of their professional life. There is the DHTech Steering Committee that was started when DHTech became a ADHO Special Interest Group in 2021. And while some of the Steering Committee members have rotated off the committee due to other responsibilities requiring their attention, new ones have joined us with new ideas. We are eternally grateful for all of the contributions, big and small, that all these people have made. DHTech would not be what it is without them.\nSo what are we doing? At the time of writing this blog post, the DHTech general Slack channel has 385 members. Posts on our blog on the DHTech website date back to 2017, when we announced the first virtual meetup we ever held! It was a meetup on CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Travis-CI, and Jenkins. Since then we have held 20 more virtual meetups with topics ranging from project presentations, framework introductions, specific technologies, and more community focused subjects such as training and education or code review. These virtual get-togethers were supplemented by in-person events at conferences. We have held several workshops at the annual DH conference (such as “How can you trust your code?” at DH2023) and more recently we have organized two mini-conferences at DH2024 and DH2025.\nBut DHTech not only brings people together, it also advocates for the individuals that do technical work in DH projects. One of our first achievements was the “DH RSE Workshop White Paper” that was written at the DH conference in 2019. Furthermore, we have run two community surveys—one in 2020, and more recently a follow up survey in 2025. The results of the 2025 survey were presented as a poster at DH2025. Multiple papers have been published by DHTech members as a follow up to a workshop or as an outcome of a DHTech activity such as:\nDamerow, J., R. S. Koeser, J. C. Carver, M. Vogl (2024). Code review in digital humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 40 (Supplement_1), i18-i26. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae052 And:\nKoeser, R. S., J. Damerow, R. Casties, and C. Crawford. 2025. “Undate: Humanistic Dates for Computation: Because Reality Is Frequently Inaccurate.” Computational Humanities Research 1 (January): e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/chr.2025.10006. Most recently, DHTech organized a symposium at DH2025 which was accompanied by proceedings for which presenters could submit a written version of their presentation. The proceedings will be published later this year, highlighting the diversity of technical work accomplished in the digital humanities.\nBeyond these activities, DHTech publishes a bi-monthly newsletter, maintains a bibliography of relevant literature, hosts a job board to publicize jobs in the digital humanities tech space, and maintains the blog you are currently reading. DHTech also has two working groups, the Code Review Working Group and the Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group. Both groups provide and develop resources for the digital humanities tech community. The Code Review Working Group facilitates peer code review, while the Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group develops resources related to research software engineering best practices. Anyone interested in those topics is welcome to join the working groups.\nLast but not least, DHTech maintains several community projects. These projects are maintained by DHTech community members. The Awesome Digital Humanities list was the first one that DHTech started and it is maintained by Moritz Mähr and Diego Siqueira. Undate, in contrast, is a Python package to deal with uncertain dates. It was started at a hackathon organized by DHTech and is maintained by Rebecca S. Koeser. The newest member to the family is hugo-bibliography, a Hugo plugin to add bibliographies to Hugo-based websites that is being maintained by Tatsat Jah.\nWhat comes next? While we have made a lot of progress over the years, advocating for the people doing technical work in DH projects and providing a space to connect and learn from each other, there is still a lot left to do. Questions we still need to answer range from “how can we help projects become sustainable and overcome the bus factor of one issue?”, over “how can we help DH projects be better prepared for any software development work they may plan”, to “how can we better educate people about best practices in research software engineering?”. We still need to reach more people, especially in areas other than North America and Europe—tell your colleagues to join us if you know anyone in these places! And in general, how can we better engage with our community members?\nAdditionally, there is the obvious question—whether you like it or not—what role does AI play for the work we are doing? How does it change the way we create software and how we teach and train? How can we ensure, the individuals just starting out in this field will be able to judge and troubleshoot systems developed by AI? What differences might there be to software development in other fields of research or in the private sector? So many questions, so few answers.\nLastly, one of the issues close to our hearts is how can technical aspects of DH work be better represented at the DH conference? We’ve organized events during the pre-conference workshop days but we strongly believe that this kind of work should be more visibly present at the main conference. And we are making progress—2026 will be the first year that the DH conference will have a technical track! How exciting!\nWhat can you do? Whatever you think will work for you! Just lurking on Slack? Go for it! Joining a few of our meetups? That would be awesome! But maybe you want to help organize a meetup or a workshop at a conference? We would love to have you help. Or maybe you are interested in the topics of our working groups? Join their channel, join the meetings. It’s really rewarding when you see things come together! And if you feel really motivated and want to be more involved in all things DHTech related, nominate yourself for the Steering Committee! It’s work, yes, but it’s also extremely rewarding!\nFinal Thoughts DHTech is a great community with many amazing people. I’ve seen it grow from just a handful of excited individuals to over 300 members. I’ve met great colleagues, made some friends, worked on exciting projects and initiatives, and I think we need DHTech now more than ever. Join us if you haven’t yet, stay put if you have, and keep pushing with us if you have some energy to spare!\n","date":"2025-10-01T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2025/10/01/lets-take-a-moment-to-celebrate-ourselves/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Let’s take a moment to celebrate ourselves!"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Our next meetup will be on September 11, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. The topic of the meetup will be publication venues for research software. Where do you publish your software? Do you publish it at all outside of GitHub and Zenodo? How do you let other people know your software exists? There are the big names like the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) but are there maybe other venues not so well known? And what does it mean to publish your software? What do you write about when you publish? And even more broadly, where do you publish about your software engineering work? These and many more questions will be the focus of our next meetup. You can register here!\n","date":"2025-09-05T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/09/05/dhtech-september-meetup/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech September Meetup"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"We gave up trying to get this newsletter out by the end of each even month. You’ll simply have to live with the fact that it will most likely come to your inbox at the beginning of the following month. But we are sure that this is something you will be able to live with 😄\nBefore we dive into the latest and greatest, we have a request! Would you please fill out this short poll about our activities? We want to make sure that we serve and support you in the best way possible, so we have a few questions. We’ll be forever grateful for your insights!\nSeptember Meetup on Publishing Software Our next meetup will be on September 11, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. The topic of the meetup will be publication venues for research software. Where do you publish your software? Do you publish it at all outside of GitHub and Zenodo? How do you let other people know your software exists? There are the big names like the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) but are there maybe other venues not so well known? And what does it mean to publish your software? What do you write about when you publish? And even more broadly, where do you publish about your software engineering work? These and many more questions will be the focus of our next meetup. You can register here!\nHugo-Bibliography DHTech has a new project we maintain: hugo-bibligraphy! Hugo-bibliography is a Hugo module designed to help you fetch and format bibliography data to include into your Hugo site. Thanks to Tatsat Jha, this idea we had came to life and now we need you to help maintain and develop it! If you maintain a Hugo site and always wanted to include a bibliography, now is the time to do it. Hugo-bibliography lets you pull data from a Zotero group to add it to your site. Please check it out and let us know about any bugs, improvements, or new features you think should be addressed. You are also more than welcome to contribute to the development by making a pull request. This project is for the community by the community!\nLet’s have another Hackathon We think it is time for another hackathon! It’s almost three years since we organized the last DHTech hackathon. undate is the result of that hackathon! You can read all about it in the recently published paper “Undate: humanistic dates for computation”. Are you interested in participating or maybe even in helping to organize another hackathon? Please fill out our poll (linked above)! If you have any ideas for what we could develop, please let us know on Slack or by email (dhtech.community@gmail.com).\nDH2025 - It was a blast! DH2025 in Lisbon was once again a highlight for DHTech! We organized the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium that featured twelve presentations on various topics and presented results of our recent DHTech survey as a poster. Some of the symposium presentations will be featured in the new ACH open access conference proceedings series Anthology of Computers and the Humanities! Stay tuned!\nFurthermore, we had a successful working group lunch (the food in Lisbon is amazing!), stickers, pens, and DHippos found new homes, and people connected IRL for a change. To give the contributions of our DHTech members more visibility, we’d like to add any talk you might have given at DH2025 to our website. Let us know if you presented outside of our Digital Humanities Tech Symposium by emailing us the details (dhtech.community@gmail.com) or let us know on Slack!\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on October 31 🎃 A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nBecome a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form.\nLatest Blog Posts Introducing Hugo-Bibliography by Tatsat Jha\nDHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2025-09-04T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/09/04/2025-august-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech August Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech Steering Committee","body":"DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group since 2021. For the upcoming two-year term (2026-2027), four seats on the Steering Committee need to be filled. Any member of DHTech is eligible to nominate themselves for one of the spots. Should we have more than four nomination, there will be an election. To give people an idea of what it involves to be on the Steering Committee, this blog post will summarize the key responsibilities and tasks of the Steering Committee. We hope that this will encourage some people to nominate themselves as candidates.\nWhat does the Steering Committee do? The DHTech Steering Committee supports the DHTech community by planning events, compiling the newsletter, maintaining the community website and Slack workspace, and providing a contact for ADHO in regards to our Special Interest Group (SIG) status. For example, we have organized workshops and panels at ACH2021, DH2022-DH2025, as well as presented posters. We have organized a few virtual meetups for the DHTech community to discuss topics and present projects. We also maintain the DHTech website (dhtech.github.io) and mailing list.\nWhile the Steering Committee members contribute to these activities in form of creating content and organizing meetups, workshops, etc., part of the responsibility is simply finding people to take ownership of certain projects, being on top of the tasks that need attention, and providing an overall vision of how DHTech can support its community. The Steering Committee also decides what to do with the small budget that we receive from ADHO for being a SIG.\nWhat is the time commitment? The Steering Committee meets virtually monthly (currently on the last Thursday of every month at 9am ET/3pm CET). Usually an agenda is being sent out prior to the meeting with discussion points. Our meetings are typically one hour long. Besides that, being part of the Steering Committee involves a few hours a month to plan events such as the DHTech meetups or conference workshops, write blog posts, participate in subgroups, and maintain the DHTech website.\nAm I the right person to be on the Steering Committee? If you have a few hours each month to give to DHTech and are a DHTech member (no matter when you joined), then yes, you are! There is no other requirement to be on the Steering Committee except a desire to support the community and help DHTech grow.\nWhat do I need to do to nominate myself? If you want to nominate yourself as a candidate for the DHTech Steering Committee, please fill out this form. You will need to provide your name, affiliation, and a short statement (e.g. about who you are and why you want to be on the DHTech steering committee).\nWhat’s the election timeline? Nominations are open until November 15, 2025. If we have four valid nominations and all candidates are still willing to serve on the committee, those candidates will be on the Steering Committee for the next two years starting in January 2026. Should we have more than four nominations, we will put the information about all candidates on our website and hold an election. All DHTech members will be able to vote for one candidate. We will send out a membership confirmation email before the voting period starts. If you do not get one but believe you are a member of DHTech, please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com).\nCan I get involved in other ways? Yes! There is the Code Review working group and Training and Education working group. Both meet monthly if that is of interest to you. Or you can join our bi-monthly meetups. Or you can get involved with one of our community projects! If you have specific ideas of things you would like to do, please post them on Slack or contact a member of the Steering Committee directly.\n","date":"2025-09-03T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025-sc-nominations/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Steering Committee Nominations 2025"},{"author":"Tatsat Jha","body":"Hugo-Bibliography is a new Hugo plug-in designed to make adding citations into Hugo projects much easier. It can be added as a theme to a Hugo website to generate bibliography pages using the provided shortcodes. At this point, bibliography data needs to be available in CSL-JSON format (that for example can be exported from Zotero). In addition, these shortcodes have a few extra features to allow for filtering out entries from the resulting bibliography.\nHugo-Bibliography ships with a Bash script to fetch data from Zotero groups automatically during the build process. Furthermore, bibliography entries are exposed using COinS allowing the Zotero browser plugin to recognize and import them.\nHugo-Bibliography is an open source project. Contributions are encouraged and welcome. If you would like to contribute, please raise issues or open pull request in the Hugo-Bibliography GitHub repository.\nHugo-Bibliography is currently being used on the DHTech website on the publications page. For more details, check out Hugo-bibliography\u0026rsquo;s GitHub repository.\n","date":"2025-07-11T18:45:24Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2025/07/11/hugo-bibliography/","section":"blog","tags":null,"title":"Introducing Hugo-Bibliography"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"It’s DHTech newsletter time! There is not too much to report this month as we are busy preparing for DH2025!\nDH2025 in Lisbon DHTech will be represented at DH2025 with a mini-conference and a poster! On Monday, July 14, 1:30pm - 6:30pm, the mini-conference Digital Humanities Tech Symposium (check out the agenda) will be held with presentations focusing on the technical aspects of DH projects. And at the poster session on Wednesday, we will present a poster about the survey we recently ran. Come find us and get DHTech stickers and pens!\nAs usual, we will also organize an in-person meetup. We will meet for lunch on Thursday (self-paid). Meeting location tbd.\nDHTech Bibliography We decided it’s time that we added a literature page to our website! Our goal is to curate a list of references around the technical aspects of DH work. This includes papers about code review, software papers, papers about best practices, and anything that someone doing technical work for DH projects might find useful. Do you have something you think should be included? Or do you even want to help maintain it? Get in touch with us via email or Slack!\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on September 30. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! We always welcome contributions and new ideas! Please reach out if you have something you’d like to share with the community and feel free to post in Slack and join our meetups. Below are some concrete opportunities to get involved.\nTell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there. Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form. DHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly, The DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2025-07-02T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/07/02/2025-june-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech June Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"News from the DHTech Community We completely missed sending out our April newsletter! Where did April go? To make up for it, we put some extra work into this one. Starting with the joke of the month!\nSon: Dad, how did you come up with my name?\nDad: Well, son, I worked countless hours to write an AI that would tell me the absolute best name for you.\nSon: Wow, cool, thank you, dad!\nDad: You’re welcome, Syntax Error On Line 125!\nSo stupid, so good 😄\nUSRSE’25 in Philadelphia USRSE’25, the research software engineering conference in the US, is in Philadelphia this year! Submission deadline is May 16 (except posters, which are due July 20). This year\u0026rsquo;s theme is Code, Practices, and People.\n🐍 Code: share your software with the community\n🔁 Practices: Discuss how RSEs code and how they can code better\n🦄 People: Support the development of the RSE community\nLet’s show some Digital Humanities RSE presence!\nSteering Committee Changes It is with a heavy heart that we let you know that Cole Crawford is stepping down from the DHTech Steering Committee effective immediately due to recent professional career decisions. We will greatly miss him and his expertise and experiences that have helped DHTech grow so much over the past couple of years. We wish him all the best for his future endeavors!\nIf you are interested in getting involved in DHTech’s leadership activities, please reach out to the Steering Committee by email or on Slack.\nDHTech RSE Survey - We still want to hear from you! Last Call! In 2019, DHTech ran a survey to better understand the DHTech and DH RSE communities. Five years later, DHTech is re-running the survey to better understand the experiences and needs of anyone doing technical work in the digital humanities! Do you write code or do coding-related work for digital humanities projects? Do you manage software engineering projects in the digital humanities? Do you develop computational methods for digital humanities research? If so and if you are over 18, please consider completing the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering survey! It should only take about 10 to 15 minutes of your time.\nThe survey results will be presented as a poster at DH2025. We will close the survey on May 23. So go do it, right now please! 😃\nDHTech at DH2025 DHTech is organizing a mini-conference at DH2025, the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium! The symposium will be held on Monday, July 1:30 to 6:30pm. The program will be posted on our website soon, so keep an eye out for it and join us in Lisbon!\nWant to get involved in the symposium? We\u0026rsquo;re looking for session moderators to introduce speakers and help keep sessions on time. Email the Steering Committee or get in touch on Slack if you’re interested!\nWe will also organize another in-person get-together sometime during the main conference. Details to follow. Make sure to keep an eye on Slack and your email inbox!\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on June 30. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.\nGet Involved! We always welcome contributions and new ideas! Please reach out if you have something you’d like to share with the community and feel free to post in Slack and join our meetups. Below are some concrete opportunities to get involved.\nTell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there. Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form. DHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2025-06-18T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/06/18/2025-april-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech April Newsletter"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/conference/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Conference"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium at DH2025 - Agenda From July 14-18, 2025, DH2025 will be held at NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2025, the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics.\nAgenda - Monday, July 14th, 1:30pm to 6:30pm Session 1 - Moderator: Robert Casties 1:30-1:40pm DHTech Steering Committee\nIntroduction 1:40-2:00pm Andreas Wagner (remote)\nTEI2Zenodo TEI2Zenodo acts as a server that accepts TEI files and uploads them to the Zenodo data repository. It is meant to be part of a CI/CD pipeline, but can also be used in other ways. It goes beyond the already existing GitHub-Zenodo integration by arranging for individual files to be deposits instead of copies of whole git repositories. The presentation will describe the handling of DOI identifiers that are being created in the Zenodo upload process, ways of using the server besides CI/CD, and need for further development: cleaning up code and adding important further functions. 2:00-2:20pm Timo Frühwirth tei-rdfa: A Python Utility for Extracting RDFa Data from TEI-XML Documents\nThe tei-rdfa Python package extracts RDF data embedded in TEI-XML documents via RDFa. Handling native TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) namespace declaration through elements, this utility aims to fill a gap left by existing RDFa parsers. The tool presentation will demonstrate the package's key features and error handling capabilities for DH researchers working with TEI+RDFa. 2:20-2:40pm Gregor Middell Turning an XML Database Inside Out The presentation of the DWDS' dictionary writing system, which serves as the backend of a German online dictionary accessed by 2-3 million users each month, will highlight the architectural choices and challenges encountered during its required refactoring. 2:40-2:50pm Break Session 2 - Moderator: Julia Damerow 2:50-3:10pm Robert Casties\nThere and back again - how to preserve your data during migrations Our data often needs to be migrated - from a foreign format into the database, from one database system into another, or from a dying system into an archive format. What can we do to make sure that no data is lost in the processs? I will present some approaches from hard-won experience, from end-to-end statistics to bookkeeping conversions to full round-trip migration and comparison. 3:10-3:30pm Benjamin Kiessling When Automatic Text Recognition doesn't work and how to fix it Automatic Text Recognition is widely used in the Digital Humanities but certain materials and scholarly practices are not well served by current methods. A gander through the principal technical causes of these deficiencies and how current research trends in the Machine Learning exacerbate them will be completed by a short presentation of a text recognition tool that aims to address them. 3:30pm-3:50pm Coffee Break Session 3 - Moderator: Jose Hernandez 3:50-4:10pm Rebecca Koeser\nUndate in Action Undate is an ambitious, in-progress effort to develop a pragmatic Python package for computation and analysis of temporal information in humanistic and cultural data, with a particular emphasis on uncertain, incomplete, or imprecise dates and with support for multiple calendars. Undate draws on and improves implementations and data modeling from digital humanities projects from multiple different institutions. We propose a “Tool Presentation” of Undate, using an interactive code notebook to demonstrate current functionality and capabilities of this library. The demonstration would introduce Undate and UndateInterval objects, and show how they can be initialized directly with numbers or strings for dates with unknown digits, or by parsing dates written out in a supported calendar, and can be used for comparison and calculations, including sorting, comparing precision, determining whether one date or date interval falls within or overlaps another, and calculating durations of dates and intervals. 4:10-4:30pm Paul Girard\nHistorical data visual exploration meets static web technologies In this talk I will present how we created a visual exploration website to publish the [REG⋅ARTS dataset](https://regarts.huma-num.fr/) by using static web technologies. The REG⋅ARTS datasets gathers the transcriptions of students registrations from the École des beaux arts de Paris between 1813 and 1968. To publish it we designed a static website which still offers state of the art exploration features such as a faceted search engine, projections on historical maps and network visualisation without using any server nor external APIs. 4:30-4:50pm Olivia Wikle\nFrom Metadata to Static Site: A Technical Demonstration of CollectionBuilder for Digital Exhibits This tool demonstration will introduce CollectionBuilder (https://collectionbuilder.github.io/), an open-source framework built on Jekyll for generating static, metadata-driven digital exhibits. It will walk through the technical workflow of creating a basic site by integrating CSV metadata, digital asset files, YAML configuration, and Markdown content, then illustrate customization options such as swapping the default image viewer for a IIIF viewer. The session will touch on the framework’s modular code structure, use of embedded open-source libraries for interactivity, and approaches to local development, deployment, and long-term maintenance. 4:50-5:10pm Moritz Mähr, Moritz Twente One Template to Rule Them All: Interactive Research Data Documentation with Quarto We introduce the Open Research Data Template, a GitHub-based framework designed to streamline the publication and reuse of open research data through executable, interactive documentation using Quarto. By integrating narrative, metadata, and multi-programming-language code (Python, R, Julia, ObservableJS) into cohesive websites, the template lowers barriers to meaningful reuse and sustainable archiving of research workflows. We will demonstrate the template's structure, automation pipeline, and real-world applications through projects such as DigiHistCH24, Stadt.Geschichte.Basel, DHBern, and Decoding Inequality 2025. 5:10pm-5:20pm Break Session 4 - Moderator: Jeffrey Tharsen 5:20-5:40pm Jamie Folsom\nExtending Recogito Studio with Plugins Recogito Studio is a new open source platform for annotation of TEI-XML Text, IIIF images and manifests and PDFs. While the software is focused on real-time collaboration, user and document management, and import and export of documents and annotations in standard formats, some adopters have needs that go beyond those core features.\nThis talk is an introduction to the Recogito Studio plugin framework and software development kit, which makes it easy for developers to add new functionality to the software without modifying the core codebase. 5:40-6:00 Jose Hernandez\nThe QuantumRandomWalks package and its use for quantum link prediction in historical citation networks This presentation will walk users through using the QuantumRandomWalks package for quantum link prediction on historical citation networks. It will provide a humanities-friendly intro to Qiskit and its features for developers that may want to build upon our work. 6:00-6:20pm Tibor Kálmán\nClouds for Crowds - Implementing federated AAI for the Digital Humanities With the increase in data-driven research, Research Infrastructures such as the DARIAH need to ensure secure access to the data, tools and workflows they offer. This presentation aims to highlight the necessity and advantages of implementing federated identity management and authorisation; describes the technological background of such an AAI solution in the humanities and motivates the DH-Tech community to adopt the AARC Blueprint Architecture supported by a Compendium being developed in the context of the AARC-TREE project. 6:20pm-6:30pm DHTech Steering Committee\nGoodbye and Thank You ","date":"2025-06-04T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/06/04/digital-humanities-tech-symposium-agenda/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","conference","whatshappening","event"],"title":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium - Agenda"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium at DH2025 Final Submission Deadline Extension and Conference Proceedings\nWe have exciting news to share! In collaboration with the new ACH open access conference proceedings series Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, there is now the option to submit a short proceedings article about your Digital Humanities Tech Symposium presentation after the conference.\nHere are the quick facts:\nProceedings articles should be 4 to 6 pages in length. Articles need to be submitted by August 3, 2025 (we highly recommend having a draft ready in time for the conference). Articles will be reviewed with potential requests for revisions. You will likely be asked to be a reviewer for another submission. Reviewed articles will be published on the proceedings website with a DOI for each article. To give everyone interested in this opportunity a chance to submit, we have extended the submission deadline for the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium to April 27, 2025.\n","date":"2025-04-01T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/04/01/digital-humanities-tech-symposium-final-extension/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","conference","whatshappening"],"title":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium - Final Extension and Proceedings Publication"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"It’s hard to believe but February is almost over! That means, it’s time for DHTech’s newsletter 🎉 And we have things to tell you about! Enjoy and engage ;)\nDHTech at DH2025 - Digital Humanities Tech Symposium DHTech is organizing a mini-conference at DH2025, the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium! Help us make it even better than last year! Submit a talk about the technical aspects of your work or demonstrate your tool from a technical perspective. Or do you have another idea? Submit it! We also need reviewers. Find all the information on our website. Submission deadline is March 15. It’ll be fun :)\nDHTech RSE Survey - We still want to hear from you! Go do it right now! In 2019, DHTech ran a survey to better understand the DHTech and DH RSE communities. Five years later, DHTech is re-running the survey to better understand the experiences and needs of anyone doing technical work in the digital humanities! Do you write code or do coding-related work for digital humanities projects? Do you manage software engineering projects in the digital humanities? Do you develop computational methods for digital humanities research? If so and if you are over 18, please consider completing the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering survey! It should only take about 10 to 15 minutes of your time. We hope to present the survey results as a poster at DH2025.\nDHTech is now on Mastodon (@dhtech) and Bluesky (@dhtech-community.bsky.social)! We’re excited to join the Mastodon and Bluesky communities and contribute to these emerging social networks that we have seen an increasing number of our colleagues and friends migrate to. We intend to continue to use and cross-post content to Twitter/X for now, but we’ll also begin posting to Mastodon and Bluesky. Follow us on Mastodon as @dhtech and on Bluesky as @dhtech-community.bsky.social.\nDHTech April Meetup on Data Longevity The next DHTech meetup will be held on April 24, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will discuss what we can do to keep the data of our projects around and usable even long after the software used to present the data has found its natural end. How can we make sure data is understandable and usable long-term? What happens to the logic encoded in our code that is necessary to interpret the data? Where can we store data and in what format? What’s the cost to benefit ratio for creating backups that might not be used for a long time? Does this sound interesting? Come join us and register for our Zoom meeting!\nDHReSCU is Looking for a Consultant We are excited to announce the first project that will be working with DHReSCU will be the Autosizer project led by Sean Fraga. This project focuses on using artificial intelligence to generate computer-readable physical dimensions from existing item images and catalog metadata.\nIf you are interested in being a consultant for Autosizer, please review the list of qualifications specific to this project on our website.\nDHReSCU still has Funding for Projects DHReSCU is a pilot program meant to aid early-stage digital humanities research software projects in developing a technical implementation plan. We hope to connect experienced research software engineers with digital humanities projects. The resulting technical implementation plan is meant to reduce mistakes made and improve project outcomes. If you have a Digital Humanities Research Project and are looking for consultation, submit your project using this application form.\nUpcoming Deadline Get feedback on your code! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on March 31. You can submit a finished product or work in progress! All that we ask for is that you choose a reasonably-sized chunk of your code that can be reviewed in about an hour. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website. Do you have any questions? Ask us on the DHTech Slack or send an email to dhtech.community@gmail.com. Submit to the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium at DH2025! Submission deadline is March 15, 2025. Check our website for more information Get Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there. Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form. Latest Blog Posts DHTech Joins Mastodon and Bluesky by DHTech Digital Humanities Tech Symposium by DHTech DHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs as soon as they are submitted. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the steering committee at dhtech.community@gmail.com.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2025-03-04T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/03/04/2025-february-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech February Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"The next DHTech meetup will be held on April 24, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will discuss what we can do to keep the data of our projects around and usable even long after the software used to present the data has found its natural end. How can we make sure data is understandable and usable long-term? What happens to the logic encoded in our code that is necessary to interpret the data? Where can we store data and in what format? What’s the cost to benefit ratio for creating backups that might not be used for a long time? Does this sound interesting? Come join us and register for our Zoom meeting!\n","date":"2025-02-28T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/02/28/dhtech-april-meetup-on-data-longevity/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech April Meetup on Data Longevity"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium at DH2025 From July 14-18, 2025, DH2025 will be held at Nova University in Lisbon, Portugal. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2025, the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects, such as:\nimplementation and design specifics of packages and applications lessons learnt regarding the design and implementation of research software tool demonstrations from a technical perspective community and diversity topics specific to the technical DH community Submissions should specify the desired format:\nPresentations: 20 minute talks including Q\u0026amp;A with the audience. Tool presentations: 10 minutes demonstrations followed by 10 minutes discussion with the audience. Other: do you have a format in mind you would like to try out? Please describe the format including length and audience engagement. Submissions should be 500 to 750 words in length. Links to relevant code and packages should be provided in the submission.\nSubmission deadline is March 15, 2025. March 29, 2025 April 27th, 2025 (final extension) . Please be aware, we may ask you to resubmit to a different platform depending on the number of submissions we receive.\nWe are also looking for reviewers for submission to Digital Humanities Tech Symposium. If you are willing to review two to three submissions between the end of April and beginning of May (concrete dates to follow), please sign up here.\n","date":"2025-02-19T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/02/19/digital-humanities-tech-symposium/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","conference","whatshappening"],"title":"Digital Humanities Tech Symposium"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Our next DHTech meetup will be on February 20, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will discuss a potential submission to RSECon25, which will be hosted at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK from 9-11 September 2025. At US-RSE’24, we organized a Birds of a Feather session to talk about how different domains pose different challenges to RSEs and require different skill sets. The idea has been floated to propose a similar session for RSECon25. Does that sound interesting?\n","date":"2025-02-01T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/02/01/dhtech-february-meetup/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening","event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech February Meetup"},{"author":null,"body":"DHTech is now on Mastodon (@dhtech) and Bluesky (@dhtech-community.bsky.social)!\nWe\u0026rsquo;re excited to join the Mastodon and Bluesky communities and contribute to these emerging social networks that we have seen an increasing number of our colleagues and friends migrate to. We intend to continue to use and cross-post content to Twitter/X for now, but we\u0026rsquo;ll also begin posting to Mastodon and Bluesky. Follow us on Mastodon as @dhtech and on Bluesky as @dhtech-community.bsky.social.\n","date":"2025-01-31T09:57:34-05:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2025/01/31/dhtech-joins-mastodon-and-bluesky/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DHTech Joins Mastodon and Bluesky"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"We are pleased to present you with the last DHTech newsletter of 2024! We hope that you have an enjoyable December filled with whatever you love the most. But while 2024 comes to a close, DHTech pushes full steam ahead. And if you are in need of some good new year’s resolutions, how about “I will contribute to DHTech in 2025!”. This is a resolution we highly support ;)\nDHTech February Meetup Our next DHTech meetup will be on February 20, 2025 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will discuss a potential submission to RSECon25, which will be hosted at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK from 9-11 September 2025. At US-RSE’24, we organized a Birds of a Feather session to talk about how different domains pose different challenges to RSEs and require different skill sets. The idea has been floated to propose a similar session for RSECon25. Does that sound interesting? Come and join us! Please register for the meetup.\nDHTech RSE Survey In 2019, DHTech ran a survey to better understand the DHTech and DH RSE communities. Five years later, DHTech is re-running the survey to better understand the experiences and needs of anyone doing technical work in the digital humanities! Do you write code or do coding-related work for digital humanities projects? Do you manage software engineering projects in the digital humanities? Do you develop computational methods for digital humanities research? If so and if you are over 18, please consider completing the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering survey! It should only take about 10 to 15 minutes of your time. We hope to present the survey results as a poster at DH2025.\nDHReSCU is looking for Projects and Consultants Thanks to a Chair’s grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arizona State University in collaboration with colleagues from Princeton University and Harvard University is exploring the development of a Digital Humanities Research Software Consulting Unit (DHReSCU). This virtual unit will provide digital humanities researchers with the opportunity to consult experienced DH RSEs during the project planning and design phase to create a software development plan. To that end, DHReSCU is looking for projects and consultants. Consultants as well as projects will be compensated for their time with a small stipend.\nMore information can be found on the DHReSCU website. Please share with your networks!\nDHTech at DH2024 - Take the Survey! At this year\u0026rsquo;s DH conference at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA, we held a mini-conference titled “DH Inside Out” about the technical aspects of DH projects. We had an amazing lineup of presenters (thank you all!) with many interesting talks and discussions. In fact, it went so well that we plan to do it again next year! Stay tuned for the call for participation and call for reviewers.\nIf you have 5 minutes, please fill out our post-mini-conference survey. Even if you didn’t attend, we are interested to know why you didn’t attend and what would be valuable to you in the future.\nIn addition to our mini-conference, we also had a lunch meetup with pizza (thank you ADHO for the funds!) and the DHippo Challenge! The best part is that we still have DHippos. Do you want one? Simply write a short blog post for our DHTech website and we’ll try to get one to you. Contact us in Slack or via email (dhtech.community@gmail.com).\nTo conclude, we really enjoyed seeing new and familiar faces, many interesting discussions, and are looking forward to DH2025!\nUpcoming Deadline Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on December 31. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website. Get Involved! Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there. Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form. Latest Blog Posts Coming Soon: a Couple of Exciting DH Apps by Aleks Kaye Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Survey by DHTech DHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs as soon as they are submitted. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the steering committee at dhtech.community@gmail.com.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nWe wish you a peaceful end of year and a happy new year! The DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2024-12-31T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/12/31/2024-december-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech December Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech is running a short survey to better understand the experiences and needs of anyone doing technical work in the digital humanities!\nSurvey Link\nDo you:\nwrite code or do coding-related work for digital humanities projects? manage software engineering projects in the digital humanities? develop computational methods for digital humanities research? If so and if you are over 18, please consider completing the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering survey! It should only take about 10 to 15 minutes of your time.\nTake the Survey!\n","date":"2024-11-20T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/11/20/dhtech-survey-2024/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","whatshappening"],"title":"Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Survey"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/adayinthelifeof/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"ADayInTheLifeOf"},{"author":"Aleks Kaye","body":"Jisedai Reader, presented by Dr Yuta Hashimoto is an app that can be described as a social media platform for book lovers. The app encourages readers to read and share their impressions about digitised books held at the National Museum in Japan and thus participate in social reading, which can lead to deeper connection and understanding of the material they consume. Unlike the social media platforms that we are used to, however, Jisedai Reader has inbuilt features designed to counter the echo-chamber effect. There is no way to follow other readers and constantly be faced with like-minded opinions, instead being presented with comments about the read books from an array of different readers on the platform. Each reader can choose to share their reflections about the books with others or to use the platform privately. Dr Hashimoto and the Jisedai Reader team hope to release the app to the general public by the end of the year. Currently, the beta version is available for iOS only and can be found by following this link: Jisedai Reader\nBooksnake, presented by Dr Sean Fraga is an object viewer that aims to retain for the user the embodied aspects of the digitised object. The aim is to mobilise the capabilities of phones and tablets to encourage better engagement with archival collections. During the presentation, Dr Fraga connected to the digitised collection of the Library of Congress and, from there, took a scan of a newspaper to show us how, using Booksnake, this document would look if it was placed in their office. Through the use of augmented reality, we were able to flick through the pages of the newspaper and be made aware of the actual size of the physical newspaper held in the archive. We could pin a virtual map on our wall or roll out an ancient scroll in our corridor. Presenting objects in live size relies either on physical dimensions included in the metadata or digitisation resolution and pixel dimensions. To reassure those concerned with privacy issues, neither the app creators nor Apple collect nor store the data of the rooms or other background space used during an augmented reality session using Booksnake. Booksnake is compatible with collections accessible through IIIF. The app has been used by Dr Fraga in the classroom, where students reflected that it gave them \u0026ldquo;the feeling of actually seeing the real thing up close\u0026rdquo;. A beta version of Booksnake for iPhone and iPad is available on the project\u0026rsquo;s website: BookSnake . Full release is planned for later this year. The creators also plan to release an Android-compatible version eventually.\n","date":"2024-11-02T18:45:24Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/11/02/exciting-dh-apps/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf","DHippoChallenge","conference"],"title":"Coming Soon: a Couple of Exciting DH Apps"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/dhippochallenge/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"DHippoChallenge"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"You might have noticed that you didn’t find a lovely newsletter in your inbox in August of this year. We will try to make it up to you by putting some extra effort into this one. We planned on starting out with a programmer joke for Halloween, however, turns out they are all really bad. Here is one that came the closest to being funny:\nWhy did the scarecrow become a successful software developer?\nBecause he was outstanding in his field!\n🙈\nBut let’s move on. We have a newsletter packed with (hopefully not too spooky) updates about your DHTech Community. Enjoy!\nDHTech at DH2024 - Take the Survey! At this year\u0026rsquo;s DH conference at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA, we held a mini-conference titled “DH Inside Out” about the technical aspects of DH projects. We had an amazing lineup of presenters (thank you all!) with many interesting talks and discussions. In fact, it went so well that we plan to do it again next year! Stay tuned for the call for participation and call for reviewers.\nIf you have 5 minutes, please fill out our post-mini-conference survey. Even if you didn’t attend, we are interested to know why you didn’t attend and what would be valuable to you in the future.\nIn addition to our mini-conference, we also had a lunch meetup with pizza (thank you ADHO for the funds!) and the DHippo Challenge! The best part is that we still have DHippos. Do you want one? Simply write a short blog post for our DHTech website and we’ll try to get one to you. Contact us in Slack or via email (dhtech.community@gmail.com).\nTo conclude, we really enjoyed seeing new and familiar faces, many interesting discussions, and are looking forward to DH2025!\nUS-RSE’24 The second annual US Research Software Engineering Conference (US-RSE’24) took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico from October 15 to 17. While vastly outnumbered, some DH research software engineers did attend and even organized a Birds of a Feather session on “RSEs in domain-specific ecosystems.” We talked about how working as a research software engineer differs depending on the domain, especially when comparing digital humanities to a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and math). It was an engaging and interesting 90 minutes discussion. US-RSE’25 will be held in Philadelphia next year, so mark your calendars!\nDHTech RSE Survey In 2019, DHTech ran a survey to better understand the DHTech and DH RSE communities. Five years later, we are preparing another survey to see how the field has changed. Please join the #dhtech-survey-2024 Slack channel if you want to shape the survey questions or help with reviewing and analyzing the results. Otherwise, keep an eye out for the survey, which we will launch later in November!\nDHReSCU is looking for Projects and Consultants Thanks to a Chair’s grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arizona State University in collaboration with colleagues from Princeton University and Harvard University is exploring the development of a Digital Humanities Research Software Consulting Unit (DHReSCU). This virtual unit will provide digital humanities researchers with the opportunity to consult experienced DH RSEs during the project planning and design phase to create a software development plan. To that end, DHReSCU is looking for projects and consultants. Consultants as well as projects will be compensated for their time with a small stipend.\nMore information can be found on the DHReSCU website.\nSubmit Code For Review The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on December 31. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website. If you have any questions about what can and cannot be reviewed, please get in touch with the working group in Slack in the #code-review-wg channel or send an email to dhtech.community@gmail.com. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please fill out the reviewer application form.\nBecome a Code Review Facilitator Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Don’t despair, we are looking for people interested in facilitating code reviews! No technical knowledge is required; all you need are some organizational skills. Facilitating a review involves scheduling kick-off and recap meetings and sending out a few emails. We have templates and checklists to help you along the way. It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can also sign up using our facilitator application form.\nDHTech Steering Committee Nominations DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group since 2021. For the upcoming two-year term (2025-2026), three seats on the Steering Committee need to be filled. Any member of DHTech is eligible to nominate themselves for one of the spots. To give people an idea of what it involves to be on the Steering Committee, we compiled a blog post that summarizes the key responsibilities and tasks of the Steering Committee. We hope that this will encourage some people to nominate themselves as candidates.\nTell us About Your Career Path Those of you who attended DH2023 may remember we organized a panel on DH RSE careers. Since there is still no established career path for this work, it’s important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear more of those stories and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nLatest Blog Posts EditionCrafter at DH Inside Out by Nick Laiacona DHReSCU Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Support Research Software Projects by Julia Damerow, Cole Crawford, Rebecca Sutton Koeser DHTech Steering Committee Nominations 2024 by DHTech Steering Committee Recently published: ‘Code Review in Digital Humanities’ by Julia Damerow, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Malte Vogl DHTech Job Board If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs as soon as they are submitted. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the steering committee at dhtech.community@gmail.com.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2024-10-31T14:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/10/31/2024-october-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech October Newsletter"},{"author":"Julia Damerow, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Malte Vogl","body":"Expanding on a poster presented at DH2022, Julia Damerow, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Jeffrey C. Carver, and Malte Vogl have published a paper in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities describing the importance of code review for humanities research software and the work of the DHTech Community Code Review Working Group to address that need.\n\u0026ldquo;Code Review in Digital Humanities\u0026rdquo; by Julia Damerow, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Jeffrey C. Carver, and Malte Vogl Software and computational methods offer tremendous possibilities for digital humanities research, both accelerating existing work and opening up entirely new questions. However, software also has the potential to introduce new kinds of errors into the research workflow. How do we know that the software developed for a digital humanities project is error free and does what we think it does? Code review is a widespread technique to improve software quality and reduce the number of flaws, where a programmer other than the author reviews and comments on the source code. However, given that many digital humanities developers work in developer teams of one, code review is often not possible. In this article, we share progress and insights from an effort to establish a community code review process for digital humanities, and provide background to help understand the need and potential impacts of this work.\nJulia Damerow, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Jeffrey C Carver, Malte Vogl, Code review in digital humanities, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2024; fqae052, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae052.\n","date":"2024-10-31T09:00:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/10/31/2024-paper-code-review/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Recently published: 'Code Review in Digital Humanities'"},{"author":"DHTech Steering Committee","body":"DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group since 2021. For the upcoming two-year term (2025-2026), three seats on the Steering Committee need to be filled. Any member of DHTech is eligible to nominate themselves for one of the spots. To give people an idea of what it involves to be on the Steering Committee, this blog post will summarize the key responsibilities and tasks of the Steering Committee. We hope that this will encourage some people to nominate themselves as candidates.\nWhat does the Steering Committee do? The DHTech Steering Committee supports the DHTech community by planning events, maintaining the community website and Slack workspace, and providing a contact for ADHO in regards to our Special Interest Group (SIG) status. For example, we have organized workshops and panels at ACH2021, DH2022, DH2023, and DH2024 as well as presented posters. We have organized virtual meetups for the DHTech community to discuss topics and present projects. We also maintain the DHTech website and mailing list, and complile a bi-monthly newsletter.\nWhile the Steering Committee members contribute to these activities in form of creating content and organizing meetups, workshops, etc., part of the responsibility is simply finding people to take ownership of certain projects, being on top of the tasks that need attention, and providing an overall vision of how DHTech can support its community. The Steering Committee also decides what to do with the small budget that we receive from ADHO for being a SIG.\nWhat is the time commitment? The Steering Committee meets virtually monthly (currently on the last Thursday of every month at 9am ET/3pm CET). Usually an agenda is being sent out prior to the meeting with discussion points. Our meetings are typically one hour long. Besides that, being part of the Steering Committee involves a few hours a month to plan events such as the DHTech meetups or conference workshops, write blog posts, participate in subgroups, maintain the DHTech website, and compiling the newsletter.\nAm I the right person to be on the Steering Committee? If you have a few hours each month to give to DHTech and are a DHTech member (no matter when you joined), then yes, you are! There is no other requirement to be on the Steering Committee except a desire to support the community and help DHTech grow.\nWhat do I need to do to nominate myself? If you want to nominate yourself as a candidate for the DHTech Steering Committee, please fill out this form. You will need to provide your name, affiliation, and a short statement (e.g. about who you are and why you want to be on the DHTech steering committee).\nWhat’s the nomination deadline? Nominations are open until Friday, November 15, 2024.\nCan I get involved in other ways? Yes! There is the Code Review Working Group and the Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group that both meet monthly if that is of interest to you. Or you can join our bi-monthly meetups. We also always welcome blog posts for our website. If you have specific ideas of things you would like to do, please post them on Slack or contact a member of the Steering Committee directly.\n","date":"2024-10-31T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024-sc-nominations/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Steering Committee Nominations 2024"},{"author":"Julia Damerow, Cole Crawford, Rebecca Sutton Koeser","body":" We are honored to announce that we have been awarded a $30,000 Chair’s Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will create a pilot for a Digital Humanities Research Software Consulting Unit (DHReSCU). DhReSCU’s mission will be to aid early-stage digital humanities research software projects in developing a technical implementation plan.\nThe grant provided by NEH will help the DHReSCU pilot program determine the extent and needs for a consulting unit in DH research software. The resulting feedback and project outcomes of DHReSCU will shape its future operations.\nTo learn more about DHReSCU and read the full announcement, read the full announcement.\n","date":"2024-10-07T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/10/07/dhrescu-grant-announcement/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"DHReSCU Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Support Research Software Projects"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech October Meetup on Code Review and AI Our October DHTech Meetup will be on October 10, 2024, at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will briefly introduce the DHTech Code Review Working Group and then talk about how AI tools can support code review, in general and in digital humanities specifically. Are you interested in the work of the working group, becoming a facilitator or reviewer? Do you have experience with AI code review tools? Do you just want to hear about other people’s experiences? Come join us and register here!\n","date":"2024-09-11T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/09/11/dhtech-october-meetup-on-code-review-and-ai/","section":"news","tags":["event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech October Meetup on Code Review and AI"},{"author":"Nick Laiacona","body":"EditionCrafter at DH Inside Out At the DH Inside Out Workshop at DH2024, we presented EditionCrafter, a tool for creating digital critical editions and archives. EditionCrafter provides a way to build high quality web based user interfaces for transcriptions and translations that accompany images of the primary sources. The tool comes in two parts: a command line interface and a React component library.\nThe command line tool is used during the build step to turn a TEI/XML file into a IIIF Manifest and a set of textual fragments, one per layer per page. These can then be put on any type of static web server, including GitHub Pages.\nThe React component then consumes the generated manifest to display the edition. It is provided both as a NPM package for inclusion in a React App and a UMD build suitable for plain HTML/JS/CSS websites.\nDH Inside Out provided the perfect forum for this talk. We were able to dive into the technical details of the tool and even do a live coding demo. We hope that other software developers working in the Digital Humanities on similar projects will find this tool useful and we welcome feedback.\n","date":"2024-08-30T09:00:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/08/30/edition-crafter-dh2024/","section":"blog","tags":["DHippoChallenge","conference"],"title":"EditionCrafter at DH Inside Out"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHippo Blog Post Challenge Our DHippos need homes!\nDHTech has DHippos for DHTech contributors. And you can get one!\nWrite a short blog post about anything related to the technical side of DH by the end of the DH2024 conference! Open a pull request or send it to us directly (dhtech.community@gmail.com). Get a hippo! Yes, it\u0026rsquo;s that easy!\n","date":"2024-08-07T09:00:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/08/07/dhippo-challenge/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening","conference"],"title":"DHippo Challenge"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DH Inside Out - Program From August 6-9, 2024, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics.\nWe received a great number of high quality submissions, showing the importance of providing a venue for technically focused talks. We were able to accept 16 submissions to be included in the mini-conference. We thank all the submitters and reviewers for their work!\nAgenda - Monday, August 5, 9:00am to 4:30pm Session 1 - Moderator: Malte Vogl 9:00am - 9:20am DHTech Steering Committee Welcome 9:20am - 9:40am Bryan Tarpley\nCorpora: A Dataset Studio for the Digital Humanities This session will showcase Corpora, an open-source, web-based tool created by the author for allowing humanities researchers to conveniently create, manage, and explore their datasets; while also serving as a dynamically generated backend (REST API) for 3rd-party tools or public facing websites. A single instance of Corpora running on modest hardware currently serves data behind the scenes for the New Variorum Shakespeare, the Carlyle Letters Online, the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, and the Advanced Research Consortium. The author will also survey the tech stack comprising Corpora, which includes a multi-model database architecture relying on MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Neo4J. 9:40am-10:00am Adam Porter Folium\nFolium is a Python library that facilitates the creation of interactive HTML maps with Leaflet.js. Working with Leaflet directly requires some knowledge of Javascript and HTML, but Folium allows mapmakers to work entirely within the Python environment to create a wide variety of maps. Drawing on a couple of different datasets, my presentation will provide a brief overview of the types of maps Folium creates before delving more deeply into choropleth maps. I will discuss how to establish useful color scales when the data distribution is uneven and has significant positive (or negative) skews. 10:00am-10:20am Nilo Pedrazzini GramTypix: a Python pipeline for subtoken-based language typology and probabilistic semantic mapping from parallel corpora GramTypix is a Python-based pipeline designed for linguistic typology and probabilistic semantic mapping from massively parallel corpora. It employs a subtoken-based approach to capture cross-linguistic variation in constructions, encoded both lexically and morphologically. The method integrates lexical associations with character n-grams from multiple languages to build semantic maps based on both lexical items and morphological markers, while automatically considering potential allomorphs as one marker. The emphasis is on customizable components in n-gram searches and on statistical analysis techniques, such as multidimensional scaling and geostatistical interpolation (Kriging), now standard in typological research. 10:20am-10:40am Rebecca Koeser\nSimulating risk attitudes and rationality using agent-based modeling This talk will present technical details from a research project using agent-based modeling to explore the theory of risk-weighted rational decision making and risk attitudes in the context of game theory. I will share an overview of the development process used for the project, and then focus on three software engineering challenges: managing code for three similar simulations; testing methods with probabilistic outcomes; and problems of scale for batch running simulations across a large number of parameter combinations. 10:40am-11:00am Break Session 2 - Moderator: Cole Crawford 11:00am-11:20am Julia Damerow, Rebecca S. Koeser, Malte Vogl\nBuilding a Community for DH Code Review Code review is a commonly used practice in software development. In a code review, a developer who is not the author of a piece of code, reads through the code and makes suggestions on how to improve it, asks questions where the work is unclear, and points out cases that may not be handled. In digital humanities, many developers writing code for a research project do not work in teams, which poses the question, how is it possible to integrate code review effectively in this situation? Our talk will discuss the DHTech working group on code review that is aiming to address this question by building a community for peer code review. We will share the successes and challenges the working group has faced, and our experiences and lessons learnt from facilitating code reviews. 11:20am-11:40am Sam Blickhan\nFunding maintenance and sustaining free, open-source DH tools on the Zooniverse platform This presentation will describe an NEH-funded project to review key digital humanities resources on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform in preparation for plans to scale. We will describe the technical motivations, the code audit and survey design process, and early results of the user surveys. It will dig into the complexities of maintaining and sustaining free, open-source software in an environment where funding is traditionally tied to innovation, and how we balance technical necessities with user needs. We hope that audience members will leave understanding our approach to code maintenance and community preference, and what opportunities exist for funding DH tools. 11:40am-12:00pm Julia Damerow\nEmbracing Mistakes, Accepting Imperfection Research software is in many cases developed by people who learn the craft of software engineering while they are developing the software. What are the consequences of this situation, in which the developers of a piece of code are not expert software engineers? I will give examples of projects I have worked on in which mistakes and decisions were made that have negatively influenced the development even years later. I believe that it is important to be open about the mistakes and bad decisions we make along the way to encourage every member of the community to share their experiences and their code, so we can learn from each other in order to create trustworthy research software that creates reliable results. 12:00pm-12:20pm Jose Hernandez, David Nelson, Julia Damerow\nDHTech Education \u0026 Training Working Group The DHTech Interest Group has established the Education and Training Working Group to address the identification of necessary competencies for DH software developers and the creation of educational resources tailored for our community. This session shall inform attendees of the ongoing labors of the working group, which have focused on the consolidation and creation of materials for digital project organization and tangible digital skills such as Python packaging and the implementation of documentation. In addition, a discussion space will be provided to identify the areas of focus for the next year by the community and gauge interest for additional contributors. 12:20pm-1:30pm Lunch Break Session 3 - Moderator: Rebecca Sutton Koeser 1:30pm-1:50pm Julian Gonggrijp\nThe READ-IT interface: RDF throughout The READ-IT interface is a central hub through which users upload, annotate and search through sources containing reading testimonies. This web application is unusual in its thorough adoption of linked data (RDF). Even the data model is dynamically read from an OWL ontology, so the client can offer appropriate controls to the user while staying agnostic of the problem domain. Hence, the client may be considered an advanced reasoner. We examine some of the abstractions employed to make this possible and some of the challenges encountered while attempting to embed our application in the existing web of linked open data. 1:50pm-2:10pm Malte Vogl\nTippingPigs - Serious games as communication device between scientists, programmers and the public In this tool presentation, we will introduce the game Tipping Pigs. The game was initially developed as a science outreach exercise, with the goal to communicate the intricacies of cascading tipping points to general audiences. Developed in the opensource framework Godot, the games source code is available at Gitlab and can be played online on Itch.io. The game interface is in German, but should be more or less self-explaining. In the tool presentation, we will present the game motivation and logic and present our argument for a stronger integration of game development and scientific inquiry. 2:10pm-2:30pm Jose Hernandez\nParallel Processing in DH Projects: Web Scraping with Python This session will discuss the application of parallel processing methods for digital humanities research by showcasing a web-scraping project on online extremism. Here we will explain two methods: the Python multiprocessing module and SLURM job arrays for the use of supercomputing systems. The example project extracted 2.5 million URLs, each corresponding to one forum, and then scraped these to compile 15 million posts for future data analysis. The presentation aims to illustrate parallelism as another tool for DH software developers and provide a comprehensive guide for identifying projects that could benefit from parallel processing in the attendees’ areas of research. 2:30pm-2:50pm Ashley Dennis-Henderson Using Regular Expressions and Optimisation to Create a Method for Automatically Extracting Dates from War Diaries Analysing historic diaries using natural language processing techniques is advantageous as they contain temporal information regarding the sequence the text was written. However, dates within such diaries are not always written consistently, and can be challenging and time consuming to extract. Using a collection of Australian World War I diaries as a case study, we have devised a method for automatically extracting dates using a combination of regular expressions and optimisation. This talk explores this method, focusing on the optimisation program format, the method’s accuracy, and the use of a GUI to manually create a testing data set. 2:50pm-3:00pm Break Session 4 - Moderator: Robert Casties 3:00pm-3:20pm Mees van Stiphout\nI-Analyzer – A Digital Text Corpus Tool for All Forever? I-Analyzer is a text corpus analysis tool that implements distant reading functionalities for a wide range of corpora, from historical newspapers to funerary inscriptions. Over six years of continual development has given us some insight into how a research software can grow in size and scope based on the demand from researchers, as well as into some of the challenges that come from the discrepancy between the project-based funding and the continual need for maintenance. During this session we hope to not only share these insights, but also hear how others have dealt with these challenges. 3:20pm-3:40pm Keli Du\nSoftware development begins when the code is complete: Lessons learnt from the development of Pydistinto In corpus and computational linguistics as well as in the digital humanities, there are a variety of measures of distinctiveness (also known as keyness measures) that can be used for comparative text analysis. In our talk, we will first introduce our Python package Pydistinto, give an overview of the nine implemented measures, describe the parameters that need to be set, and explain the process of comparing a target corpus with a comparison corpus as well as visualizing the results. With this in mind, we would like to focus on sharing our experiences with the design and development of the program. 3:40pm-4:00pm Nick Laiacona\nPublishing Digital Editions with EditionCrafter EditionCrafter is an open source tool for publishing digital editions encoded in TEI XML. It is based on code from the digital critical edition \"Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France\" published by the Making and Knowing Project at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. EditionCrafter can generate sophisticated diplomatic renderings of text side-by-side with a deep zoom window of the original folios. There are also built-in functions for variorums, editorial notes, and glossaries. In this presentation, we will talk about how we created EditionCrafter and demonstrate how to incorporate it into your website. 4:00pm-4:20pm Trent Wintermeier\nAVAnnotate AVAnnotate is an application and workflow, designed by Dr. Tanya Clement and Brumfield Labs, which allows users to build digital exhibits of annotated audiovisual artifacts. AVAnnotate connects open source tools for annotation (such as Audacity), audiovisual management (Aviary), public code and document repositories (GitHub), and the AVAnnotate web application to create and share IIIF manifests and annotations via static, multi-page, online exhibits. In this Tools Presentation, we will discuss how the technical infrastructure of AVAnnotate represents a new kind of ecosystem where exchange is opened between institutional repositories, annotation software, online repositories and publication platforms, and all kinds of users. 4:20pm-4:30pm DHTech Steering Committee\nGoodbye and Thank You ","date":"2024-06-14T09:00:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/06/14/dh-inside-out-dh2024-program/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening","conference"],"title":"DH Inside Out - Mini-conference at DH2024 - Program"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"We’re almost halfway through the year, time for another DHTech newsletter! Read on to find out all about the latest happenings in your DHTech community.\nDH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” This year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out” on Monday, August 5 from 9am to 4:30pm. The program for the mini-conference is out now! Go check it out and join us for a packed day full of interesting technical-focused talks.\nDon’t forget to register for our mini-conference when registering for DH2024! It is listed as a pre-conference workshop.\nAnd there will be Swag! We will bring new stickers and other swag. So make sure to stop by our mini-conference and say hi. And if you have contributed to one of our projects or working groups, there might even be a small token of gratitude waiting for you!\nCall for BoF Panelists at US-RSE’24 Check out the call for panelists for a US-RSE’24 Birds of a Feather conversation “RSEs in domain-specific ecosystems” about how the experiences of research software engineers differ by domain. The conversation will engage questions such as:\nHow do differences in research domains impact the training needs of RSEs? What types of institutional support and infrastructure are needed to support RSEs and scholars in the humanities and social sciences vs. other domains? How might DH RSE experience benefit and inform RSE roles in other domains?\nFor more details and to indicate your interest to be a panelist, please complete this nomination form by July 15, 2024.\nCode Review Call The next quarterly deadline to submit code for review is coming up on June 30. Check out the website for instructions on how to submit your code. If you have any questions about what can and cannot be reviewed, please get in touch with the working group in Slack in the #code-review-wg channel or send an email to dhtech.community@gmail.com. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please fill out this form.\nNot ready to submit your code for review? Please let us know why, by filling out this form. It would greatly help us to understand how we can serve the needs of the community better and how to improve our process.\nJournal of Open Humanities Data - Special Issue Check out this call for papers for a special issue of the Journal of Open Humanities Data: \u0026ldquo;Amplifying #GLAM #Collections: Scalable and Inclusive Data Practices.\u0026rdquo;\nThe editorial team is looking for folks in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, Records and allied disciplines to submit either short data papers or full research papers — this special issue is being edited by GLAM workers for GLAM workers.\nTell us About Your Career Path Those of you who attended DH2023 may remember we organized a panel on DH RSE careers. Since there is still no established career path for this work, it’s important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear more of those stories and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nDHTech Job Board We decided that it is time for a DHTech job board! If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We will add a new section to our website that lists current jobs as soon as we have the first job posting submitted. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the steering committee at dhtech.community@gmail.com.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2024-06-12T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/06/12/2024-june-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech June Newsletter"},{"author":"Malte Vogl","body":"Once upon a time, I started programming from a test-driven development perspective, but then there were more and more projects and fewer and fewer tests. I finally took the time to start writing tests again\u0026hellip;\nActually, it was not only that there were no tests, I also managed to misconfigure my liniting backend a few months ago and never investigated why it didn\u0026rsquo;t work anymore. You can imagine how my code looked after three months of no linting. The project I was finally writing tests for is a simulation model that uses the agent based modelling (ABM) framework mesa, a Python package. My goal was to not only follow basic best practices of trustworthy code, like good documentation, clean code, and providing tutorials, I also wanted to write an ODD (Overview, Design concepts, Details) protocol. This best practice for ABMs aims at providing a full explaination of the assumptions that go into a simulation. It is recommended, for example, by the CoMSES Network.\nI had already finished a large portion of my ODD document, when I realized a conceptual error in the code. And even worse, that error was invalidating my assumptions! So I wrote a small test for the invalidated assumption. Which failed\u0026hellip; Investigating further, I was confused by my own code, so I started to fix the linter setup. Oh boy! It took half a week to clean the code, write tests for all routines, and rewrite part of the ODD. But after adding the coverage report to my tox routine and slowly reaching almost 100% coverage, I not only fixed the error in my assumption, but managed to increase the performance of the simulation massivly.\nSo, while time consuming, I actually love testing now. And not only that, my linter Ruff is now a good friend and not an enemy any more. Well, at least until I revisit another old project that has not been linted for a few months\u0026hellip; ;-)\n","date":"2024-04-24T18:45:24Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/04/24/love-testing/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf"],"title":"Dr. Strangelove - or how I learned to love testing"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Check out the latest news from your favorite community ;) Read on to learn more about what is happening in the DHTech space!\nDH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” This year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out” on Monday, August 5 from 9am to 4:30pm. There is still one day left to submit to the mini-conference! You can find the full call and instructions on how to submit on our website.\nThere is also still time to volunteer as a reviewer! You can sign up using this form.\nAnd lastly, don’t forget to register for our mini-conference when registering for DH2024! It is listed as a pre-conference workshop.\nDHTech Job Board We decided that it is time for a DHTech job board! If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We will add a new section to our website that lists current jobs as soon as we have the first job posting submitted. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the steering committee at dhtech.community@gmail.com.\nLatest Blog Posts Dr. Strangelove - or how I learned to love testing by Malte Vogl\nDHTech Working Groups In case you didn’t know, DHTech has working groups that anyone is welcome to join. At the moment, there are two working groups:\nCode Review Working Group\nJoin the channel #code-review-wg and introduce yourself if you like to join the group! Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group\nJoin the channel #education-wg and introduce yourself if you like to join the group! Is there a topic you’d like to discuss and work on on a regular basis? Consider forming a working group! Check out our working group page for more information. As a bonus, working groups can apply to use some of the money we get from ADHO as a SIG to further their work!\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2024-04-12T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/04/12/2024-april-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech April Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” The workshop program for DH2024 is now available online. We therefore decided to extend the submission deadline for \"DH Inside Out\" on last time to April 26, 2024 to give people not part of DHTech a chance to sumbit. You can submit your contribution here. This year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects.\nWe are also looking for volunteers to review submissions. Please see the full call on our website for instructions on how to submit presentation proposals and on how to sign up as a reviewer.\n","date":"2024-04-11T08:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/04/11/final-deadline-extension-for-dh2024-mini-conference-dh-inside-out/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","conference"],"title":"Final deadline extension for DH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out”"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech April Meetup on LLMs Our next DHTech meetup will be on April 18 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will be talking about how large language models (LLM) affect the different aspects of research software engineering. What does their existence mean for teaching software engineering especially in the DH context? How does the way we develop code for research change? How do LLMs change the role of the research software engineer or does it not impact it at all? If you want to give a lightning talk about your perspective please get in touch with us via Slack or by email (dhtech.community@gmail.com). We would like to hear from you and your experiences! You can register for the call on Zoom here.\n","date":"2024-04-03T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/04/03/dhtech-april-meetup-on-llms/","section":"news","tags":["event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech April Meetup on LLMs"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” Extended to March 31, 2024! You can submit your contribution here. This year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects.\nWe are also looking for volunteers to review submissions. Please see the full call on our website for instructions on how to submit presentation proposals and on how to sign up as a reviewer.\n","date":"2024-03-14T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/03/14/deadline-extension-for-dh2024-mini-conference-dh-inside-out/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","conference"],"title":"Deadline extension for DH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out”"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"It’s the first DHTech newsletter of 2024! We’re excited to share the latest and greatest news from our community with you, so read on.\nNew Steering Committee Member: Welcome Jose! Jose Hernandez joined the DHTech Steering Committee in January. Jose is a Digital Humanities Technology Specialist at Florida State University. He is heavily involved with the DHTech working group on education and training and we are excited to have him on board.\nDH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” This year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects. The deadline for submitting contributions is coming up fast: March 15, 2024!\nWe are also looking for volunteers to review submissions. Please see the full call on our website for instructions on how to submit presentation proposals and on how to sign up as a reviewer.\nTell us About Your Career Path Those of you who attended DH2023 may remember we organized a panel on DH RSE careers. Since there is still no established career path for this work, it’s important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear more of those stories and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.\nDHTech April Meetup on LLMs Our next DHTech meetup will be on April 18 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will be talking about how large language models (LLM) affect the different aspects of research software engineering. What does their existence mean for teaching software engineering especially in the DH context? How does the way we develop code for research change? How do LLMs change the role of the research software engineer or does it not impact it at all? If you want to give a lightning talk about your perspective please get in touch with us via Slack or by email (dhtech.community@gmail.com). We would like to hear from you and your experiences! You can register for the call on Zoom here.\nCode Review Call The DHTech Code Review Working Group has been working hard on improving their process. A description of the current and improved process can be found on their website. They also have switched to quarterly submission deadlines for projects who would like to have their code reviewed. The next submission deadline is coming up on March 31. Check out the website for instructions on how to submit your code. If you have any questions about what can and cannot be reviewed, please get in touch with the working group in Slack in the #code-review-wg channel or send an email to dhtech.community@gmail.com. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please fill out this form.\nWorking Group Updates DHTech now has two working groups: the Code Review Working Group and the newly-formed Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group. The Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group focuses on creating a collection of educational materials in topics such as version control, documentation practices, and packaging while highlighting DH use cases. The group meets on the second Thursday of every month 9am to 10am ET (3pm to 4pm CET). Please join the #education-wg channel on Slack or get in touch with Jose Hernandez (jah22q@fsu.edu) if you are interested in joining.\nWe have also added some general guidelines for forming and maintaining working groups. Please check out our working group page for more information.\nLatest Blog Posts “How can you trust your code?” by Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Jose Angel Hernandez, and Mareike Bassenge. “New Steering Committee Member” by Jose Angel Hernandez. DHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\nYours truly,\nThe DHTech Steering Committee\n","date":"2024-03-12T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/03/12/2024-february-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech February Newsletter"},{"author":"Jose Hernandez","body":"Hello! My name is Jose Hernandez and I am very excited to be joining your DHTech Steering committee. I decided to join because I am very passionate about the use of emerging technologies in DH (supercomputing, quantum, etc.) and the creation of education materials at all preparation levels of our fields! I currently focus on these in my own work as a technology specialist at Florida State University’s Research Computing Center. I hope to be able to serve our community by continuing the good work and ongoing efforts of my colleagues. My main goal is to continue fostering a space where everybody can approach anybody and ask for help at any time. Community has always been an integral part of my growth as a person and academic, therefore I am looking forward to creating and contributing to such a space in my time on the committee.\nOutside of DH I love track and field and I have been a coach for over 6 years. I am also originally from Puerto Rico and like breaking my head learning new programming languages or human ones ( current challenges: FORTRAN and German)\nPlease feel free to reach out to me on Slack if you have anything to talk about concerning any DHTech work, particularly the Education \u0026amp; Training Working group, or if you just want to discuss any new DH methods ( I’m specially fond of historical network projects!).\n","date":"2024-02-28T19:01:41-05:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/02/28/new-steering-committee-member/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"New Steering Committee Member"},{"author":"Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Jose Angel Hernandez, and Mareike Bassenge","body":"At the DH2023 conference in Graz, Austria, a group of digital humanities academics and professionals gathered for a workshop titled “How can you trust your code?” organized by DHTech. The goal of the workshop was to identify and discuss issues related to the development, use, and reuse of research software in digital humanities and across humanities disciplines more broadly. We\u0026rsquo;ll be posting content compiled from the notes and resources gathered during the many productive conversations during that one-day workshop as a series of related blog posts over the next few months, and once they are all published, we\u0026rsquo;ll combine the content and publish it as a whitepaper authored by all workshop participants.\nOur goal in writing up those conversations is to document the main issues affecting those who write research software for digital humanities and those who utilize them in their research endeavors, and where possible to make recommendations.\nThe workshop was attended by a wide range of participants in a variety of roles. Those present included faculty and graduate students involved in teaching and research, some of whom fall into the researcher-developer category, as well as people working in technical roles such as Research Software Engineers.\nPoll results for participant roles from the workshop opening session The diversity of perspectives made it possible for a number of wide-ranging conversations, considering issues from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints (both computer science side and humanities) and practical goals (teaching, research, software engineering), identifying problems and proposing possible solutions. The range of expertise and perspectives present at the workshop was particularly valuable since Digital Humanities work requires numerous proficiencies, both technical and academic.\nIn a poll during the opening session, people generally said they trust other people\u0026rsquo;s code if it seems to be maintained.\nPoll results on trusting other people's code, from the workshop opening session However, when we asked what measures people take to check if code is trustworthy, we got a range of responses from trying the code out, reading through it, checking what kind of tests are present, checking the quality of the documentation, talking to the maintainers, and even concern that there are no AI-generated snippets.\nAs a group, we brainstormed and grouped the topics we thought were important to discuss, and held a number of different conversations in smaller breakout groups over the course of the day related to creation, use, reuse, and maintenance of software in the digital humanities. Towards the end of the day, we started the work to organize those conversations around these broad topics:\nCode quality Institutional and social structures Theoretical foundations of software development Documentation best practices Understanding AI and ‘black box’ tools and algorithms ","date":"2024-02-02T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2024/02/02/how-can-you-trust-your-code/","section":"blog","tags":null,"title":"How can you trust your code?"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech February Meetup on Agent-based Modeling Our next DHTech meetup will be on February 15, 2024 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will talk about agent-based modeling (ABM)! Are you using agent-based models for a project? Or are you interested in learning more about ABM? Do you have questions you would like to discuss like how to best design and calibrate a model? Come join us on Zoom! You can register here.\nWe are looking for people who would like to give a lightning talk about their ABM-based project! Please get in touch with the DHTech Steering Committee if you would be willing to talk about your project or a specific framework for about 5 minutes by emailing dhtech.community@gmail.com or by reaching out on Slack!\n","date":"2024-01-25T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2024/01/25/dhtech-february-meetup-on-agent-based-modeling/","section":"news","tags":["event","meetup"],"title":"DHTech February Meetup on Agent-Based Modeling"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"This is the last newsletter of 2023! While it might be the last, we have a lot of news and opportunities to share before we say goodbye to the year.\nSteering Committee Changes We are excited to announce that DHTech has a new steering committee member! Starting in 2024, Jose Hernandez will join the DHTech Steering Committee. Jose is a Digital Humanities Technology Specialist at Florida State University. We look forward to having his perspective on the steering committee.\nDH2024 Mini-conference “DH Inside Out” Next year in August, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects. We are also looking for volunteers to review submissions. Please see the full call here for instructions on how to submit presentation proposals and on how to sign up as a reviewer.\nDHLabs in DHTech Following from the DH2023 event \u0026ldquo;Labs for Labs: A participatory workshop on digital lab practices in the humanities and social sciences\u0026rdquo; there was a general consensus and keen interest among the participants to establish a means of communication and knowledge sharing for DH Labs. Due to the overlapping and complementary interests it was decided that joining forces with the existing DHTech community would be valuable and this has now been established as a channel called #dh-labs-community on the DHTech Slack. In the immediate period ahead, we hope this channel will enable us to follow up on the planned outcomes from the workshop, including the co-drafting of a manifesto for DH labs, and to arrange future gatherings for labs in 2024 and beyond.\nAodhán Kelly, Costas Papadopoulos (Maastricht University)\nArianna Ciula, Ginestra Ferraro, Pamela Mellen (King’s College London)\nNew Working Group Education \u0026amp; Training DHTech has a new working group on Education \u0026amp; Training. This working group will focus on education and training materials for people coding and developing software for digital humanities projects. If you are interested in joining the working group, please join the channel #education-wg on Slack and say hello!\nCall for Projects for RSE Consultation DHTech is looking for digital humanities project teams in the US planning to develop software who would benefit from consulting with a Research Software Engineer (RSE) on their technical implementation plan. Teams accepted for this call will be matched with an appropriate RSE. Teams must be willing to meet with their assigned consultant at least five times over the course of five months, and plan to start the development work of the software by the end of 2025. Accepted project teams will be paid a stipend of $1500 to compensate for the required time to provide feedback on the process. Please see the full call here, and share with any project teams you think would be interested.\nLatest Blog Posts \u0026ldquo;Call for Projects for RSE Consultation\u0026rdquo; by Julia Damerow, Cole Crawford, Rebecca Sutton Koeser. \u0026ldquo;DH Inside Out - Mini-conference at DH2024\u0026rdquo; by DHTech about DHTech’s DH2024 mini-conference. DHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\nHave a nice break and a happy new year!\n","date":"2023-12-21T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/12/21/2023-december-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech December Newsletter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Call for Submissions From August 6-9, 2024, DH2024 will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, USA. DHTech will hold a mini-conference at DH2024 themed “DH Inside Out”. Typical DH conference presentations are focussed on the research with a slight nod to the technical details; we want to flip that format and dive more deeply into the technical aspects of the work, while still keeping it in context of the research and domain specifics. To that end, we invite submissions of interest to the people who work on the technical aspects of DH projects, such as:\nimplementation and design specifics of packages and applications lessons learnt regarding the design and implementation of research software tool demonstrations from a technical perspective community and diversity topics specific to the technical DH community. Submissions should specify the desired format:\nPresentations: 20 minute talks including Q\u0026amp;A with the audience. Tool presentations: 10 minutes demonstrations followed by 10 minutes discussion with the audience. Other: do you have a format in mind you would like to try out? Please describe the format including length and audience engagement. Submissions should be 500 to 750 words in length. Links to relevant code and packages should be provided in the submission.\nSubmission deadline is March 15, 2024 March 31, 2024 April 26, 2024 (final deadline extension). Please submit using this form. Please be aware, we may ask you to resubmit to a different platform depending on the number of submissions we receive.\nPlease note that this mini-conference will be in-person only. If you can’t be present at the conference in person but would really like to present, please submit and add a note that you won’t be able to attend in-person. Depending on the number of submissions, we might be able to accept pre-recorded talks potentially followed by a Zoom discussion.\nCall for Reviewers We are looking for reviewers for submission to \u0026ldquo;DH Inside Out\u0026rdquo;. If you are willing to review two to three submissions between March 15 and March 31, 2024, please sign up using this form.\n","date":"2023-12-19T09:00:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/12/19/dh-inside-out-dh2024/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening","conference"],"title":"DH Inside Out - Mini-conference at DH2024"},{"author":"Julia Damerow, Cole Crawford, Rebecca Sutton Koeser","body":"DHTech is looking for digital humanities project teams in the US planning to develop software who would benefit from consulting with a Research Software Engineer (RSE) on their technical implementation plan. Teams accepted for this call will be matched with an appropriate RSE. Teams must be willing to meet with their assigned consultant at least five times over the course of five months, and plan to start the development work of the software by the end of 2025. Accepted project teams will be paid a stipend of $1500 to compensate for the required time to provide feedback on the process.\nPlease provide a one page description that includes:\nA general outline of your project and the software you plan to develop. How you plan to fund and staff the development work. If there are any RSE groups or other software development units at your institution you have access to. The timeline of your project. The composition of your team. The work that has been done so far towards developing the software for your project such as any prototypes developed or technical plans drafted. Any specific requirements or context a consultant would need to advise on the technical implementation plan for your project. Expected impact or value of an external RSE consultant for your project. We are particularly interested in projects at historically underserved institutions and institutions that do not have a research software engineering group. Projects should be in the planning stage with a firm intention to start development as soon as funding allows. We are not looking for projects enhancing existing software, but projects in the early phases of planning where most design decisions are still to be decided and consultation with an RSE would be most valuable. Our goal is to match experienced research software engineers with digital humanities projects that would like to develop software but do not have the expertise available to them to plan such a project. The research software engineer will not write the software but develop a sound software implementation plan in close collaboration with the project that can be used when applying for funding. We will handle matching up research software engineers and projects. Projects must be available to meet with their assigned RSE consultant and provide any information needed to develop a technical implementation plan.\nWe are submitting a proposal to pilot the RSE consulting workflow described above. Acceptance of our proposal is not guaranteed, so we cannot promise that any project teams will be matched with an RSE consultant. If funded, accepted projects will be involved in assessments to determine impact and value of implementing the consultancy workflow on a larger scale. As participants in a pilot, project teams and consultants will be expected to provide detailed feedback and outcomes during and after the consulting work, to feed into assessing and revising the workflow for potential implementation on a larger scale.\nPlease send any applications or questions to Julia Damerow (jdamerow@asu.edu).\n","date":"2023-11-29T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/11/29/call-for-projects-for-rse-consultation/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Call for Projects for RSE Consultation"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Happy Halloween! From DHTech straight to you some (hopefully not so spooky) news about what’s happening in the DHTech community.\nDH2024 DH2024 will be in Washington, D.C. from August 6-9, 2024. As a SIG, DHTech has a guaranteed spot on the program. The steering committee decided to use our spot for a mini-conference that focuses on technical talks, technical tool demos, lessons learnt, and related topics that present the technical side of DH projects. We are planning to have a separate call for submissions and would appreciate your thoughts and ideas before we release the call. Please let us know what kind of presentations you would be interested in submitting and seeing, what kind of feedback you would hope to get when presenting, and any other thoughts you might have by using this Google form.\nReport from the US-RSE’23 Birds of a Feather Session on Code Review Several DHTech members attended the inaugural US-RSE conference earlier this month in Chicago, an event by the US Research Software Engineer Association themed “Software-Enabled Discovery and Beyond.” While the majority of attendees hailed from STEM fields rather than the humanities or social sciences, common challenges, such as building sustainable and maintainable software, were universally recognized. The difficulty of building sustainable, maintainable, reproducible, and extensible software was a common refrain at the conference. Read more about DH-Tech’s participation in the conference on our blog.\nEducation and Training Working Group In our October DHTech meetup we talked about how DHTech can support training and education of research software engineering work in the Digital Humanities. Jose Hernandez gave an overview of his vision for a new DHTech working group that focuses on developing and sharing training and education resources. Many of us have developed tutorials, slides, or other materials to teach technical topics for DH developers and digital humanists in general that others could benefit from if those resources were made available. As a first outcome of the meetup, Jose created a Humanities Commons DHTech site to which people can upload their materials. Furthermore, we plan to meet bi-monthly with this new working group to explore further initiatives. Please join the #education-wg channel on Slack if you are interested in joining the working group.\nLatest Blog Posts Check out the latest blog posts on the DHTech website!\n\u0026ldquo;Reinventing the DHTech logo\u0026rdquo; by Rebecca Sutton Koeser about the redesign of our logo. \u0026ldquo;DHTech Participation at US-RSE Conference\u0026rdquo; by Cole Crawford about DHTech\u0026rsquo;s involvement in the first US Research Software Engineer Conference. DHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\n","date":"2023-10-31T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/10/31/october-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech October Newsletter"},{"author":"Cole Crawford","body":"Several DHTech members attended the inaugural US-RSE conference, an event by the US Research Software Engineer Association themed “Software-Enabled Discovery and Beyond.” While the majority of attendees hailed from STEM fields rather than the humanities or social sciences, common challenges, such as building sustainable and maintainable software, were universally recognized. The difficulty of building sustainable, maintainable, reproducible, and extensible software was a common refrain at the conference.\nJeffrey Carver, a DHTech member, conducted a half-day workshop on Software Engineering for Research Software Engineering (SE4RSE'23) alongside Neil Chue Hong and Miranda Mundt. Carver’s presentation on \u0026ldquo;Peer Code Review in Research Software: Enhancing Quality and Collaboration\u0026rdquo; explored the processes, challenges, and improvements required when RSEs conduct code reviews. His survey of code review practices revealed that code reviews regularly identify issues which are difficult to test or statically analyze; that many engineers have positive experiences with code review and that it improves team cohesion; and that most downsides of code review stem from social or incentive problems (too much time, misunderstanding criticism, difficult to find reviewers).\nDHTech steering committee members Cole Crawford and Jeffrey Tharsen organized a panel on Code Review for Research Software, featuring insights from Troy Comi, Jeffrey Carver, and Julia Damerow. Troy discussed creating a repo review initiative at Princeton to improve software quality prior to publication for researchers without access to an RSE in their group; Julia addressed code review as a team building and quality assurance practice in the context of the DHTech Code Review Working Group and her student workers at Arizona State University; and Jeffrey touched on the benefits and challenges of code review. The highlight of the panel was a full hour of lively, open discussion with conference attendees.\nLastly, we extend our gratitude and congratulations to Julia Damerow, a general chair of the event, for a successful US-RSE conference debut!\n","date":"2023-10-27T10:06:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/10/27/dhtech-at-usrse-conf/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Participation at US-RSE Conference"},{"author":"Rebecca Sutton Koeser","body":"Earlier this year, when we were getting ready to order DHTech swag to bring to the DH2023 conference and share with all of you, we hit a snag: we didn\u0026rsquo;t have vector versions of our logo, or even any high-resolution versions.\nOriginal DHTech logo The original DHTech logo was designed by Johannes Biermann and Alexander Steckel, and it was a servicable logo. We were grateful to have it, and it\u0026rsquo;s been useful. But when the opportunity came to revisit it, there was a sense that the logo communicated \u0026ldquo;tech\u0026rdquo; pretty well but not so much \u0026ldquo;humanities.\u0026rdquo; A few people also commented about the lack of color.\nSomehow, I got inspired to revisit and rework the logo. At first I started trying to trace and recreate the existing logo in Figma - but why trace a drawing of a gear manually when you can write code that to generate any number of different gears? I had been experimenting with drawing leaves in d3.js radial coordinates for one of my projects, so I already knew how to start.\nI\u0026rsquo;m embedding a cleaned up version of my Observable notebook so you can see how I generated it, and if you want you can play with the variables used to generate different gear-like shapes.\nI tinkered with d3.js in Observable and came up with something I liked that was fairly close to our old logo, and then I exported that as an SVG and pulled it into Figma. Because we wanted more color, I was experimenting with gradients and colors that would still suggest a metallic shine but not as monotone, and happened on a gradient that reminded me a bit of a CD-ROM. Once I had that idea, I went looking and found a set of Holographic gradients created by Lily Bather, and chose one that I thought worked well for our logo.\nNew DHTech logo I liked the curve of the letters in the original logo and how they fit inside the gear, but I was having trouble finding anything like that, or really any fonts with d and h that would fit nicely inside the curve of the gear.\nAs I was working on updating the logo, I got the idea to use two different fonts: one of them gesturing at older ways of writing and printing text and one that connected to the more technical and newer aspects of our work. I chose Goudy Bookletter 1911 by Barry Schwartz, which is published as an open-source font, and Ubuntu, which for me has associations with Linux and coding fonts.\nI love the new logo, with the juxtaposition of gear and CD-ROM, mechanism and media, history and technology. I hope you enjoy it, too. And if you haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any swag yet, keep an eye out for DHTech Steering Committee members at future conferences!\n","date":"2023-10-27T09:06:15-04:00","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/10/27/new-logo/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Reinventing the DHTech logo"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech October Meetup on Education and Training Our next DHTech meetup will be on October 5 at 9am ET/3pm CET. We will talk about how DHTech can support training and education of research software engineering work in the Digital Humanities. Jose Hernandez will give an overview of our vision for a new DHTech working group that focuses on developing and sharing training and education resources. Many of us have developed tutorials, slides, or other materials to teach technical topics for DH developers and digital humanists in general. How can we make them more widely available? How can we give credit for this important work? If you are interested in shaping a new working group, if you have insights about training and education that you would like to share, or if you simply want to participate in the discussion, please join us on Zoom (register here).\n","date":"2023-09-28T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/09/28/dhtech-october-meetup-on-education-and-training/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","event"],"title":"DHTech October Meetup on Education and Training"},{"author":"Cole Crawford","body":"DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group since 2021. For the upcoming two-year term (2024-2025), four seats on the Steering Committee need to be filled. Any member of DHTech is eligible to nominate themselves for one of the spots. Should we have more than four nomination, there will be an election. To give people an idea of what it involves to be on the Steering Committee, this blog post will summarize the key responsibilities and tasks of the Steering Committee. We hope that this will encourage some people to nominate themselves as candidates.\nWhat does the Steering Committee do? The DHTech Steering Committee supports the DHTech community by planning events, maintaining the community website and Slack workspace, and providing a contact for ADHO in regards to our Special Interest Group (SIG) status. For example, we have organized workshops and panels at ACH2021, DH2022, and DH2023 as well as presented posters. We have organized a few virtual meetups for the DHTech community to discuss topics and present projects. We also maintain the DHTech website (dhtech.github.io) and mailing list.\nWhile the Steering Committee members contribute to these activities in form of creating content and organizing meetups, workshops, etc., part of the responsibility is simply finding people to take ownership of certain projects, being on top of the tasks that need attention, and providing an overall vision of how DHTech can support its community. The Steering Committee also decides what to do with the small budget that we receive from ADHO for being a SIG.\nWhat is the time commitment? The Steering Committee meets virtually monthly (currently on the last Thursday of every month at 9am ET/3pm CET). Usually an agenda is being sent out prior to the meeting with discussion points. Our meetings are typically one hour long. Besides that, being part of the Steering Committee involves a few hours a month to plan events such as the DHTech meetups or conference workshops, write blog posts, participate in subgroups, and maintain the DHTech website.\nAm I the right person to be on the Steering Committee? If you have a few hours each month to give to DHTech and are a DHTech member (no matter when you joined), then yes, you are! There is no other requirement to be on the Steering Committee except a desire to support the community and help DHTech grow.\nWhat do I need to do to nominate myself? If you want to nominate yourself as a candidate for the 2023 DHTech Steering Committee elections, please fill out this form. You will need to provide your name, affiliation, and a short statement (e.g. about who you are and why you want to be on the DHTech steering committee).\nWhat’s the election timeline? Nominations are open until Friday, November 10, 2023. If we have four valid nominations and all candidates are still willing to serve on the committee, those candidates will be on the Steering Committee for the next two years starting in January 2024. Should we have more than four nominations, we will put the information about all candidates on our website. The election period will then be from November 20 to December 1. All DHTech members will be able to vote for one candidate. We will send out a membership confirmation email before November 20. If you do not get one but believe you are a member of DHTech, please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com).\nCan I get involved in other ways? Yes! There is the Code Review working group that meets monthly if that is of interest to you. Or you can join our bi-monthly meetups. If you have specific ideas of things you would like to do, please post them on Slack or contact a member of the Steering Committee directly.\n","date":"2023-09-28T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023-sc-elections/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Steering Committee Elections 2023"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/2simple2mention/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"2Simple2Mention"},{"author":"Diego Siqueira","body":"In the world of coding, teamwork is essential. Whether you\u0026rsquo;re building a software project or collaborating on an open-source repository, co-authoring Git commits and practicing pair programming can streamline your workflow and improve code quality.\nPair Programming and Co-authoring: A Dynamic Duo In pair programming, two developers work together at the same computer. One developer writes code while the other reviews and provides real-time feedback. This collaborative approach not only improves code quality but also fosters knowledge sharing and problem-solving skills.\nCo-authoring Git commits allows multiple developers to take credit for their contributions to a project. It\u0026rsquo;s a way to recognize and acknowledge the teamwork that goes into writing code. It also makes it clear who worked on what, helping with code review and debugging.\nBenefits of Co-authoring and Pair Programming Clarity: Easily see who contributed to each commit. Accountability: Everyone gets credit for their work. Collaboration: Encourages teamwork and effective code review. Knowledge Sharing: Pair programming enhances knowledge transfer. Faster Problem Solving: Two heads are often better than one. How to Co-author Git Commits Using the --trailer flag and the Co-authored-by: trailer allows you to clearly attribute multiple authors to a commit. This format is supported by both GitHub and GitLab. Here\u0026rsquo;s how to do it:\nCreate a New Branch: Start by creating a new branch in your Git repository where you\u0026rsquo;ll be working on your feature or bug fix. This helps keep your changes separate.\nWrite Your Code: Whether you\u0026rsquo;re working solo or with a coding partner, make your code changes as you normally would.\nCommit Your Changes: When you\u0026rsquo;re ready to commit your changes, include a short, descriptive commit message that explains the work you did. To add co-authors, use the --trailer flag with the Co-authored-by: trailer.\ngit commit -m \u0026#34;The commit message\u0026#34; --trailer \u0026#39;Co-authored-by: name \u0026lt;name@example.com\u0026gt;\u0026#39; If you\u0026rsquo;re adding multiple co-authors, give each co-author their own line and Co-authored-by: commit trailer.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it! Your commit now includes the Co-authored-by: tag, which clearly attributes contributions to the co-authors.\nStart Co-authoring and Pair Programming Today! Combining co-authoring Git commits with pair programming is a winning formula for collaborative coding. It promotes transparency, teamwork, and efficient code collaboration, all while enhancing your coding skills.\nSo, whether you\u0026rsquo;re working solo or with a coding partner, start using co-authors in your Git workflow and embrace the power of pair programming. Your coding journey will be more rewarding and productive than ever!\nStay tuned for more tech tips and tricks from DHtech. Happy coding!\nFurther reading Co-authoring Git commits Creating a commit with multiple authors Email Privacy on GitHub: Setting Your Commit Email Address ","date":"2023-09-01T13:11:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/09/01/collaborative-coding/","section":"blog","tags":["2Simple2Mention"],"title":"Collaborative Coding: Pair Programming \u0026 Co-authoring Git Commits"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"It has been an exciting summer! The DH2023 conference was a big success for DHTech. Read on to learn what’s new!\nSign up to become a Reviewer for the Code Review Working Group The code review working group is looking for people willing to review other projects\u0026rsquo; code. If you are interested in helping out please fill out our code reviewer application form. The expected commitment is two Zoom meetings before and after the code review (30-60 minutes each) and about an hour to review code.\nSubmit a Project for Code Review Do you have a project and would like someone to review (part of) the project’s code? The code review working group plans another round of code reviews. Please fill out the code review request form to start the process!\nDHTech at DH2023 DHTech organized a pre-conference workshop at DH2023, a panel discussion, and an informal get-together. All three of these events were very well attended and we got an influx of new members afterwards. The workshop was buzzing with interesting discussions. We talked about many different aspects of how we can trust the code we and others write. The attendees took a lot of notes that we plan to write up as a white paper. So stay tuned!\nOur panel “Research Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in Digital Humanities” was very well attended. Cole Crawford, Jose Hernandez Perez, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Sepideh Alassi, and Zoe LeBlanc talked about their career paths and their views about a research software engineer career path for Digital Humanities. If you have attended DH2023 but missed the panel (or if you really want to see it again), the recording of it is available in the conference’s video library. If you have not attended DH2023, the organizers plan to make all recordings publicly available 6 months after the conference.\nThe DHTech informal in-person meetup happened during one of the lunch breaks and was also a great success. It was well attended with about 20 participants. Many ideas of what DHTech could provide, plan, or tackle next were brought up and discussed. One topic in particular, mentorship, was of interest as this has already been discussed and talked about multiple times among DHTech members.\nIn summary, the conference was a great opportunity to meet fellow DHTech members, exchange and share ideas, and strengthen our community. We definitely look forward to DH2024!\nIf you want to read more details, we will soon publish some blog posts about the different events on our website! If you want to see some photos, check out our Google Drive Folder.\nUS-RSE’23 Cole Crawford and Jeffrey Tharsen are organizing a Birds of a Feather session at US-RSE’23 in Chicago, October 16-18, 2023 titled “Code Review for Research Software”. If you are interested in connecting with RSEs from other disciplines and talking about code review, this is a great opportunity to do so. Generally, this is the place to be in October if you want to meet fellow US-based RSEs from the Digital Humanities and other domains.\nNew Website You are here, so you might have noticted that we have updated our website! Thanks to Rebecca Sutton Koeser and Cole Crawford, our website has been migrated from Jekyll to Hugo. Go check it out and let us know what you think! If you find any problems or have ideas for how we can improve it, please create an issue on the GitHub repository for the site. If you’re interested in helping maintain and improve the site, please join the #dhtech-website channel on the DHTech Slack.\nLatest Blog Posts Check out the blog post “Embracing Endings: Principles for Digital Longevity and Their Importance for Research Software Engineers” by Moritz Mähr about the University of Victoria\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Endings Project\u0026rdquo; and an application of endings principles to the Stadt.Geschichte.Basel project.\nDHTech Email Address Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.\nUpcoming Newsletters This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us (dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack).\n","date":"2023-08-31T16:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/08/31/august-newsletter/","section":"news","tags":["newsletter"],"title":"DHTech August Newsletter"},{"author":"Szemes Botond","body":"Thanks to funding from ADHO, DHTech was able to support one DHTech member by paying for their DH2023 registration costs. Read Szemes Botond reflection of the workshop \u0026ldquo;Digital Literary Stylistics (SIG-DLS)\u0026rdquo;!\nOn the opening day of the 2023 DH conference, I attended the event of the Digital Literary Stylistics (SIG-DLS), which provides a platform for young researchers to share their projects in the field of stylistics. This area was understood in a broad sense in the event, in that not only issues of authorship attribution (although many presentations focused on the topic) but also other questions of computational stylistic were discussed.\nThe central position of authorship was already evident in the opening presentation. Benjamin Nagy’s well-named research (Meter Metters) showed how poetic meter can be related to the question of authorship in ancient literatures. This research not only presented sophisticated and, in many respects, novel statistical procedures, but also had serious philological implications: on the one hand, real philological problems of authorship are common is ancient literatures, and on the other hand (as in all cases, but especially here, due to the distance in time), a knowledge of literary history is essential to understand the results.\nFor similar questions of authorship attribution, Andrea Nini\u0026rsquo;s excellent (and provocative in a sense) presentation provided a linguistic-theoretic background. This lecture had the greatest impact on me. It sought to answer the question of why different methods work in the field, and what conceptions of language can explain their success. Nini made an exciting attempt to bring together the insights of cognitive linguistics and quantitative methods. Drawing also on set theory, he argued that schematized linguistic constructions that more easily recalled from short-term memory vary from individual to individual and from group to group – and the most frequent words actually carry information about these schemas. Another important part of Nini\u0026rsquo;s presentation was that he supported the theoretical insights with measurements of a case study in which he compared the performance of different methods with different theoretical presuppositions.\nAnother highlight of the program was the presentation from Peter Boot and Marijn Koolen (Computing and Interpreting Valence in Literary Studies), which was related to a range of topics, from sentiment analysis of texts to the question of the narrative arc, which thus provided important insights not only for forensic but also for interpretive approaches in the digital literary studies.\nFinally, what was particularly exciting about the event was how the nowadays increasingly popular “lightening talks” were able to integrate organically into the discussions. This is presumably due to the interest of speakers in similar topics - even if the corpora and methods studied showed great variation. The event created the opportunity for real conversations - which can now continue also online thanks to the Latent Reading Discord Server, launched this summer.\n","date":"2023-08-29T13:57:24Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/08/29/dh2023-conference-report/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Report on a conference session – DH2023, Graz"},{"author":"Moritz Mähr","body":"In the ever-evolving digital landscape, the concept of digital longevity is of paramount importance. As Research Software Engineers or Data Stewards, we are all too familiar with the challenges of maintaining, preserving, and ensuring the usability of our digital projects in the long run - possibly even beyond its end of life (or end of funding). The Endings Project, spearheaded by the University of Victoria, offers a set of principles that provide a roadmap to ensure the sustainability of digital projects. This blog entry is an introduction to the principles and an example of their application in the Stadt.Geschichte.Basel project in Switzerland.\nThe Background of the Endings Principles The Endings Principles were born out of the University of Victoria\u0026rsquo;s extensive experience with a broad variety of SSHRC and CFI-funded DH projects over the past 15 years. The multidisciplinary team behind the Endings Project includes research faculty from several disciplines, programmers, and librarians, all of whom have collective theoretical and practical experience in various fields.\nThe Endings Principles for Digital Longevity provide a valuable framework for ensuring the sustainability and longevity of digital projects. Incorporating these principles into the work of Research Software Engineers allows for the assurance that the projects will stand the test of time and continue to provide value to the scholarly community for years to come.\nWhat are the Endings Principles? The Endings Principles for Digital Longevity are a set of guidelines that divide digital projects into five primary components: Data, Documentation, Processing, Products, and Release Management. Each component is governed by specific principles that ensure the longevity and sustainability of digital projects.\nData\nData is the expression of the source information, knowledge, and expertise of our researchers. The following principles apply to data:\nData is stored only in formats that conform to open standards and that are amenable to processing (TEI XML, GML, ODF, TXT). Data is subject to version control (Subversion, Git). Data is continually subject to validation and diagnostic analysis. Documentation\nData models, including field names, descriptions, and controlled values, should be clearly documented in a static document that is maintained with the data and forms part of the products. All rights and intellectual property issues should be clearly documented. Where possible the Data and Products should be released under open licenses (Creative Commons, GNU, BSD, MPL). Processing\nProcessing code is written and maintained by the project technical staff, and is also subject to version control. Processing code provides all the following functions:\nRelentless validation: all processing includes validation/linting of all inputs and outputs and all validation errors should exit the process and prevent further execution until the errors are resolved. Continuous integration: any change to the source data requires an entire rebuild of the site (triggered automatically where possible). Code is contingent: while code is not expected to have significant longevity, wherever possible, all code should follow Endings principles for data and products. Products\nProducts are the project outputs intended for end-users, typically in the form of websites or print documents. The following principles apply to products intended for the web:\nNo dependence on server-side software: build a static website with no databases, no PHP, no Python. No boutique or fashionable technologies: use only standards with support across all platforms, whose long-term viability is assured. Our choices are HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. No dependence on external libraries or services: no JQuery, no AngularJS, no Bootstrap, no Google Search. No query strings: every entity in the site has a unique page with a simple URL that will function on any domain or IP address. Inclusion of data: every site should include a documented copy of the source data, so that users of the site can repurpose the work easily. Massive redundancy: every page contains all the components it needs, so that it will function without the rest of the site if necessary, even though doing so means duplicating information across the site. Graceful failure: every page should still function effectively even in the absence of JavaScript or CSS support. These principles are tempered by the following concessions:\nOnce a fully-working static site is achieved, it may be enhanced by the use of other services such as a server-side indexing tool (Solr, eXist) to support searching and similar functionality. The use of an external library may be necessary to support a specific function that is too complex to be coded locally (such as mapping or cryptography). Any such libraries must be open-source and widely-used, and must not themselves have dependencies. Release Management\nRelease management handles the public release of products. These principles apply to release management:\nReleases should be periodical and carefully planned. The \u0026ldquo;rolling release\u0026rdquo; model should be avoided. A release should only be made when the entire product set is coherent, consistent, and complete (passing all validation and diagnostic tests). Like editions of print works, each release of a web resource should be clearly identified on every page by its build date and some kind of version number. Web resources should include detailed instructions for citation, so that end-users can unambiguously cite a specific page from a specific edition. URLs for individual resources within a digital publication should persist across editions. Any moved, retired, or deleted resources no longer available at a previously accessible URL should be redirected appropriately. Why Do We Need Them? The digital world is susceptible to what experts warn could be a new \u0026ldquo;digital dark age.\u0026rdquo; Our capacity to produce digital information is outpacing our ability to preserve and access that knowledge for the long haul. This is particularly essential for digital humanities (DH) projects, where the disregard of preserving and future-proofing these projects jeopardizes their future. The Endings Principles provide a practical solution to these challenges, offering a roadmap for the successful conclusion, archiving, and preservation of digital projects.\nHow Can You Use Them for Your Work? The Endings Principles can be applied to any digital project, regardless of its scale or complexity. By adhering to these principles, Research Software Engineers can ensure that their projects are sustainable. This means that the projects will remain accessible, usable, and valuable for the foreseeable future, far beyond the estimated 10-year lifespan of most current formats.\nApplication of Endings Principles for Digital Longevity in Stadt.Geschichte.Basel In Stadt.Geschichte.Basel, more than 70 historians and archaeologists are comprehensively researching the history of Basel. The project runs from 2017 to 2025 and has a budget of more than $9 million. It focuses on current and under-researched topics such as the industrial and commercial history of the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of migration. The project also aims to explore the regional and international connections of Basel's history on the economic, political, and cultural levels. The project will result in a series of nine books, to be published in stages, covering the history of Basel from the Celts to the present. The project's website will provide access to documents, data, and materials for research and teaching, as well as insights into the processes of creating historical research and public interest in the city's history. To achieve this, the project has established a team of five people responsible for managing the researched data and creating the necessary software tools.\nIn the Stadt.Geschichte.Basel project, we recognize the importance of ensuring the longevity of our digital resources. To this end, we have adopted the Endings Principles for Digital Longevity, which guide our approach to managing and preserving our digital assets.\nPrinciple 1: Durability by Design We design our digital resources with durability in mind. This includes the use of open, non-proprietary formats for our data and metadata, which ensures that our resources remain accessible and usable over time. Our online portal is designed to be continuously updated and maintained even after the end of the project period, ensuring its long-term viability.\nPrinciple 2: Openness and Transparency We are committed to openness and transparency in our work. Our online portal provides public access to a wide range of data on Basel's history, and we actively engage with our stakeholders, including researchers, media, schools, memory institutions, and the public, to ensure that our work meets their needs and expectations.\nPrinciple 3: Respect for User Community We regularly survey our users to understand their needs and expectations, and we involve them in the development of our work packages. We establish focus groups that include researchers and partners involved in the project, who we consider as data producers. In our team, we have two Data Stewards. This role is responsible for surveying the working methods and needs of authors, defining the focus of research data management, creating requirements specifications, and offering consulting, workshops, and colloquia as needed. We also try to understand the users of our online portals and educational materials, who we consider as data consumers. To gather feedback, we survey these focus groups at irregular intervals using online questionnaires and workshops. The topics we cover in these surveys are directly relevant to the development of our project.\nPrinciple 4: Recognition of Complexity We recognize the complexity of digital preservation and have established a dedicated role of Data Stewards to manage our digital resources. Our Data Stewards are responsible for various tasks, including the management of image data, cartographical material, literature and tables. They also participate in ongoing training and networking activities to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in research data management and digital humanities.\nPrinciple 5: Sustainable Resourcing We understand that digital preservation requires sustainable resourcing. We have allocated specific workloads for tasks related to digital preservation, and we have established partnerships with various institutions, such as the University Library of Basel, University of Bern and the Land Registry and Survey Office, to ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of our digital resources.\nBy adhering to these principles, we aim to ensure that the digital resources produced by the Stadt.Geschichte.Basel project remain accessible, usable, and meaningful for future generations.\n","date":"2023-08-07T19:54:55Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/08/07/endings-principles/","section":"blog","tags":["2Simple2Mention"],"title":"Embracing Endings: Principles for Digital Longevity and Their Importance for Research Software Engineers"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech will be present at the DH2023 conference with two events on the conference schedule and one informal meetup! On Monday, July 10, we have a full-day workshop, “How can you trust your code?”. We will discuss questions related to trustworthiness of code developed for Digital Humanities projects. We will explore questions such as: how do we know that our code has bugs (or is bug-free)? And what do we do if we suspect that the code we are using has bugs? What are the implications of this situation when using tools developed by other people? How can we trust them to develop code that produces accurate results? What can we do about all of this? We’ll discuss in small groups and collect discussion notes for consolidation into a white paper. Join us if this is something you are interested in! If you won’t be at the conference but are interested in helping with the white paper afterwards, join the #dh2023 channel on Slack for updates!\nDHTech will also host the panel [“Research Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in DH.”]({{ site.baseurl }}/dh2023-panel) The panel will discuss the problem of missing career path opportunities for people doing technical work in DH. The lack of stable career prospects in DH often results in highly qualified people leaving the field for a more stable career leading to a lack in code maintenance and quality. Without permanent positions for research software engineers, how can the DH community ensure code quality and sustainability beyond the limited and often temporary funding of DH projects? How do career structures have to change to accommodate people doing coding work? Each panelist will give a 5 to 10 minutes introduction introducing themselves and their career path. Afterwards, we will then invite the audience to participate in a discussion with the panelists. And because we love white papers, we aim to write up the discussion after the conference as a white paper.\nBesides the above two opportunities to connect with your fellow DHTech members, we also hope to organize an informal get-together over coffee on one of the conference days. We will send out more details as we get closer to the conference, so stay tuned!\n","date":"2023-06-02T17:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/06/02/dh2023-summary/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DHTech at DH2023"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"DHTech will be present at DH2023 with its SIG workshop titled \u0026ldquo;How can you trust your code?\u0026rdquo;. Join us on Monday, July 10, 9am to 5pm for a full-day workshop!\nHow can you trust your code? This full-day workshop discusses the question of trustworthiness of code developed for Digital Humanities projects. Every programmer makes mistakes. These mistakes usually manifest as bugs in the code. Sometimes bugs cause a decrease in performance or interface glitches, ranging from slight annoyances to the inability to use a piece of software. In the case of research software, however, bugs can lead to inaccurate or plainly wrong research results. This begs the questions: how do we know that our code has bugs (or is bug-free)? And what do we do if we suspect that the code we are using has bugs? What are the implications of this situation when using tools developed by other people? How can we trust them to develop code that produces accurate results? What can we do about all of this?\nThe issue about code quality goes hand in hand with the question about reusability of code and reproducibility of research results. All too often, the wheel gets reinvented because of code that is too outdated, too poor in quality, or simply not available to be reused and built upon. How can we encourage tool reuse in the digital humanities? And how can we design and evaluate ways to overcome reproducibility barriers?\nThis workshop will discuss these questions and more. The workshop participants will split into smaller breakout groups each discussing a specific aspect of the overall issue of code quality and trustworthiness. Each group is expected to take detailed notes of their discussion with the goal to consolidate all of them into a white paper.\nTentative workshop schedule:\nIntroduction of participants and workshop organization (30min) Discussion of subtopics to be discussed in breakout groups (20min) Presentation of prepared subtopics Gathering of additional subtopics Short break (10min) Breakout groups to discuss subtopics (50min) Short break (10min) Breakout groups to discuss subtopics (50min) Participants will regroup to discuss different subtopics Summary of first workshop half (10min) Lunch break (1hr) Breakout groups to discuss subtopics (50min) Short break (10min) Plenary discussion of general outline of white paper (30min) Breakout into pairs to flush out sections of white paper (45min) Plenary discussion of next steps and outcomes (15min) ","date":"2023-06-02T16:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/dh2023-workshop/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DH2023 Workshop"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Several members of DHTech will be at DH2023 with a panel! Julia Damerow, Malte Vogl, Jeffrey Tharsen, Robert Casties, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Zoe LeBlanc, Diego Siqueira, and Cole Crawford are organizing \u0026ldquo;Research Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in DH\u0026rdquo; on Thursday July 13, 2pm - 3:30pm.\nResearch Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in DH In 2012, Ramsay and Rockwell wrote that “[t]here is [\u0026hellip;] a large group in digital humanities that experiences this anxiety about credit and what counts in a way that is far more serious and consequential. These are the people [\u0026hellip;] who have turned to building, hacking, and coding as part of their normal research activity” (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, p. 75). They continue to discuss the question whether writing code counts as scholarship. In 2017, Dombrowski et al. discussed in a panel at DH2017 the role of digital humanists at the intersection of the humanities and research computing (Dombrowski et al. 2017). What both of these discussions have in common are that they are closely intertwined with the discussion about career path options and opportunities of recognition for people doing coding work in the digital humanities. In a survey by DHTech conducted in 2020, 67% of the respondents said that they did not have a career path at their current employer (DHTech 2020). This poses a problem as missing career path opportunities often result in highly qualified people leaving the field for a more stable career leading to a lack in code maintenance and quality. Without permanent positions for research software engineers, how can the DH community ensure code quality and sustainability beyond the limited and often temporary funding of DH projects? How do career structures have to change to accommodate people doing coding work?\nTo discuss the question of career paths for people doing coding and technical work in digital humanities, we propose a panel at DH2023. The panelists are a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and interests in terms of career path and recognition. The goal of this panel is to develop an understanding of what opportunities exist and what is still missing for anyone interested in a career in DH that involves writing code. We will ask the panelists to give a short account of their background and career path (5-10 minutes) answering a list of questions we provide ahead of time. These questions will include for example how they were trained, what formal education they have, what their current position is, and how they get recognized for their coding work. We will then invite the audience to participate in a discussion with the panelists. We aim to write up the discussion after the conference as a white paper.\nPanelists Cole Crawford holds an ALM in Software Engineering from Harvard Extension, an MA in Literature and Culture from Oregon State University, and a BS in Computing Science and Informatics and English from Creighton University. He uses his background in research software engineering and literary studies to help humanities scholars build digital infrastructures and projects in order to model, collect, process, and analyze their data and reach wide audiences with their research.\nJose Hernandez Perez is currently the Digital Humanities Technology Specialist for the Research Computing Center at Florida State University. There he works in the Interdisciplinary Data Humanities Initiative, which instructs and assists humanities faculty and students in the use of High-Performance Computing tools. In addition, he assists in the development of DH projects that require further technical assistance with data analysis, database creation, TEI-XML, etc. Before joining FSU, he earned a BA in History and an MA in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History from the University of Chicago. His current focus is to advance the integration of HPC tools within DH while developing effective methods for standardizing computer science education, particularly in specialized fields, (ex. HPC; quantum computing) into humanities curricula. With respect to the panel, some of the topics he would like to discuss are how to start the learning of code outside and inside the classroom; how to create a space for RSEs within DH infrastructure at higher education institutions; and the creation of educational standards or formalized paths for the RSE career field, which is today self-guided by the interested student, career switcher, or project needs.\nRebecca Sutton Koeser double majored in English Literature and Computer Science, and then decided to pursue a Ph.D. in English Literature. In grad school, she quickly got involved with the Electronic Text Center and Digital Library work at Emory University Libraries. After completing a traditional (non-digital) dissertation, she took a position working as a software engineer at Emory University Libraries, where she worked on a variety of research infrastructure and digital scholarship projects. Working on a small software team there taught her real-world software engineering skills and best practices, project management, and Agile methodology. Rebecca was recruited to be the first Lead Developer for the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, where she leads a small team of software engineers and one designer who partner with faculty to develop innovative digital humanities research projects, and also has some time to pursue her own research. She is excited about the growing Research Software Engineer community, RSE career path options, overlap between DH and RSE communities, and increased opportunities for researchers with technical expertise to contribute and co-author innovative work.\nSepideh Alassi is a postdoc and lecturer at the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel, where she develops research software and teaches courses about semantic web technologies and graph databases, text analysis, natural language processing, and programming. She has a background in computer science, applied mathematics, digital humanities, and the history of science. She earned her Ph.D. in 2020 in digital humanities developing the Bernoulli-Euler Online platform, a virtual research environment for historians of science. She has over 12 years of experience in research software engineering using various programming languages. She has been a developer of Knora (recently renamed DSP-API), Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s flagship RDF-based infrastructure for editing, storing, searching, and reusing humanities research data. Currently, her primary focus is developing an automatic information retrieval pipeline to create a LOD-based knowledge graph from unstructured textual data by applying semantic web technologies and natural language processing techniques. In this panel, she looks forward to discussing the challenges research software engineers face working in interdisciplinary fields such as DH and the role national funding institutes can play in securing RSE career paths.\nZoe LeBlanc is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at Urbana-Champaign where she does full-stack DH (web development to data science to historical research), but she will detail how getting this point was far from straightforward or even expected. Unlike many programmers, she had zero programming experience growing up, and was only introduced to computers in-between her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Her timing was fortunate, since when she entered her PhD program in History at Vanderbilt University, it was when a new field called digital humanities was first taking off. While she was able to learn more about DH through fellowships and workshops, she eventually went beyond the ‘established’ DH path to a coding bootcamp. LeBlanc will detail how this experience led her to new career options (DH developer for example), but also how in turn those lead to reconsidering faculty positions. She will also discuss her current experiences in an iSchool, which is both relatively supportive of programming as scholarship, but also raises questions around what types of coding work are more visible, and therefore valued.\nUpdate July 5, 2023 Unfortunately, two of our original panelists (see below) are unable to attend the conference in person and therefore had to drop out of the panel. We greatly appreciate that Sepideh and Cole agreed to join as panelist on such short notice!\nMax Ionov is a research assistant at the Cologne Center for eHumanities, University of Cologne. Currently, he is involved in the project Classic Mayan Dictionary and Postil Time Machine. He is also actively involved in the W3C OntoLex community and is a COST action NexusLinguarum, devoted to promoting and developing the field of Web-centric Linguistic Data Science.\nKalle Westerling pursued a PhD in Theatre and Performance at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. During his time there, he got engaged with interdisciplinary digital initiatives like creating a digital archive for the Center for LGBTQ Studies, helping set up the Futures Initiative, directing HASTAC Scholars, and eventually as a project manager and technical lead for the Digital Humanities Research Institutes. After graduating in February 2022, he started in the position as Research Software Engineer in Living with Machines project, co-hosted at the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute. As part of the project, he has been an embedded part of the research team and worked on developing codebases for metadata management, crowdsourced human-in-the-loop workflows for machine learning models, and parsing XML standards for historical newspapers. Westerling will discuss how the skills built during his PhD have opened him up to a field of Research Software Engineering, developer education, professional development, and technical leadership. One of the challenges he wants to discuss as part of the panel is the necessity to develop language to translate one\u0026rsquo;s experiences to outside traditional academic contexts.\nBibliography DHTech. 2020. “DH RSE Survey Results.” DHTech. 2020. https://dh-tech.github.io/survey-results-2020.\nDombrowski, Quinn, Tassie Gniady, Megan Meredith-Lobay, Jeffrey Tharsen, and Lee Zickel. 2017. “Research Computing’s Demand for Humanists , and Vice Versa.” In Digital Humanities 2017.\nRamsay, Stephen, and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2012. “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 75–84. University of Minnesota Press.\n","date":"2023-06-02T15:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/dh2023-panel/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DH2023 Panel"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"DHTech is excited to announce that thanks to funding from ADHO we are able to offer a DH2023 Registration Grant! Any DHTech member is eligible to apply. After proof of registration we will reimburse you for your registration costs for the DH2023 conference. Since our budget is limited, the earlier you apply the better your chances are to be awarded this grant.\nTo apply please fill out this form. You will need to provide some basic information and two short statements about why you apply for the grant and why the grant should be awarded to you.\nMay the 4th be with you!\n","date":"2023-05-04T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/05/04/announcing-dh2023-grant/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DH2023 Registration Grant"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"Rebecca will talk about her work on version four of the Princeton Geniza Project (PGP). Over the course of a two-year research partnership with Marina Rustow and the Princeton Geniza Lab, they de-siloed data (metadata and transcription text), improved researcher workflow, designed and built a new search interface, implemented a new tool (annotorious-tahqiq) for creating and editing transcriptions that is designed for RTL languages from the start; incorporated IIIF images from a variety of different institutions, have preliminary dataset exports planned to be used for eventual dataset publication. Technical challenges include: working with data from a long-running project (PGP dates back to the 80s); mixed scripts and bidirectional text (Hebrew, Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic); dates from different historical calendars; displaying text and image together when both are optional; transcription workflow and data format, etc.\nYou can register for the meetup here.\n","date":"2023-03-30T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2023/03/30/announcing-april-meetup/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","meetup","event"],"title":"DHTech April Meetup about the Princeton Geniza Project"},{"author":"Rebecca Sutton Koeser","body":"In November of last year, DHTech held our first hackathon. I wasn’t sure what to expect from it, but I was excited at the prospect of working on something with other members in the community and creating something together.\nI’ve participated in hackathons before; I’ve even participated in some in-person hackathons, although not in a long time — certainly not since the pandemic, and probably not since I had children. Typical hackathons are notoriously unwelcoming in a lot of ways, including to people with care-giving responsibilities (but also often to non-developers or newer developers); the shift to “data jams”, as organized by Library of Congress or my former co-worker Nick Budak, are in part an attempt to address this problem. I did recently participate in a virtual one-day hackathon organized by some IIIF folks to help work on the iiif-prezi3 python library, which was an interesting experience — I could tell the organizers had done a ton of work ahead of time to prepare tasks that were documented and could be picked up and worked on in parallel, but even with that preparation it was hard for them to keep up with answering questions and reviewing pull requests during the hackathon. Many of the contributions made during that one-day hackathon were not approved and merged into the codebase until long after the fact.\nIn this case, we couldn’t do that kind of preparation beforehand because we wanted to determine what to create and develop as a group. We knew from the sign up form that we wanted to focus on something related to fuzzy and uncertain dates, since that was the topic of most interest to everyone — and it’s something that has come up before during other DHTech meetup conversations as something that impacts many of our projects. We kicked off the hackathon with a zoom meeting, and shared examples of some of the problems we wanted to solve or had run into in our various projects, similar projects and code libraries that might be relevant or good references, and even in some cases, code that some of us had created that might be related to the work we wanted to do. In my case, I shared a link to the Shakespeare and Company Project codebase where I implemented logic for storing and reasoning with partially known dates (year, year/month, year/month/day, and month/day), and a link to the Princeton Geniza Project codebase where I have logic for converting dates from different calendars, leveraging the existing python convertdate library (a library I first learned about thanks to a DHTech member!).\nIn our kick-off meeting we brainstormed a list of tasks, but determined that first we needed someone to implement the initial data model — and decided that two of us (Cole Crawford and I) should find some time for pair-programming to tackle that task. Cole and I were able to find time later that afternoon to get started, and were able to get far enough to push code and create a pull request so we could get review and set the rest of the contributors up to start building out more functionality. (I think it was in this initial session that I came up with the provisional name “undate” for our new code library — I wanted something short, unique, and recognizable, and liked how the “un” gestures at the uncertainty and unknown or partially unknown dates that we want to be able to work with.)\nThere are a number of challenges involved in running a hackathon. In this case, there were logistical and practical difficulties as well as communication and collaboration challenges. Because DHTech members are currently spread out across the U.S. and Europe, time zones made it harder to schedule time together, and sometimes exacerbated the problem of waiting for review on pull requests. Time was a challenge in another way, too — that is, finding and making time to work on the project. We scheduled the hackathon to run over an entire week, and we polled people for availability to try to find a good week to do it, but it seemed that most people were fitting it in around their other work commitments and busy schedules, which didn’t leave a lot of time for development work. Other challenges related to leadership and participation. Because we didn’t have the work planned out in detail ahead of time, we hadn’t identified a person or group to lead the development. I took on a bit of an unofficial technical lead role because we were building on code I’ve written before and problems that I’ve been wrestling with for a long time, but maybe it would have been better if we’d designated a few people as official technical leads and empowered them more to make decisions and move things forward. I think the lack of planning ahead also made it harder for newer developers and less technical people to get involved. There were a couple of people who joined the kick-off meeting who didn’t end up participating, and I’m not sure if that was due to time constraints, interest, or a lack of easy ways to help. A smaller technical difficulty was reconciling differences in tooling and approaches (perhaps due to lack of clear leadership); this was an opportunity in a way, because we all got a chance to learn from each other about the different ways we’ve been doing things, but it also meant that we spent longer on setup tasks and infrastructure, leaving less time for tackling the real problems of working with uncertain dates.\nIn spite of all these difficulties, the hackathon was also full of wonderful opportunities. I got the chance to do pair programming with people that I’ve never worked directly with — DHTech members and friends that I see regularly on Zoom but have never collaborated with. This should have been an opportunity for newer members to pair up with more experienced people; some of us offered times on Slack for just that, but it didn’t work out this time — and I hope we do better the next time. This is also an opportunity beyond the week of the hackathon: we’ve started developing a useful tool that many of us will be able to use across our projects. But it also occurred to me during the week of the hackathon, we can and should build it out so it is stable and feature complete so that we can submit it to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) as a research software publication.\nThis hackathon and the undate project is also a personal opportunity for me. I’ve been working with uncertain dates for some time now. It was relevant on both Shakespeare and Company Project (see my essay \u0026ldquo;Coding with Unknowns\u0026rdquo;) and Princeton Geniza Project. During the week of the hackathon, I remembered that my work on this goes even further back, to a simple public domain checker I implemented for Emory University Libraries as part of a digitization workflow. I’ve been interested in generalizing this work and making it more reusable, but I don’t know if I would have found the time to do it on my own — and whatever I did wouldn’t have been as good without the input of collaborators and ideas about how the same or similar problems apply to other projects.\nWhat’s next? Well, for me personally, I hope to find time to continue working on undate. I have lots of ideas about what else it needs and where it can go; you can see some of them in the issues on GitHub. In the short term, I’d like to get to an alpha version published on PyPI. In the longer term, I want a stable, feature-complete version that people can start using for any python-based projects, and that we can submit to JOSS for review. As for DHTech — we’re talking about doing another hackathon. Maybe we’ll do another round of collaborating on undate; and if we do, this time we can plan ahead and hopefully make it easier for people to contribute. Or maybe we’ll pick a different topic or need within the community and start on a new tool. It could be that we’ll schedule an in-person hackathon at a conference, which would be a different dynamic entirely!\nAre you interested in contributing to undate? Are you interested in a future DHTech hackathon, either working on undate or something else? Or do you have ideas about how we can make it more welcoming and inclusive to any members in our community who want to participate? Please join us on Slack or our next meetup and participate in the discussion as we think about next steps and possibilities.\n","date":"2023-02-09T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/02/09/hackathon-undate/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Join me for a DHTech hackathon? It’s an un-date!"},{"author":"Robert Casties","body":"I have always been aware that the way that our digilib image server dealt with images with color profiles \u0026ndash; basically it did nothing \u0026ndash; was not perfect. But now I got a report from a project and some sample images that showed substantially washed-out colors in the image processed by digilib compared to the original image viewed in a desktop image viewer. I had to finally get digilib to do color right.\nVery brief introduction to color profiles: A color profile is basically a table that relates the red, green, and blue (RGB) pixel values in the image data e.g. (241,0,0) to the mixtures of physical wavelengths that are real colors, e.g. a red of 610nm. The universal standard for color profiles in images is defined by the ICC. The color profile also defines the maximum range of colors (the gamut) that can be displayed using this color space. The lowest common denominator is the sRGB color space from 1996 but many better devices today can display the bigger DCI-P3 color space. All images without an embedded color profile are usually assumed to be in the sRGB color space.\nThis means that two images that represent identical colors can have different pixel values when they have different color profiles so it is actually important not to ignore the color profile of an image.\nI found the very nice test image you can see above at the Apple Webkit blog. The image uses the DCI-P3 color space and it has a background color that is the brightest red that can be represented in sRGB (241,0,0 in DCI-P3) and a foreground logo in the brightest red that can be represented in DCI-P3 (255,0,0 in DCI-P3). If your browser and monitor are correctly set up for sRGB you should only see a uniform red square but if your browser and monitor can handle DCI-P3 you\u0026rsquo;ll see the logo in brighter red.\nArmed with the test image converted into different image formats I looked into what happened in our digilib image server that is written in Java and uses the ImageIO API. The first thing I found is that the JPEG reader correctly reads and interprets the color profile in the image but it always converts the image into the sRGB color space so there is no way to work with images in bigger color spaces. The PNG reader reads but then ignores the color profile and claims that the image was in sRGB even if it was not, leading to wrong colors. Only the TIFF reader correctly reads and interprets color profiles. The JPEG writer correctly adds the color space (even if not sRGB) to the resulting image. The PNG writer ignores the color space of the image.\nI learned over time that it is possible to extract the profile from the PNG reader manually and fix the images and that it is possible to also add the profile manually to the PNG writer. I also learned that it is not possible to work with images with 16 bit per channel but that it is possible to convert the images to 8 bit per channel and work with that (many thanks to Harald K).\nThe visible end result of this epic struggle (which actually took longer than #adayinthelifeof) is that from version 2.12 onwards digilib reads images with color profiles and correctly converts them into the sRGB color space (using config \u0026ldquo;default-quality=2\u0026rdquo; or parameter \u0026ldquo;mo=q2\u0026rdquo;) or outputs images in the original non-sRGB color space (\u0026ldquo;default-quality=3\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;mo=q3\u0026rdquo;).\n","date":"2023-01-16T16:04:14.27Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2023/01/16/java-color-profiles/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf"],"title":"All the color(profile)s of Java"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"Do you have a piece of code you would like to submit for review but you don’t know if it’s ready? Or maybe you don’t know how to get it ready? Or would you like to review some code but would like to talk about the process first? Then this workshop is for you! If you would like to submit code for review, we will work with you to get your code in shape for submission (make sure it’s on GitHub, go over what is needed for the submission, etc). If you would like to know more about what it means to become a reviewer, we will answer any questions you might have! Register for this virtual workshop here.\n","date":"2022-12-20T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2022/12/20/announcing-code-review-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Code Review Workshop"},{"author":"Rebecca Sutton Koeser and Julia Damerow","body":"Our December meetup was focussed on discussing the Python-based Django framework, since we knew a number of members of the community use it for their projects and others might be interested in either using the framework or adapting approaches and ideas from it for their own work.\nThe meetup was attended by seven people with quite a range of experience with Django: some have used it extensively, others are maintaining legacy projects, others have only a little familiarity with it. Here’s what people commented when they answered the introductory question: what do you use django for, if you use it at all?\nUsing Django for legacy projects, but not the first choice (because of programming language). Using it for a number of large database driven web applications (CDH @ Princeton). Not used it, know of it. More familiar with smaller apps, Flask; learning, starting to appreciate precision; toying with using Django architecture in Jupyter notebook - Python for data science vs web dev. Discovered Django in a hackathon, started using it for all projects at Haverford; started introducing Fast API. Working with student developers, it was easier to rely on what they already know about Python instead of having to learn the Django approach; also have inherited a number of Django projects, many Django cookie cutter sites, that need maintenance. Number of larger db-driven projects, web projects; some use Django REST, some use GraphQL with React or Vue frontend for projects that need to be interactive. Also use Django templates when applications don’t need interactivity. Most projects are in Django, new projects all go into Django. Also have Rails and legacy PHP applications, but trying to standardize on one framework (DARTH / Harvard). Only a little direct exposure; used a different Python framework from the 2000s (Zope), still has that code around. Main website \u0026amp; project sites using Drupal, starting to use some Django things, seems like a nice environment, especially if you start from the database. Interested to learn if that’s true, hear more about experience, especially maintenance for the long term. A couple of people had some specific things they wanted to share, but there were also a number of questions and conversations around what was shared, and other pain points or things they wished they could do with Django.\nRebecca Sutton Koeser (Lead Developer at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University) shared a few tips and best practices they’ve adopted for their projects at Princeton. For instance, if you’re using Django Admin for data management and data entry, you get the benefit of automatic log entries that track who edited which records when, and in newer versions of Django there’s a structured notation that indicates which fields on the record changed. At Princeton, they’ve leveraged this to create log entries for other events — whether scripted migrations done in bulk, or documenting record history from other systems before the Django database existed. Their approach is to write a migration that creates a “script” user and then write code to generate log entries when appropriate in migration scripts.\nScreenshot of the Django Admin history for a document in the Princeton Geniza Project showing entries for record creation before the current database existed, scripted import into the database, and edits since then In parallel with this use of log entries, there’s a small Django application (django-adminlogentries) that you can install to easily view log entries in the Django Admin interface, which can be really helpful to see what work has been done recently, what changes were made by which person, reporting on activity in the database, etc.\nScreenshot of the Django Admin log entry list view on the Princeton Geniza Project. Julia Damerow (Lead Scientific Software Engineer, Arizona State University) asked if this is versioning or just logging. One of the projects she works on uses django-simple-history for versioning. It keeps track of the changes done to objects and allows you to roll back to previous versions. Julia was curious if Django’s built-in logging mechanism could be used for this kind of versioning as well. It looks like, however, the logging mechanism is not a true replacement for django-simple-history (at least not without additional work).\nAnother approach that was discussed is to create custom modules for common tasks used across applications; the most simple and successful one is pucas for standardized login using Princeton’s CAS authentication. Cole Crawford (Software Engineer, Humanities Research Computing, Harvard University) chimed in that they have something similar at Harvard (django-harvardkey-cas). Robert Casties (Research Scholar, Research-IT, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) asked about reusable modules and how they are structured. Rebecca said that you can take an app or module built as part of a Django project and extract and generalize it for reuse, and that the Django documentation is really helpful: there’s a tutorial on how to write reusable apps.\nRebecca also shared how they have implemented exports to make some of the information from the database available in CSV format. Admin users can export all or a filtered subset right from the admin interface, but they also have a cron job that synchronizes the CSV files to a data repository on GitHub (for example, see https://github.com/princetongenizalab/pgp-metadata with data exported from Princeton Geniza Project). This will be the basis for dataset publication, but it also makes the data available for viewing, filtering, and downloading with GitHub’s Flat Viewer.\nFor automated database documentation, at Princeton they are using DBML (Database Markup Language), dbdocs.io, and django-dbml to generate documentation and diagrams directly from the Django models. For example, see the diagrams for the Princeton Geniza Project database and the GitHub Actions workflow used to generate and update the database documentation. There was some brief discussion of the related tool, dbdiagram, which uses the same DBML notation to design databases (see this diagram from the Geniza project).\nRyan Heuser (Research Software Engineer, also at Princeton with Rebecca), shared about his experiments and ideas for connecting Django and Jupyter notebooks. He said that he usually works with tabular data in CSV files or similar, which doesn’t provide the relationships available in the Django models; often the data doesn’t have the structure and validation that we have in database records (e.g. years that aren’t guaranteed to be integers).\nUsing Django models in Jupyter. Ryan showed a solution he found that lets Django play nice with Jupyter so you can access querysets and models in a notebook. This way you get all the structure and native field types from the models. You can define arbitrary methods and attach them to existing objects to give them new behaviors, e.g. taking a Princeton Prosody Archive HathiObject and adding a method to get the full text. This behavior might not be needed for the web interface but it is powerful for analytical work.\nPlotting Wordqueries Similarly, this kind of notebook integration allows you to graph data quickly in cases when you don’t want to build a web interface or a view necessarily, but simply want to see the data in a Jupyter notebook. In the notebook Ryan presented, he experimented with ways to store token counts in Django and quickly get statistics for any word across the texts. Ryan’s conclusion was that it is cool for experimenting in real time, but it’s kind of fragile. How can it be made more stable? What if I wanted to use it in Colab? This little Django hack might not work, and it’s also a lot to expect someone else to insert this weird async unsafe configuration.\nJulia interjected that in neuroscience there is a data standard called “Neurodata Without Borders” (NWB). Part of it is an API with reference implementations in Python and Matlab. The libraries allow you to create objects with predefined properties describing data such as experiment design, experimental subjects, behavior, and the like. Julia thought that it would be amazing to have something similar for humanities with a predefined data model that allows you to capture information relevant to humanities projects that might not be available in standard repositories (e.g. author identifiers, affiliation identifiers, software used to create a dataset, etc). She said she loved the idea of using Django like Ryan presented, and suggested that one could create a library like NWB that would empower this kind of work.\nThere was some discussion of how to package project data for others to reuse, since none of us are going to let someone use Jupyter to access our actual production database. Ryan shared an example from his Literary Language Toolkit (LLTK) project, which has methods to download several available text corpora. You could imagine doing something similar to download an app and an exported version of the database so that you could work with a local copy. Andy Janco (an RSE in the Research Data and Digital Scholarship group at the University of Pennsylvania) suggested Huggingface Datasets as a great way to share and version data. He also commented that he’s a fan of installing iPython so that the built-in Django console acts kind of like a notebook. He shared a link to an article describing how to use Django with Jupyter. Robert commented that SQLite could be a nice solution for sharing data like this, and said that if you have control over the source data and code and can generate the exports, this would be a nice approach. Although if you generate exports in other formats, then the CSV is guaranteed to be clean, too. Rebecca said this sounded somewhat analogous to the \u0026ldquo;baked data\u0026rdquo; approach, where static data is deployed as part of the application along with the code.\nJulia commented that usually their projects don’t have data in a format where they can easily use the Django models; a lot of times it’s just text or xml. She wished there was a code library or utility that would make it easy to iterate over all the texts with metadata, store it in a database, and then maybe on top of that, there could be a Django model that works with the same data structure. Then you could either use the library to index the data and make it findable, maybe with an elasticsearch component; then, if you’re building a webapp, you can plugin and use the data right away.\nJulia then changed the subject and asked a question about difficulties with maintenance. She said their projects have lots of plugins and dependencies, and they regularly get Dependabot alerts about new versions that encourage updating. But much of the time, if you just update, nothing works. They have similar issues with Java projects, but 80% of the time it’s fine; it’s only occasionally that you need to pull the code down and do more work to get the upgrade to work. On their Django apps, a lot of the time the PR checks fail, and they have to pull the code down and review to address manually. There was some discussion about this, and it seems that everyone deals with some amount of this difficulty, although perhaps more painful for some than others, and worse in some environments than others (e.g. Javascript vs.Python), and a few people reminded us of the below xkcd comic along the same lines. Andy shared a link to Django Packages, and said that it was sometimes useful for comparing and assessing packages.\nIt was a lively and productive discussion that filled the full hour of our scheduled meetup and even spilled over to Slack with some follow up conversation. It sounds like there is potential for the DHTech community to collaborate on tooling and approaches (maybe something to work on in a future hackathon!), as well as other common frameworks and technologies that we could share best practices and learn from each other. Some of those topics include internationalizing applications in Django or other frameworks, or indexing and normalization for search on non-english text, e.g. transliterated Arabic.\n","date":"2022-12-20T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2022/12/20/dhtech-on-django/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech on Django"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"There are two changes in the DHTech Steering Committee for next year. First, we want to thank Itay Zandbank for sharing his expertise and supporting the efforts of DHTech by being a member of the DHTech Steering Committee the past 1.5 years! He helped to establish DHTech as an ADHO SIG and to grow the community.\nSecond, we have a new Steering Committee member! Cole Crawford graciously volunteered to serve on the Steering Committee for the next two years. He is a software engineer in the Arts and Humanities Research Computing group at Harvard, but like many of us, that means he wears many hats as he jumps between full stack web development, DevOps, data visualization, natural language processing, project management, and teaching workshops.\nIf you followed our emails and website closely, you might notice that the promised elections for the Steering Committee did not happen. This is due to the fact that we had exactly three nominees for the three open Steering Committee positions.\n","date":"2022-12-20T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/sc-changes-2023/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"Steering Committee Changes"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"DHTech has been an ADHO Special Interest Group for over a year now. This November we are planning to hold the first official Steering Committee elections. Three out of the 7 Steering Committee seats will be up for election. To give people an idea of what it involves to be on the Steering Committee, this blog post will summarize the key responsibilities and tasks of the Steering Committee. We hope that this will encourage some people to nominate themselves as candidates in the upcoming elections.\nWhat does the Steering Committee do? The DHTech Steering Committee supports the DHTech community by planning events, maintaining the community website and Slack workspace, and providing a contact for ADHO in regards to our Special Interest Group (SIG) status. For example, in the last year we have organized workshops at ACH2021 and DH2022 as well as presented posters. We have organized a few virtual meetups for the DHTech community to discuss topics and present projects. We also maintain the DHTech website (dhtech.github.io) and mailing list.\nWhile the Steering Committee members contribute to these activities in form of creating content and organizing meetups, workshops, etc., part of the responsibility is simply finding people to take ownership of certain projects, being on top of the tasks that need attention, and providing an overall vision of how DHTech can support its community. Since this year, the Steering Committee also decides what to do with the small budget that we receive from ADHO for being a SIG.\nWhat is the time commitment? The Steering Committee meets virtually monthly (currently on the last Thursday of every month at 9am ET/3pm CET). Usually an agenda is being sent out prior to the meeting with discussion points. Our meetings are typically one hour long. Besides that, being part of the Steering Committee involves a few hours a month to plan events such as the DHTech meetups or conference workshops, write blog posts, and maintain the DHTech website.\nAm I the right person to be on the Steering Committee? If you have a few hours each month to give to DHTech, then yes, you are! There is no other requirement to be on the Steering Committee except a desire to support the community and help DHTech grow.\nWhat do I need to do to nominate myself? If you want to nominate yourself as a candidate for the 2022 DHTech Steering Committee elections, please fill out this form. You will need to provide your name, affiliation, and a short statement (e.g. about who you are and why you want to be on the DHTech steering committee).\nWhat’s the election timeline? Nominations are open until November 11, 2022. After November 11, we will put the information about all candidates on our website. The election period will be from November 21 to December 2. All DHTech members will be able to vote for one candidate. We will send out a membership confirmation email before November 21. If you do not get one but believe you are a member of DHTech, please get in touch with Julia (jdamerow@asu.edu).\nCan I get involved in other ways? Yes! There is the Code Review working group that meets monthly if that is of interest to you. Or you can join our bi-monthly meetups. If you have specific ideas of things you would like to do, please post them on Slack or contact a member of the Steering Committee directly.\n","date":"2022-09-01T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2022-sc-elections/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Steering Committee Elections"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"We want to thank Moritz Mähr and Diego Siqueira for agreeing to become the official maintainers of our Awesome DHtools repository. For the last few months they have steadily improved and added to the list. We are grateful that the list is in such capable hands!\nIf you have anything that you think is missing from the list, we welcome new issues and pull requests.\n","date":"2022-05-27T11:48:21.503Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2022/05/27/awesome-dhtools-has-new-maintainers/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Awesome DHTools has new Maintainers"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The April DHTech meetup will take place on April 21, 2022 at 9am ET/3pm CEST. The topic of the meetup will be the various types of documentation (technical, API, end user, etc) that might be required when developing software. We plan to discuss different solutions and workflows to write, distribute, and maintain documentation. Have you mastered documenting all aspects of your code? Are you struggling to at least keep a minimum of documentation up to date? Are you somewhere in between? We want to hear and learn from you! All participants are invited to share their documentation processes and experiences. Please fill out this form if you would like to briefly talk about how you or your team handles documentation, the lessons you’ve learnt, or your favorite documentation tool (no more than 2 minutes and one slide).\nYou can register for the meetup here.\n","date":"2022-04-13T12:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2022/04/13/announcing-april-meetup/","section":"news","tags":["announcement","meetup","event"],"title":"April DHTech Meetup on Documentation"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The Code Review Working Group of DHTech is starting the alpha phase of implementing a code review process for the digital humanities. For the initial round of reviews, we are looking for people willing to submit code for review and people willing to review someone else’s code. If you are willing to participate, we will also ask you to complete a feedback questionnaire at the end to help us improve the process. If you would like to have your code reviewed, please fill out the code review request form. Your code should be available on GitHub. It should take less than an hour to review. For more information about the conditions your code should meet, please review our review preparation instructions.\nIf you are interested in being a reviewer, please fill out the reviewer application form. We expect reviews to take no more than an hour to complete. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us either by joining the #code-review-wg channel on DHTech or by emailing Julia Damerow (jdamerow@asu.edu).\n","date":"2022-03-23T15:32:21.298Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2022/03/23/code-review-for-dh/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"A Code Review Process for DH"},{"author":null,"body":"Webinar Summary On February 17, 2022, members from DHTech came together to learn about some of the projects of their fellow community members. A total of five lightning talks were presented. The speakers and their projects are listed below. The meetup was recorded for anyone who wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to join.\nRaff Viglianti - Publishing TEI in the Browser About Raff Viglianti is a Research Programmer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is an elected member of the TEI Technical Council, and the Technical Editor of the online open access journal Scholarly Editing.\nTopic I will introduce strategies for publishing TEI in the browser using HTML5 Custom Elements. I will introduce a duo of JS libraries (gatsby-transformer-ceteicean, gatsby-theme-ceteicean) for the static site generator Gatsby and show examples from http://scholarlyediting.org/.\nNick Laiacona - FairCopy About Nick Laiacona is a partner in Performant Software Solutions, a software development firm specializing in digital humanities. (@nick_performant)\nTopic FairCopy is a simple and powerful tool for reading, transcribing, and encoding text using the TEI Guidelines. (www.faircopyeditor.com)\nRobert Casties - Minimal Computing solution providing a DTS API for TEI texts About Robert Casties is a Researcher and RSE at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, working on the many digital projects of the institute.\nTopic Distributed Text Services (DTS) is a proposed standard API to access TEI documents and their parts in a structured way, somewhat similar to IIIF for images. I’d like to present dtsflat-server a very simple server that can serve a subset of a DTS API from a DTSflat file structure and simple-tei2dtsflat a tool to create DTSflat files from a simple TEI document.\nLinks Slides Bernhard Rieder, Erik Borra, Stijn Peeters - CAT4SMR About Erik Borra, Stijn Peeters, and Bernhard Rieder are Assistant/Associate Professors at the University of Amsterdam\u0026rsquo;s Media Studies department and members of the Digital Methods Initiative. They have participated in the creation of tools and methodologies for internet research for over a decade, both as researchers and software developers. More at https://cat4smr.humanities.uva.nl/index.php/people/.\nTopic Our talk will introduce the CAT4SMR (Capture and Anaysis Tools for Social Media Research) project, which is dedicated to the creation, maintenance, and embedding of research software for the study of social media platforms in the humanities and social sciences. We will discuss the overall rationale behind our integrated researcher/developer approach and quickly present some of the tools we have been working on (DMI-TCAT, YouTube Data Tools, 4CAT).\nMalte Vogl - SemanticLayerTools About Malte Vogl is a RSE at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, working in the project ModelSEN Modeling historical knowledge processes.\nTopic SemanticLayerTools aims to be a toolset for making the analysis of historical multilayer networks transparent. The current beta focusses on bibliometric networks using Leiden and Infomap clustering algorithms.\nLinks Documentation Slides ","date":"2022-02-17T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2022/02/17/lightning-talks/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","event","recording"],"title":"Community Projects Lightning Talks"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/tags/recording/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Recording"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"Moritz Mähr kindly offered to merge his external Digital History link list with our admittedly outdated awesome-dhtools list. He also included Github actions to make the list a member of the awesome lists ecosystem. The much improved list can now be accessed at dh-tech.github.io/awesome-dhtools/\nYou can help us grow this useful resource by adding your own links to resources and tools via pull requests here. It is of course also possible to advertise your own DH-related tools, corpora, or websites via the awesome list.\nWe are looking forward to your input!\n","date":"2021-12-21T11:48:21.503Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2021/12/21/greatly-improved-dh-link-list/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"Greatly improved DH link list"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"Every two to three years, the International RSE Survey is being conducted and it is out now! The survey provides valuable insights about what the international RSE community needs and how it can best be supported. You do not need to have an RSE title. If you develop research software as part of your job, you should take the survey!\nFurther information can be found here.\n","date":"2021-12-13T17:38:58.945Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2021/12/13/international-rse-survey/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"International RSE Survey"},{"author":"DHtech","body":"The SIG activities that were discussed include the new mentorship program, which will offer a long term, low frequency partnership between members working on various DH topics; and a community code review initiative, which aims to improve the code quality of DH projects.\nAttendees introduced themselves and shared some of their ongoing work; people joined from Europe, Australia, and the US. Some common themes that emerged were problems of sustainability, the difficulty of finding and funding qualified software developers on the one hand, and training students in DH on the other hand.\nOn the more policy oriented side, attendees discussed the need to clarifying the goals of DHTech in relation to other software- and DH- focused initiatives and organizations, including the RSE movement and the Software Sustainability Initiative. The attendees suggested some of the topics unique to the DHtech community, including a strong focus on data source criticism due to data heterogeneity and therefore workflows of data curation, the ethical implications of working with specific sources, and the close interaction of DH RSEs with non-coding experts in their code development.\nUpcoming opportunities The next DHTech meetup will take place in mid November and revolve around projects, both in their initial phase as well as matured, that have to work with fuzzy or uncertain dates.\nIf you are interested in the mentoring program, either as mentee or mentor, feel free to fill the short mentorship interest poll.\nThe next meeting of the community code review initiative will take place on 20th of October. Please join the DHTech Slack for more information.\n","date":"2021-09-30T14:14:11.524Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2021/09/30/first-dhtech-meetup-as-an-adho-sig/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"First DHtech Meetup as an ADHO SIG"},{"author":"DHtech","body":"DHtech is joining the crowd on Twitter with the handle @dhtech_group. We will be using the account for announcing our activities and events.\nFollow us to never miss the news and retweet to spread the word.\n","date":"2021-04-14T14:57:53.632Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2021/04/14/dhtech-on-twitter/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHtech on Twitter"},{"author":"DHTech","body":"As a result of the DHTech survey it came to our attention that quite a number of people said they were working in DH as single programmers. Additionally, many people doing coding related work in DH don’t have a formal computer science degree but are self-taught or taught on the job. For RSEs in such a situation it can be challenging to get guidance and support in all phases of a project; be it the project planning phase, where knowledge of existing tools and workflows can greatly improve the reusability and long-term accessibility, or during the actual software development phase, where a simple question sometimes takes a day to answer (we have all been there!).\nThus, the idea formed to develop a technical mentoring program that provides mentees with a technical mentor who can answer questions and can offer guidance on, for example, design and infrastructure questions. Such a program would not be a replacement for training or workshops that teach specific skills, but could support people doing technical work in DH by providing a means to have low frequency but high quality conversations with experienced RSEs. Of course, such a system of mentoring could also be valuable for more experienced RSEs who enter into a new field such as data modelling or 3D visualizations.\nThere are several questions that need to be answered to successfully implement a technical mentorship program. How could such a program give appropriate credit and recognition for mentors (e.g. acknowledgement in publications or on websites, allocation in institutional workload)? What would be the expectations of mentee and mentor? How would mentor and mentee be matched? How much time should a mentor commit to the program?\nWe plan to work on providing a guide to these questions in the next few weeks. Anyone interested in joining the discussion is welcome to join us on Slack. The first step, however, will be to gauge the interest of the community for such a program. For this purpose, we have created a short survey that can be accessed here. If you would consider becoming a mentor or a mentee, please fill out the form. Filling out the form is not a commitment to either yet, just an indication of interest. If there is enough interest in the community for a technical mentorship program, we will follow up with a registration process at a later time.\n","date":"2021-03-18T14:45:30.939Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/mentorship-survey/","section":"blog","tags":["WhatsHappening"],"title":"DHTech Technical Mentorship Program"},{"author":"Julia Damerow, Malte Vogl, Robert Casties","body":"The survey results can be found here. A second blog post that takes a closer look at the demographic questions of the survey will follow. A total of 66 people responded to the survey.\nSelf-classification About half of all respondents classified themselves as “Service RSE,” which we defined as someone who is working with a team of other Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to provide support for digital projects. This was rather surprising to us as from our experiences most “technical” people in the digital humanities seem to be people that use coding in their research or are in postdoc or similar roles doing “the coding part.” It might be due to the fact that we reached more successfully more established technical teams than people who do technical work but are less connected to formal and informal networks like ours. The other half of respondents consisted for a large part of people self-identifying as “Embedded RSEs,” which we defined as someone who works with others that do not have any coding skills and helps them with their coding related work. We considered the participants who classified themselves as neither Service nor Embedded RSE for the most part as having a similar role to Embedded RSEs in the sense that they were researchers that have robust technical expertise. A few respondents didn’t fall clearly in either category.\nWe realize that the classifications we provided were less than ideal. Many people doing technical work in the digital humanities might not refer to themselves as research software engineers. If we redo this survey at some point, we should rethink this question to make it more applicable to a wider range of people. For the purpose of this blog post, we use the terms “service RSE” and “embedded RSE” in the widest possible sense, meaning that not just software engineers fall into these categories but anyone doing technical work.\nReflecting, however, on the above numbers a bit, we are wondering what does this mean for building a community of people doing technical work in the digital humanities? It is reasonable to assume that people working in a more service-oriented RSE role are more closely aligned with traditional software engineering positions. They might be more likely part of national RSE associations or more general software engineering communities. In regards to conferences, they might attend yearly RSE events but they are probably a lot less likely to attend the yearly DH conference, which tends to be more focused on the humanities part in digital humanities than the technical part. Embedded RSEs or researchers that program for their own research on the other hand are probably more likely to attend the DH conference or community events aimed at their research area than attending an RSE event. We make these assumptions as they seem to be supported by our personal experiences. They would also explain why we were surprised by the survey responses to the self-classification question. If our assumption is right and you connect to your community through the DH conference or smaller domain-specific events, you will probably not meet too many people in service RSE positions.\nThe question is, is this a problem? Should we aim to get people together from both ends of the spectrum? Should there be a venue that brings people together for exchanging ideas and best practices? We believe there should be and that it would improve the work of both groups of people. People who use coding as a tool to further their research might learn from people with potentially more robust software engineering expertise, experiences and skills to improve their code, code management, and more in general the software development lifecycle of digital projects; and those in defined RSEs roles and careers might get a better understanding of the challenges, issues and questions that humanities research raises.\nProgramming Languages and Frameworks We compared the results of the question about programming languages with the results from the 2018 RSE survey. Not very surprisingly, Python is the language of choice for RSEs in general, DH RSE or not (we are using RSE here in the broadest sense to include anyone doing coding or technical work). When it comes to the second and third most used languages though, the Digital Humanities have different preferences. While in most countries, the second preferred language is C++ or R for RSEs in general, Javascript is the clear winner for DH RSEs. We assume that this is so because a majority of digital humanities projects have at a least one component that focuses on presenting their work through web applications. Since the objects of study are typically texts, images, videos, or similar data types, many projects develop web applications or web pages that use Javascript.\nAnother difference to the general RSE community in regards to programming languages, are that places three and five in the DH RSE survey are taken by XML-related technologies (XSLT, XQuery) and PHP. While PHP seems to be used by RSEs in general though ranking lower overall, XSLT or XQuery is not even on their list. We explain this by the wide-spread use of TEI and the existence of so many digital editions and collections projects that often use XML to encode their texts.\nAnother thing to note is that although it was only a very small number, some respondents did indicate they didn’t program at all or only very little, which means that their work probably focuses on other aspects of software development. This adds another dimension to the question what technical work in DH is or entails.\nWhen it comes to frameworks, unsurprisingly, the most common ones are Python, Javascript, and PHP frameworks. Most of them (if not all) being web application frameworks. This fits with our assumption that DH projects often develop web applications or web pages to present their work.\nClassification of Tasks 50% of the respondents indicated that they did project management tasks in addition to other (technical) work. Since we didn’t define what we understood as project management, this number might actually be even higher if we consider any kind of task that relates to processes and workflows around the development of software and digital resources as being project management. We are wondering what that means for the quality of the resulting products?\nIn many industry software development projects, there are dedicated project managers that handle tasks such as setting up processes for user feedback, communication with stakeholders, or developing budget plans. In a research setting, there is often no such role. Many projects are managed by the PI and the software development process is often managed by the person doing the technical work. In many cases where only ad hoc small projects are managed at a time, this makes sense. However, the question arises, should there be project management related training opportunities? How well do people manage their technical work? Does everybody use a bug tracker or other tool to track bugs, change or feature requests or would it be valuable to have sessions at conferences and through webinars that explain basic (and not so basic) project management topics? Do we all know how to properly document code, and simply don’t do it, or do we not know any better? Could the issue of unmaintained (and unmaintainable), unsustainable code we are all familiar with be improved by teaching our community better project management skills?\nObviously strategies to solve these topics have to depend on each case at hand and no single solution will fit all projects. For one project, simply tracking bugs via GitHub issues is enough, while bigger projects or teams working on multiple projects at the same time might need a dedicated project manager that for instance handles communication with stakeholders and developers. We don’t have the answer but we believe these are questions worth considering.\nTopic preference In the last section of this blog post, we are looking at the three questions that were asked together in regards to which topics the respondents mostly worked on, enjoyed the most working on, and would like to improve in. The first thing to notice is that a majority of respondents work in software engineering. However, only about ⅔ of them actually enjoy it. We have to note though that since we asked what topics people enjoyed most and not what people didn’t enjoy, for some respondents software engineering might just not be the part of their job they enjoy the most, but they also don’t mind it.\nOnly 5 people indicated that they would like to improve their software engineering skills. This begs the question if people doing software engineering in DH are already so skilled they don’t require more training, if they are simply not aware that there is more to learn, or if they know there is more to learn but are not interested in doing so. Similar to software engineering, quite a few people’s work involves server setup and maintenance, but hardly anyone enjoys doing it. There seems to be a bigger awareness for its usefulness however, as twice as many people indicated they’d like to improve their skills in that regard (10 vs 5).\nWhen taking into account how respondents classified themselves, we find that a total of 15 people that either self-classified as service RSEs or are in a role that seems similar enough, stated that they enjoy software engineering. 9 service RSEs, however, did not indicate that they enjoyed software engineering. The reverse is true for embedded RSEs. 7 stated that they enjoyed it, while 9 did not. It seems logical that service RSEs more often enjoy software engineering, if we assume that many service RSEs do their job because they enjoy building software, while embedded RSEs might often code out of necessity to further their research.\nWe noticed that the topics that would align more with research tasks such as algorithm development, data modeling, or machine learning, were all more in demand in regards to skill improvement than the tasks related to building and maintaining software (software engineering and server setup). We have two possible explanations for this. On the one hand, developing software might be more the means to an end especially for people whose main focus is on their research. For them it might be good enough as long as their code produces results, but they might not care about employing software engineering best practices. On the other hand, it is still the case that publishing results in papers is valued more for career progression in a research focused position than creating clean, maintainable, and reusable code. Hence, with the many time constraints we all face, brushing up on one’s software engineering skill might simply not be a priority.\nConclusion We’ve made quite a few assumptions in this blog post to explain the results we’ve seen. Most of them are backed by our personal experiences. Obviously, there are other explanations that we haven’t thought of and ours might not be correct. However, we believe many of the questions we have raised should be considered and thought through. There might be some simple measures we can take as a community to improve some of the issues we’ve identified, may it be workshops at conferences or webinars. We will publish a second blog post soon that will discuss the other half of the survey that asked for demographic information.\nCall for Opinions We are interested in your view of this. If you want to share your experiences in your professional setting or discuss with us, feel free to join our Slack group or simply write a small opinion post for this blog.\n","date":"2020-12-03T14:49:31.815Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2020/12/03/dh-rse-survey-results-discussion-part-1/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DH RSE Survey Discussion - Part 1"},{"author":"Malte Vogl","body":"For a small project we had two Django instances dealing with different parts of a workflow. Since the system was supposed to run on an air-gapped sub-system of the infrastructure, our usual authentification and authorization approach using OpenIDConnect was no option.\nIn v0.5 we simply had two user databases, one for each instance, and had to manage the users between both systems. However, even changing the password was very complicated for the admins, not even talking about the users themselves.\nIn came the idea of Django\u0026rsquo;s database routers: Why not simply have system A look into the user database of system B?\nThe first thing that comes up on Stack Overflow is NEVER DO THIS!\nStill it was a viable option for our setup. The router was relatively fast to write, but somehow it brought some strange errors?! Maybe the small toy database for one system was not capable of the complex rewrites? Ahh, that\u0026rsquo;s why sqlite3 is only for testing! Last time migrating a production database led to a full day of pain. However, this time I found a little help. The trick was to get rid of ContentType entries, and everything went smooth on first try!\nThe databases were now talking to each other without any error and the number of available users in system B showed that it was indeed using system A\u0026rsquo;s user database. But there was still a strange error: When going from system A to B Django always asked for an additional login process. Hmmm\u0026hellip;\nSince Django by default saved the session state in cookies, we thought maybe the cookies are not shared correctly. CSRF issues come to mind. Setting the SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN value for both projects led to no change. Setting SESSION_COOKIE_NAME \u0026hellip; CSRF_COOKIE_DOMAIN \u0026hellip; Still nothing.\nDigging deeper into the documentation, we realized that the state was by default not saved in a cookie, which only contains an ID, but in the database. So, time for another quick routing from system A to B, this time for the sessions part of database operations. Restarting\u0026hellip; Nothing changed\u0026hellip;\nOne more time going back to the documentation and Stack Overflow we found an obscure post, that finally brought salvation: The sessions state is indeed in the database, but signed by the secret key generated by Django when starting the project from scratch. So, accessing the session state with a wrong key raises a SuspiciousOperation error and leads to a re-signin for the user. A really basic security feature.\nThe final solution to our problems was thus to set the same SecretKey for both projects, and voila, everything worked as expected. A very simple and logical solution but we spend hours finding it. I\u0026rsquo;ll read 2Simple2Mention next time \u0026hellip; ;-)\n","date":"2020-11-26T13:18:30.939Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2020/11/26/sharing-users-between-django-projects/","section":"blog","tags":["2Simple2Mention"],"title":"Sharing Users between Django projects"},{"author":null,"body":"The survey was comprised of 23 questions. 66 people responded to the survey. If you have not yet responded but would like to, the survey will remain open and is available here: https://forms.gle/qya3qE9mk24HvUXf8. We will post updates to the current results after we have received a significant number of additional responses.\nNotes about the survey:\nAny multi-choice question that had an \u0026ldquo;Other\u0026rdquo; option, allowed to enter additional values not included in the provided options. This post shows the results for all questions except questions that need more work on anonymizing the responses, and questions that asked for free text responses, which will need more work to anonymize and categorize. In most cases, bar charts indicate that multiple responses where possible; pie charts indicate that the respondent could only select one answer. Survey Results Question 1: As what would you classify yourself? Possible Answers:\nEmbedded RSE (you are working with a team of people that do not have much coding skills, and you are the go to person for any software/algorithm development related questions/issues) Service RSE (you are working with a team of RSEs that helps academic units/projects to implement their software/algorithms) Other Results:\nService RSE: 32 Embedded RSE: 22 Other: 12 Question 1: As what would you classify yourself? Question 2: Which programming languages do you regularly use? Possible Answers:\nPython Java C C++ C# Ruby Rust Javascript Prolog/Scheme PHP Go XSLT XQuery Other Results:\nPython: 53 Javascript: 47 XSLT: 22 Java: 18 PHP: 14 XQuery: 14 R: 6 Ruby: 5 C#: 4 Other: 14 Other included: C++, bash, C, Perl, Typescript, Scala, Go, yaml, XProc 3.0, Groovy, SQL\nQuestion 2: Which programming languages do you regularly use? Question 3: What frameworks are you regularly using? Possible Answers:\nDjango Flask Spring Drupal Wordpress Grails Ruby on Rails Hibernate Play React Vue.js Angular Laravel Other Results:\nDjango: 26\nVue.js: 20\nFlask: 18\nWordpress: 14\nSpring: 9\nReact: 8\nDrupal: 7\nLaravel: 5\nRuby on Rails: 4\nAngular: 4\nHibernate: 3\nOther: 14\nOther included: Eclipse RCP, Apache Spark, eXistdb templating system, Wagtail, Pyramid, Docker, Sencha, Bootstrap, Streamlit, RShiny, flexdashboard, Smart GWT, Symfony\nQuestion 3: What frameworks are you regularly using? Question 4: How would you classify your work? Possible Answers:\nFrontend engineering Backend engineering Fullstack Design Project management DevOps Other Results:\nFullstack: 44\nProject management: 35\nDesign: 23\nBackend engineering: 22\nDevOps: 21\nFrontend engineering: 17\nOther: 12\nOther included: Data Science, Analysis, Algorithm development, Machine learning, Coordination, Data Modeling, Domain specific work, Consulting\nHow would you classify your work? Question 5: Regarding the following topics, what do you spend most of you time with? Possible Answers:\nData analysis/science Data Modelling Computer vision AI/Machine Learning Knowledge represenation UI/UX Data visualisation Software engineering Algorithm development Server infrastructure setup/maintenance Results:\nSoftware Engineering: 38 Data Modelling: 33 Server infrastructure: 26 Data analysis/science: 24 UI/UX: 24 Knowledge representation: 21 Data visualisation: 19 Algorithm development: 12 AI/Machine Learning: 8 Computer vision: 3 Regarding the following topics, what do you spend most of you time with? Question 6: Regarding the following topics, what do you enjoy the most? Possible Answers:\nData analysis/science Data Modelling Computer vision AI/Machine Learning Knowledge represenation UI/UX Data visualisation Software engineering Algorithm development Server infrastructure setup/maintenance Results:\nSoftware engineering: 25 Data Modelling: 24 Data analysis/science: 20 Data visualisation: 19 Knowledge represenation: 15 UI/UX: 12 Algorithm development: 11 AI/Machine Learning: 11 Computer vision: 4 Server infrastructure setup/maintenance: 3 Regarding the following topics, what do you enjoy the most? Question 7: Regarding the following topics, in which ones would you like to improve your knowledge? Possible Answers:\nData analysis/science Data Modelling Computer vision AI/Machine Learning Knowledge represenation UI/UX Data visualisation Software engineering Algorithm development Server infrastructure setup/maintenance Results:\nData analysis/science: 31 AI/Machine Learning: 29 Data visualisation: 28 Knowledge represenation: 15 Data Modelling: 13 UI/UX: 13 Algorithm development: 11 Computer vision: 10 Server infrastructure setup/maintenance: 10 Software engineering: 5 Regarding the following topics, in which ones would you like to improve your knowledge? Question 8: What is the highest degree you have? Possible Answers:\nHighschool Diploma Bachelor\u0026rsquo;s Degree Master\u0026rsquo;s Degree Magister/Diplom PhD Other Results:\nPhD: 32 Master\u0026rsquo;s Degree: 20 Magister/Diplom: 9 Bachelor\u0026rsquo;s Degree: 5 What is the highest degree you have? Question 9: In what field is your highest degree? Possible Answers:\nComputer Science or related field Natural Sciences Humanities Other Results:\nHumanities: 36 Computer Science or related field: 18 Natural Sciences: 5 Other: 7 In what field is your highest degree? Question 10: How did you get training in computer science/software engineering? Possible Answers:\nI have a degree in computer science/software engineering I have a degree in a closely related field (e.g. GIS, bioinformatics, etc) I got trained on the job (taught by someone) I am self-taught I completed workshops and certificates Other Results:\nSelf-taught: 24 CS/SE degree: 22 Closely related field: 12 Other: 4 Trained on job: 4 How did you get training in computer science/software engineering? Question 11: What type of employer do you have? Possible Answers:\nUniversity Other research institution Non-academic employer I\u0026rsquo;m self-employed/freelancing Other Results:\nUniversity: 39 Other research institution: 24 Non-academic employer: 2 Self-employed/freelancing: 1 What type of employer do you have? Question 12: What\u0026rsquo;s your current title? Possible Answers:\nProfessor or similar title (e.g. Assistant Professor, Lecturer, etc) Researcher or similar title Research Software Engineer or similar title (e.g. Scientific Software Developer) Postdoctoral Researcher Graduate Student RA/TA or similar title Student Assistant Librarian/Archivist Other Results:\nResearch Software Engineer or similar title: 25 Researcher or similar title: 18 Other: 7 Professor or similar title: 5 Postdoctoral Researcher: 5 Software Developer or similar: 4 Librarian/Archivist: 2 What\u0026#39;s your current title? Question 13: Your position is\u0026hellip; Possible Answers:\nFulltime Part-time Self-employed/freelancing Other Results:\nFulltime: 56 Part-time: 9 Your position is full-time/part-time Question 14: Your current position is\u0026hellip; Possible Answers:\nPermanent Temporary (more than 3 years contract) Temporary (1 to 3 years contract) Temporary (less than 1 year contract) Other: Results:\nPermanent: 39 Temporary (\u0026lt;1 year contract): 3 Temporary (1-3 years contract): 19 Temporary (\u0026gt;3 years contract): 5 Your current position is permanent/temporary Question 15: At your current employer\u0026hellip; Possible Answers:\nyou have a career path you have no career path Other Results:\nNo career path: 43 Career path exists: 18 Other: 3 At your current employer you have/don\u0026#39;t have career path. Question 16: Are you planning to keep working as an DH RSE for the foreseeable future? Possible Answers:\nYes No Don\u0026rsquo;t know Results:\nYes: 43 Don\u0026rsquo;t know: 19 No: 4 Are you planning to keep working as an DH RSE for the foreseeable future? Question 17: How big is your development team (without student assistants)? Possible Answers:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s just me (but there might be researchers you work with in your team) 2-5 5-10 more than 10 Results:\nJust me: 20 2-5: 27 5-10: 4 more than 10: 15 How big is your development team (without student assistants)? Question 18: How big is your development team (including student assistants)? Possible Answers:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s just me (but there might be researchers you work with in your team) 2-5 5-10 more than 10 Results:\nJust me: 15 2-5: 25 5-10: 8 more than 10: 17 How big is your development team (including student assistants)? Question 19: In which country do you work? Possible Answers:\nfree text\nResults:\nAustria: 3 Europe: 1 France: 2 Germany: 26 Greece: 1 Ireland: 2 Israel: 1 Japan: 2 Mexico: 1 Netherlands: 2 Spain: 1 Turkey: 1 United Kingdom: 12 United States: 11 In which country do you work? Question 20: Do you consider yourself a member of a minority in your field? Possible Answers:\nNo Yes Prefer not to answer Don\u0026rsquo;t know Results:\nNo: 39 Yes: 16 Don\u0026rsquo;t know: 8 Prefer not to answer: 3 Do you consider yourself a member of a minority in your field? ","date":"2020-10-07T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/survey-results-2020/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"DH RSE Survey Results"},{"author":"Robert Casties","body":"During the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 I was in my home office and I was reading all those stories on Twitter of people who suddenly learned painting or playing the guitar and I envied them for the time and energy for something new they seemed to have. My personal work situation felt pretty much the same except for the missing commute to our institute, but I decided to use some time to look at some of our old projects on our old servers and either migrate or delete the websites and shut down the servers. This suddenly felt creative and refreshing like a spring cleaning with Marie Condo.\nThe first website I looked into was still running on an Apple XServe on Mac OSX 10.5 and it was written in Python 2.4 (compiled from source) using the Zope 2.10 web application framework (downloaded as tar file) connected to a PostgreSQL 8 database (also compiled form source) last modified in 2010.\nI wanted to migrate the old setup to a Docker image for Zope so I could use it in a docker-compose setup together with a standard PostgreSQL container. How hard could that be? And then I could reuse the Docker image also for other old projects based on Zope 2.10.\nI started by checking the official Python Docker image but the earliest version was Python 2.7. Luckily I found a charming old page in time so I knew I need not try any Python later than 2.4. So I had to compile my own version of Python. That should be easy, we used to do that a lot back in those days\u0026hellip;\nI whipped up a new Dockerfile based on Ubuntu 18.04, added the build-essentials, downloaded and unpacked the Python-2.4.6.tgz sourcecode, and ran the classic configure, make, make install. In reality the process was of course messier and included a lot of head-scratching, countless docker build runs and searches for obscure error messages on the internet. My favourite bits are that I needed to patch the auto-generated Setup file to enable zlib when compiling Python (I never got bz2 to work), patch the psycopg2 PostgreSQL adapter to accept Postgres 10s version number as sufficiently current and that the Zope-2.10.13-final.tgz file on the internet was not a gzipped tar file but a gzipped gzipped tar file\u0026hellip;\nBut at the end of the day (or the next\u0026hellip;) I had a nice Dockerfile that will produce a Docker image with Zope 2.10 every time I run docker build instead of the \u0026ldquo;classic\u0026rdquo; manual installation on a single server.\nThen I just needed to create a docker-compose.yml file for the specific website, that would start the Zope 2.10 container and mount the local directory with the old Zope instance and data files into the container. I added a PostgreSQL 10 container and loaded a plain-SQL dump of the old database into the new database server and voila! I had the old website running on new hardware in a repeatable and somewhat self-documenting setup (preserving old bugs and security holes).\nI put the Docker files and a little documentation on our public repository as docker-legacy-zope and the generated Docker images on Docker hub so you can use these images to migrate your own old Zope 2.10 websites to Docker (you have my sympathy).\n","date":"2020-08-17T15:52:34.38Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2020/08/17/zope-in-docker/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf"],"title":"Zope 2.10 in Docker, or Applied Software Archaeology"},{"author":"Malte Vogl","body":"Doing the sensible thing, as a first step I updated to the latest Django version, which was 3.1 at that time. Trying the debugging server of Django just gave me lots of errors. After a short search I realized, that of course also Django CMS needs to be updated, which was done in a breeze. Retrying the server, lots of new interesting errors.\nSince they looked like Python errors, I just froze the requirements from the Python virtual environment, and deleted the old environment. Since the server also needed some updates, I ran those as well, which gave me the latest Ubuntu LTS (18.04., since 20.04.1 was not yet released).\nHowever, the system need a reboot\u0026hellip; After a short consideration with colleagues I dared to do the reboot! But.. no SSH shell access was coming back. Did the server needed a passphrase on reboot? Or did someone remove the cable in the server rack? Or did I accidentally crash the whole system :-/\nThere was only one option! Physically moving my self to the server in question. But! There was a key I needed to access the rack! In a room, to which only three persons had access, who all where in holiday on that day. And only one of the three had a key to the safe, in which the server rack key was securely deposited! Which was forgotten the following day. Which was a Friday! Arghhhhh!\nThe following Monday was my lucky day. Not only did I was able to enter the room with the safe, I also got the key to the server. And there were people answering my phone call, who let me in the data center. I even found a terminal and was able to connect it to the server!\nOk, the strange keyboard layout let to some problems with the root password, and I did not find any problems with the network settings, and there where no error messages at all, that gave any clue why the server was not reachable from the outer world, \u0026hellip; but in the end, after only a short hour of interesting detective work on the OS level, I just tried a reboot. And it worked. Sh..\nHaving thus not solved one problem, I tried the next. What went wrong with the Django update? After first trying to compile the latest Python version on Ubuntu 18, which lead to another interesting problem with uwsgi (the system Python version and the version in the v-env need to be exactly the same!), I realized my simple error: The latest Django CMS version was not yet supporting the latest Django version (django-cms 3.7.4 vs django 3.1 was the problem, only django 3.0.9 is supported !). One more time removing the virtual environment and this time installing the correct version numbers, I restarted the systemd daemon for uwsgi, and voila! as good as new.\nMy lesson learned: Never touch a run.. well, you know the story\u0026hellip;\n","date":"2020-08-14T09:33:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2020/08/14/updating-django-version/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf"],"title":"Simply updating the Django version ..."},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"I work as a scientific software engineer at Arizona State University (ASU). I head the Digital Innovation Group (or short DigInG) that develops software for historians and philosophers of science. I started this group when I was a graduate student together with another PhD student and besides a pause of about a year when I was working outside of academia after I graduated, DigInG has been a big part of my work life. Besides me, the group consists of one other software engineer and between ten to fifteen student workers. Our student workers help with software development and research related tasks such as data collection, annotation, etc.\nThe software applications we develop are mostly Java and Spring-based. We have some Python/Django apps, but we try to keep their number to a minimum. In my experience, they always give us more trouble than the Java apps (I’m happy to rant about them to anyone who wants to listen to my frustrations ;). Our code is hosted on GitHub and we more or less follow the Gitflow workflow in our projects. We organize the work that needs to be done via Jira tickets, and our student workers pick up tickets, create new branches for them, and make pull requests when they are done. The usual.\nA while back, I’ve decided to put all user management related functionality from one of our projects into their own jar so we can easily reuse it, since pretty much all our apps need a user management. I called it simple-users, put it into GitHub and Maven Central, and that was it. We made some changes to it over time, since it started out pretty basic, but it kept working well in our projects. Recently, one of our student workers worked on including simple-users into one of our new apps. He made the necessary configurations, added the necessary templates and controllers, and opened a pull request. When reviewing pull requests, I first look at the code changes before I tell our Jenkins instance to deploy the changes to our development server. Once deployed, I test the code in the application. The code changes seemed fine, so I changed the Jenkins configuration for the deployment job to include email provider information, which is needed for email notifications, and let Jenkins deploy the application.\nTo briefly interrupt my exciting story, that’s a feature that I love about Jenkins! I can tell it to run certain jobs simply by making a comment on the pull request. For example, Jenkins won’t run any jobs until I tell it so by making a comment. The default comment is “test this please,” which has confused student workers at times as they thought I was telling them to test their code. Especially, when code changes lead to database changes, I often don’t want to deploy an application right away but only after I reviewed the changes. One of our projects has some integration tests that I usually only want to run right before it’s ready to be merged, since they take a little longer to finish. In that case I can use a different comment that will only trigger the integration test job.\nAnyways, back to the story. The deployment went fine and I went to the application to test the changes. I created a new user and then started the reset password process of that user. I was waiting for an email. Nothing. I went back to the pull request, and looked at the code again. This time I saw that there were some annotations missing that were necessary to read the email provider properties into the Spring configuration bean. I made a comment on the pull request and closed it.\nAfter a little while the pull request was reopened with the required changes. Jenkins deployed the application, I tested it, and this time I got an exception that the connection was reset. I double-checked that the email provider configuration was right and checked with my student worker that it worked locally for them. It did when using fakeSMTP. I logged on to our development server and checked the logs to see if there was anything else that would give a hint what went wrong. Nothing.\nSo, I pulled the pull request to my laptop and ran it locally to be able to debug it. Using the configuration for the email service we use to send emails, I could reproduce the exception. Progress, even if just half a centimeter. I debugged it but still couldn’t find out why it wasn’t working. Everything seemed correct. I tried the same configuration that we use for one of our other apps for which emails have been sent fine in the past, and I got the same exception. I tried sending emails through the email service using their API and that worked; the issue was not on their end.\nFinally, I had the glorious idea to update the version of javax.mail. We were using 1.4.7 but the latest version is 1.6.2. And who would have thought, emails were sent just fine. Bottom line, I don’t know what the actual root cause for the issue was, but it seems like the email service provider changed something recently, which made the older version of javax.mail fail to create a connection. Since our apps are used by a limited number of people that typically don’t reset their passwords very often, we probably just haven’t run into that issue with any of our other applications yet.\nI pushed the updated version of simple-users to GitHub and started the Jenkins job to release it in Maven Central. Of course, this failed, why wouldn’t it. Apparently Sonatype had some issues that day, which made the maven goal that would publish simple-users fail. I ended up with a staged release in Maven Central, and a half updated pom.xml. So, I released simple-users by hand, fixed the pom.xml, and finally made a comment for my student worker on the pull request to update the version of simple-users.\nI looked at my watch. Hey, it was only noon! Time for our daily standup. I work remotely from the East Coast, which means I am two or three hours ahead of Arizona (depending on the time of year since Arizona does not have daylight savings time). It was only 9am in Arizona. My afternoon would probably bring more code reviews, some writing for papers I was working on, and maybe I would be able to get some coding done. Whatever it would be, I was just hoping it would be better than hunting down bugs just to find out that all that was needed was one tiny change in a pom file… It turned out it would be worse, but that is a story for another day.\n","date":"2020-08-14T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/blog/2020/08/14/just-sending-email-notifications/","section":"blog","tags":["ADayInTheLifeOf"],"title":"Just sending email notifications"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The next webinar will be announced soon. Until then, check out the summary of the last webinar!\n","date":"2020-03-03T06:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2020/03/03/please-hold/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"Next webinar will be announced soon"},{"author":null,"body":"Webinar Summary On February 27, 2020, a total of 11 DHTech members met for a webinar on the topic of deployment, release, and packaging workflows. Several people described the workflows and tools they employ at their organizations followed by a lively (and interesting) discussion of questions and answers.\nCESSDA ERIC First, John (supported by Matthew, Joshua, and Carsten) from CESSDA ERIC described their infrastructure setup. Their applications run on a Kubernetes/Docker cluster on Google Cloud. Their code is hosted on Bitbucket and they have set up a Jenkins pipeline that deploys to their development, staging, and production environments. They pointed out that one of their lessons learnt has been to build one container for all environments, rather than a separate built for each environment to avoid any differences or deviations between the multiple environments and thus surprises in production that could not be reproduced in test environments.\nSome of the other technologies they use are SonarQube to combine test results, Helm to manage their multiple Kubernetes resources, Grafana with Prometheus and Graylog for monitoring and log management, Weblate for interface translations, Nexus repository for artifact hosting and HAProxy.\nMoreover, to ensure sustainability and maintainability, CESSDA ERIC requires the guidelines published here to be followed by any component to be deployed on their infrastructure. One of their requirements is that any component needs to be provided as a Docker container, which can then be added to their clusters.\nCenter for Digital Humanities at Princeton University Next, Rebecca and Nick from the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University talked about their deployment/publishing workflow of Python/Django apps and Python packages. Their code is hosted on GibHub and unit tests are executed using Travis CI. They use Pa11y CI to check for accessibility issues as they develop. Their applications are manually deployed using Ansible, which they have integrated with their Slack workspace to alert them of running deployments. They also have a few Python packages that are published on PyPI.\nTo ensure code quality, they use CodeFactor, which even provides them with a measurement of technical debt! They have local development environments plus staging and production environments.\nMax Planck Institute for the History of Science Lastly, Malte briefly talked about one of their setups at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. They have a small and limited setup of Python/Django applications that uses uWSGI. Due to the size and scope of the applications and thanks to uWSGI, they do manual deploys by pulling specific branches that are easy to handle. uWSGI is run in emperor mode as a service, such that rebooting the server is no problem, cf. Tutorial here.\nRobert from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science mentioned that they also used GitLab and GitLab CI for some applications.\nDigital Innovation Group Julia from the Digital Innovation Group at Arizona State University briefly stated that their workflows include GitHub and Jenkins, and for Python apps Docker containers.\nKing\u0026rsquo;s Digital Lab The King\u0026rsquo;s Digital Lab, for historical reasons, hosts a variety of projects based around different technologies: Java web projects, TEI projects, and Python/Django projects. For quite a while now they have been standardising their technology stack and most of the recent and new projects are built with Python/Django, Foundation for UI, and Vue.js for certain frontend functionality.\nThey have their own VMWare based infrastructure for hosting the projects, but that may change in the future. Each project has at most 3 instances, dev, staging and live. They use Vagrant for local development.\nKing’s Digital Lab mostly uses GitHub for source control, but they also have some projects in Gitlab, when they need more control over the CI pipeline or for private repositories. For continuous integration they use both Travis and Gitlab CI. The projects are deployed manually using a Fabric script.\nThey make use of a startup configuration to start new projects to ensure they all follow the same guidelines that can be found here.\nTo increase security and maintainability they are moving to a Docker based stack, and using Cookiecutter Django fork for new projects, and some of the above will have to change, but for now this is still very much work in progress.\nConclusion In summary it can be said that (not very surprisingly) there seem to be many different deployment/publishing setups that are specific to the individual infrastructures. While some run their services exclusively in the cloud, others customized their workflows to the available organizational infrastructures and requirements. It might also be worth noting that in many cases, developers are also responsible for the deployment processes, which might have an influence on how these deployment processes are designed.\n","date":"2020-02-27T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2020/02/27/deploy-packaging/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","event"],"title":"Deployment, Release, and Packaging Workflows"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"On Thu, Feb. 27, 10am ET/4pm CET, we will be talking about how different projects manage their deployment, release, and packaging workflows. Do you use a CI/CD server? Do you release your code through pip? Do you have shell scripts to manage your workflows? Maybe you use Ansible or Docker? Or how else do you manage your workflows? This webinar will be a discussion of the different ways code can be release and deployed and everything that surrounds that topic. Come join us if you want to share your experiences, want to learn from what others have faced, or are simply curious what all the fuss is about. Come with questions, stories, fun facts! There won’t be a presenter for this webinar, but we hope for contributions from the webinar participants for a broad overview of what’s out there and what is being used. Please join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2020-02-07T06:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2020/02/07/announcing-february-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"DHTech February Webinar: Deployment, Release, and Packaging Workflows"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"Are you the lone DH RSE wolf in your group? Do you think there must be others like you at your institution and would like to connect? Or are you working in a group of DH RSEs or have you successfully mastered creating a local DH RSE community? On Thu, Jan. 23, 2020 at 10am ET/4pm CET, we will be discussing how to build local DH RSE communities. What have others done to successfully connect with like-minded people? How to make your institution aware of your type of work and its importance to research? We invite anyone interested in that topic to join our discussion on Zoom.\n","date":"2020-01-10T09:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2020/01/10/announcing-january-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"DHTech January Webinar: How to build local DH RSE communities?"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"On December 17, at 10am ET/4pm CET, we will be discussing the ADHO Special Interest Group (SIG) proposal. If you are interested in participating in this discussion and the SIG proposal submission, please join our Slack channel #sig-planning and attend the webinar at Zoom.\n","date":"2019-12-06T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/12/06/announcing-december-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"DHTech December Webinar: Discussion of ADHO SIG Proposal"},{"author":null,"body":"Members of the DHtech group are planning to propose a Special Interest Group (SIG) to the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) that focuses on the technical side of DH such as tool development and maintenance.\nIf you are interested in being involved in the proposal writing, want to follow the discussion or are simply interested in the general topic of DH technology, you are most welcome to join our Slack and GitHub organization.\nThe discussion is taking place in the channel #sig-planning.\n","date":"2019-11-15T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/adho-sig/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Plans for an ADHO SIG"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"On November 13, at 10am ET/4pm CET, we will be discussing the idea to propose an ADHO Special Interest Group (SIG) (see http://adho.org/sigs for information on ADHO SIGs). If you are interested in participating in this discussion and a potential proposal, please join us as at Zoom.\n","date":"2019-11-05T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/11/05/announcing-november-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"DHtech November Webinar: Discussion of ADHO SIG Proposal"},{"author":null,"body":"On September 9th, 2019, Itay Zandbank gave a short overview of how his company trains new developers and brings them up to speed on their projects.\nItay is the CEO and founder of The Research Software Company, a company that provides services for science and humanities research labs from coding to data management.\n","date":"2019-09-09T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/09/09/train-new-developers/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"How to train your new developers?"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"On September 9, 2019 Itay Zandbank will give a short overview of how his company trains new developers and brings them up to speed on their projects. His presentation will be followed by a group discussion. Itay is the CEO and founder of The Research Software Company, a company that provides services for science and humanities research labs from coding to data management.\nSave the date 9 September 2019 at 9am EDT / 3pm CEST / 4pm IDT and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2019-08-23T08:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/08/23/announcing-september-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"How to train your new developers?"},{"author":null,"body":"DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17353345\nAt the DH 2019 conference, a group of people that identify themselves broadly as Digital Humanities Research Software Engineers came together for a workshop. This white paper is the outcome of this workshop. It aims to draw attention to some of the issues we observe and experience and invite anyone who is interested to join us. Who are we? An important and large part of the broad and diverse Digital Humanities (DH) community can be defined as the ones who conceptualize, develop, and maintain algorithms, develop tools and websites, model data, and implement and maintain research software in order to solve Humanities research questions. This group, the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineers (DH RSEs), is crucial for the success of any DH project. There is a wide range of DH RSEs from programmers with a strong humanities background who acquired programming skills later in their careers, to software developers who acquired their DH knowledge over time through working with humanities scholars. However, what is lacking is the awareness of the importance of DH RSEs, a clear career path, and academic recognition, for example due to inadequate publication systems for software and data. We argue that without DH RSEs there would be no DH as almost no DH project can be realized without someone who understands the approaches and methods of the research domain and is able to conceptualize and implement the digital or computational part of a humanities research project. Communication An important skill of DH RSEs is the ability to mediate between the technological world and humanities scholars. This requires an understanding of the approaches and thought processes used by both the humanities discipline and the computational technique. One of the keys to successful communication is understanding the assumptions of the discipline, those things that are so obvious to researchers in the field that they would not explicitly state them unless asked about them directly. RSEs who are experienced in humanities disciplines either understand the assumptions of the field already or know enough to be able to predict what they might be and ask about them. A continuous dialogue between RSEs and humanities scholars is needed to make this ad-hoc knowledge transferable and available for RSEs new to the field. Career Paths DH RSEs have various different roles in an academic context. Some work on software development, data analysis, or are designing representations of results; others manage software development projects and infrastructure in a wider context. DH RSEs are sometimes directly embedded into a specific research field, or work in more service oriented facilities. While there are some institutions offering career paths for more “service-oriented” DH RSEs, this is not the standard yet. Additionally, there is no clear career path for “embedded” DH RSEs and their role as part of the research community is not always clear. Many DH RSEs start out as PhD students and might move on to postdoctoral positions. Since a big part of their work focuses on software development, however, this turns out to be a dead-end career as the development of software tools is not recognized as valuable contribution in terms of career progression (publications are in most places still required to move on to an assistant professorship). In addition, the “traditional” career path (PhD, Postdoc, professorship) is not the desired career path for many DH RSEs, but alternatives are lacking. Since DH RSEs are such an essential part of DH research, we argue that a clear career path is strongly needed to keep experienced and attract new DH RSEs. Recognition Recognition is a problem for many people working in RSE roles. There is no formally agreed way to credit work done towards research outputs other than the traditional author/co-author roles. In many fields, including DH this model is not reflective of how research is conducted. There are many varied roles taken in DH projects, in a very small scale project these may be filled by one or two co-authors but in larger projects there will be many people involved in data creation, data management, software development, statistics and visualisation and probably many others on top of the standard role of interpreting the research in a written form for publication. The kind of recognition required in DH strongly depends on the chosen career path. Postdocs in RSE roles and embedded RSEs might have different needs from persons working in RSE service units. These different backgrounds and futures need to be taken into account by institutions and funding agencies. For DH RSEs pursuing a more traditional academic career, the development of software tools, creation and cleaning of datasets should be taken into account when applying for positions. Similarly, it should be common practice to cite and refer to the software and their creators in publications if the software played a crucial part in the research process. If a project would not have been possible without the help of an RSE, this RSE should be named and potentially even be co-author on publications. Some journals, for example, “PLOS One” (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/), explicitly state the contributions of each author allowing RSEs to be acknowledged for their work. While this practice is not universal, there are efforts underway to increase the visibility of this issue and to standardize non-traditional publication roles (see, for example, Holcombe 2019 for a discussion of this issue). Funding Many (if not most) DH projects depend on the work of RSEs to accomplish their goals. Often, grant proposals promise a piece of software, an interactive website or the development of a new algorithm as one of the project deliverables. However, it is not the norm yet that RSEs are involved in the planning and writing phases of the grant application process. This leads to inadequate time and funding allocated for the technical aspects of the project. It is also important that funding agencies have appropriate processes for reviewing the technical aspects of a project and ask the right questions of applicants to ensure that these technical questions are addressed from the inception of the project. RSEs are the people who can work with applicants to answer these questions and should be involved in this from the very beginning of a project. Community DH RSEs are not only part of the DH community but also of the wider research software engineering community (RSE 2019). All RSEs face common issues, but DH RSEs are currently not very well represented or vocal within either community. We have already made a start on establishing a group within the Digital Humanities, called DHTech, as a place where ideas can be discussed and where we can learn from each other and our experiences. By coming together and working as a group, we hope to increase the visibility and amplify the voice of DH RSEs in both communities. DHTech offers regular webinars, has a mailing list and a Slack channel. It can be joined here. Authors Robert Casties, Alexander Czmiel, Julia Damerow, Max Ionov, Albert Meroño Peñuela, Steve Ranford, Catherine Smith, Malte Vogl References AG Research Software Engineering in den Digital Humanities (im DHd-Verband). Home (2019). URL https://dh-rse.github.io/ DHTech. About (2019). URL https://dh-tech.github.io/about/ Holcombe, Alex. Farewell authors, hello contributors. Nature 571, 147 (2019). URL https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02084-8 Mateusz Kuzak, Maria Cruz, Carsten Thiel, Shoaib Sufi, and Nasir Eisty. Making Software a First-Class Citizen in Research. SSI Blog (2018). URL https://software.ac.uk/blog/2018-11-28-making-software-first-class-citizen-research RSE. International RSE Groups. Research Software Engineers Association (2019). URL https://rse.ac.uk/community/international-rse-groups/ James Smithies. Research Software (RS) Careers: Generic Learnings from King's Digital Lab, King's College London (Version 6.0) Zenodo (2019). URL http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2559235 Software Sustainability Institute. About Software Sustainability Institute (2019). URL https://www.software.ac.uk/ Society of Research Software Engineering. Society of Research Software Engineering (2019). URL http://www.society-rse.org/ ","date":"2019-08-03T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/dhrse-whitepaper/","section":"news","tags":null,"title":"The DH RSE Workshop White Paper by DHTech"},{"author":null,"body":"On May 20, 2019, Taylor Quinn talked about starting a Vue.js project using the Vue CLI and Single file component basics. He showed how to set up and use Axios to make Ajax calls and covered topics from project setup to the basics of composing a UI with components.\nTaylor is a Software Engineer in the Digital Innovation Group at ASU where he specializes on Python and Django development using Vue.js.\n","date":"2019-05-20T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/05/20/fronend-development-using-vue/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Front end Development using Vue"},{"author":null,"body":"DH2019 Pre-conference Workshop: I’m the one building the tool! When: Monday, July 8, 2019, 9am - 1pm\nWhere: Digital Humanities Conference 2019, Utrecht, the Netherlands In the modern world of “publish or perish”, the pressure to present polished results can lead to a focus on outcomes and immediately understandable forms of presentation. Sometimes, this results in an underrepresentation of the technologies used to produce these and an omission of its specific challenges. While awareness for the relevance of the research data used to produce a published article has been growing for many years, its acceptance as scholarly output is still contested. The same holds true for the actual software used to process data and create results. At DH 2017 Montreal, the workshop “Building an Infrastructure for Historical Research Tools”, organized and/or attended by several of the authors, proved that a need for technical exchange exists. The workshop brought together developers, scholars with a programming or technical background, and generally people involved in the development of tools to support digital humanities research. A result of this workshop was the formation of DH Tech, “an international grass-roots community of Digital Humanities software engineers” (DHTech 2017) that holds regular virtual workshops for the discussion of technical questions, technologies, and ideas. At the same time, the nationally organized Research Software Engineering (RSE) Community has been growing worldwide (see for example (RSE 2019)), while at DHd 2018 Cologne, some 100 attendees joined to form the DH-RSE working group, as a way to bring together the RSE and the DH communities at their intersection (de-RSE 2018). DH-RSE is a platform for exchange and communication for German-speaking software developers in the digital humanities (DH-RSE 2018). Both groups, DH Tech and DH-RSE, aim to support dialogue and collaboration among Digital Humanities tool developers and provide a forum for collaboration as well as to increase the visibility of the people behind Digital Humanities research software and their work. In this joint half-day workshop we will discuss shared concerns and explore ideas for closer collaboration among technology-oriented DH researchers. The desired outcome of the workshop is a joint white paper, describing topics of concern and relevant steps for solving them. If you ever had a moment of “how did they use that technology to do this,” “what software did they use and can I adapt it,” or “where is that data from and how did they process it” during a conference talk, this is your chance to meet like-minded people! Agenda The workshop will focus on building a DH specific research software developer community. We will discuss expectations and needs of the workshop participants in regards to software development in DH, and possible broaden the discussion to topics such as: Software development and academic careers Open Reputation Systems Collaboration vs. data-protection Publication of preliminary results / open source first Visibility of the technological side of DH Registration Please register via the DH conference website: https://dh2019.adho.org/registration/ If you are interested in briefly introducing a DH-related software development initiative, have a specific topic you would like to discuss, or generally have questions, please email Julia Damerow (jdamerow@asu.edu). Bibliography de-RSE (2018). Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum gründen AG DH-RSE. https://www.de-rse.org/blog/2018/03/01/digital-humanities-im-deutschsprachigen-raum-gruenden-rse-ag.html (accessed 9 January 2019). DH-RSE (2018). Research Software Engineering in den Digital Humanities (DH-RSE). https://dh-rse.github.io/ (accessed 5 January 5 2019). DHTech (2017). DHTech. https://dh-tech.github.io/ (accessed 5 January 2019). RSE (2019). Research Software Engineer Association. https://rse.ac.uk/ (accessed 9 January 2019). ","date":"2019-05-10T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/dh-workshop-2019/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Workshop at DH2019"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"On May 20, 2019, Taylor Quinn will talk about starting a Vue.js project using the Vue CLI and Single file component basics. He will show how to set up and use axios to make Ajax calls. Taylor is a Software Engineer in the Digital Innovation Group at ASU where he specializes on Python and Django development using Vue.js.\nSave the date 20 May 2019 at 8am MST / 17 CEST now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2019-04-09T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/04/09/announcing-may-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Frontend development using Vue.js"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"We are currently planning the next workshop. Please check back later for more info.\n","date":"2019-02-28T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/02/28/announcing-march-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Upcoming DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"In the first workshop of 2019, Julia Damerow talked about developing applications using Java and the Spring Framework. Core concepts of Spring were briefly discussed on some of Spring’s projects such as Spring Security and Spring Data.\nJulia Damerow is a scientific software engineer at Arizona State University where she manages the Digital Innovation Group and develops software for historians of science.\n","date":"2019-02-25T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/02/25/spring-framework/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"The Spring Framework"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"In the first workshop of 2019 on February 25 at 8am MST/4pm CEST, Julia Damerow will talk about developing applications using Java and the Spring Framework. We will talk about the core concepts of Spring and briefly touch on some of Spring’s projects such as Spring Security and Spring Data.\nJulia Damerow is a scientific software engineer at Arizona State University where she manages the Digital Innovation Group and develops software for historians of science.\nSave the date 25 February 2019 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2019-02-05T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2019/02/05/announcing-dhtech-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the February DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"We are currently planning the next workshop. Please check back later for more info.\n","date":"2018-10-16T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/10/16/announcing-november-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the November DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"In this webinar Florian Kräutli showed how to use the X3ML Toolkit to build a CIDOC-CRM model based on existing XML data. We can then use the same tool to convert the data to RDF and ingest it into a linked data platform. He demonstrated the Metaphactory platform, which forms the foundation of ResearchSpace, and can be used to navigate and visualise CIDOC-CRM compatible RDF data, as well as build custom user interfaces for other linked data applications.\nResources:\nCIDOC-CRM Documentation: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/versions-of-the-cidoc-crm\nX3ML Toolkit Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/marketak/3m-docker/\nMetaphactory: https://www.metaphacts.com/trial\nTextmate + Turtle Bundle: https://macromates.com + https://github.com/peta/turtle.tmbundle\nResearchSpace: https://github.com/researchspace/researchspace\nExample mappings: https://docs.cordh.net/tool/mapping\n","date":"2018-10-15T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/10/15/cidoc-crm-by-practice/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"CIDOC-CRM by Practice"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on October 15, 2018 at 7am MST/4pm CEST held by Florian Kräutli. The topic of the workshop will be \u0026ldquo;CIDOC-CRM by Practice.\u0026rdquo; Florian will give an introduction to the practical application of CIDOC-CRM for creating Linked Data applications. He will demonstrate how to convert existing data to CIDOC-CRM and subsequently visualize it within a Linked Data platform. Florian coordinates digital research activities at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. More info will follow soon.\nSave the date 15 Oct 2018 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2018-10-09T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/10/09/announcing-october-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the October DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Yoann Moranville gave an Introduction to WordPress plugins. Yoann is a software developer and research associate in DARIAH.\n","date":"2018-07-09T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/07/09/wordpress/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Introduction to WordPress plugins"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on July 9, 2018 at 8am MST/5pm CEST. The workshop\u0026rsquo;s topic will be Introduction to WordPress plugins. Yoann Moranville is a software developer and research associate in DARIAH.\nSave the date 09 Jul 2018 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2018-07-02T10:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/07/02/announcing-july-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the July DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Peter Gietz talked about Authentication and Authorization. he is the CEO of DAASI International and has been working with federated identity management for decades. The workshop covered the basic concepts and focused on the SAML/Shibboleth technology that is the basis for eduGAIN and the DARIAH AAI in particular.\n","date":"2018-06-04T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/06/04/authentication-authorization/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Authentication and Authorization"},{"author":"Carsten Thiel","body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on June 04, 2018 at 8am MST/5pm CEST. The workshop\u0026rsquo;s topic will be Authentication and Authorization. Peter Gietz is the CEO of DAASI International and has been working with federated identity management for decades. The workshop will cover the basic concepts and focus on the SAML/Shibboleth technology that is the basis for eduGAIN and the DARIAH AAI in particular.\nSave the date 04 Jun 2018 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2018-05-30T17:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/05/30/announcing-june-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the June DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Julia Damerow talked about Apache Kafka and how it is used in the Giles Ecosystem.\nRead the announcement for this workshop.\n","date":"2018-04-23T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/04/23/apache-kafka-giles/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Apache Kafka and the Giles Ecosystem"},{"author":"Carsten Thiel","body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on April 23, 2018 at 8am MST/5pm CET. The workshops topic will be Apache Kafka and how it is used in the Giles Ecosystem. Julia Damerow is a software engineer at Arizona State University where she is developing software for historians and philosophers of science.\nSave the date 23 Apr 2018 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2018-04-07T17:30:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/04/07/announcing-april-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the April DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Carsten Thiel talked about configuration management. He touched on topics such as Puppet and his experiences in regards to configuration management. Carsten works as Technology Coordinator DARIAH-DE at the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.\nYou can find the announcement for this workshop here.\n","date":"2018-03-26T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/03/26/configuration-management/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Configuration Management"},{"author":"Julia Damerow","body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on March 26, 2018 at 8am MST/5pm CET. Please note that due to daylight saving time, we will meet an hour later. Carsten Thiel (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) will be talking about configuration management. He will be touching on topics such as Puppet and his experiences in regards to configuration management. Carsten works as Technology Coordinator DARIAH-DE at the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.\nSave the date 26 Mar 2018 now and join us on Zoom.\n","date":"2018-02-26T09:30:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/02/26/announcing-march-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the March DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Robert talked about Image Servers and IIIF. He presented Digilib a IIIF-compliant image server that he develops.\nYou can find the announcement for this workshop here.\n","date":"2018-02-19T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/02/19/image-servers-iiif/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Image Servers and IIIF"},{"author":null,"body":"The next DHTech Virtual Workshop will be on February 19, 2018 at 8am MST/4pm CET. Robert Casties (MPIWG) will be talking about image servers and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). Robert is the architect and developer of Digilib, a state-less, web-based client-server application for interactive viewing and manipulation of images that is IIIF compliant. IIIF is a set of API specifications to enable interoperability between image repositories.\n@jdamerow Save the date 19 Feb 2018 now and see the workshop page for details.\n","date":"2018-01-16T09:30:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/01/16/announcing-february-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the February DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"Malte will talk about Gitlab CI/CD for Django websites, Carsten and Julia will talk about their experiences with Jenkins and Travis.\nYou can find the announcement for this workshop here.\n","date":"2018-01-15T00:00:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2018/01/15/gitlab-ci-cd/","section":"news","tags":["meetup","recording"],"title":"Gitlab CI/CD for Django"},{"author":"cthiel","body":"Established at DH 2017 Montreal, DHTech aims to support the development and reuse of software in the Digital Humanities by providing a community to exchange knowledge, share expertise, and foster collaboration among Digital Humanities software projects.\nTwo of the cornerstones of modern software development, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are practices to support collaborative and fast development through automation.\nWith CI, software is built and tested on very code push. Using triggers from version control systems, code is compiled and tested against defined criteria, such as unit and integration tests. This ensures that the latest changes to the code base are compatible with the existing code base, i.e. they integrate well.\nOn top of this, CD is the practices of packaging and publishing the build artifact of a successful integration run. In an optimal setup, this allows the immediate delivery of the latest successfully built version to a production environment.\nIn our first Virtual Workshop we will be hearing from Malte Vogl on his experience using Gitlab CI for Django projects. Expanding on Malte\u0026rsquo;s introduction, Julia Damerow and Carsten Thiel will open up the general discussion with their experiences using Travis-CI and Jenkins.\nSave the date 15 Jan 2018 now and see the workshop page for details.\n","date":"2017-12-14T19:30:00Z","link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/2017/12/14/announcing-the-first-virtual-workshop/","section":"news","tags":["announcement"],"title":"Announcing the First DHTech Virtual Workshop"},{"author":null,"body":"\u003c!DOCTYPE html\u003e Redirecting to https://dh-tech.github.io/awesome-digital-humanities/ Redirecting to https://dh-tech.github.io/awesome-digital-humanities/ ","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/awesome-dhtools/","section":"","tags":null,"title":""},{"author":null,"body":"The goal of DHTech is to support the development and reuse of software in the Digital Humanities by providing a community to exchange knowledge, share expertise, and foster collaboration among Digital Humanities software projects. Anyone involved in Digital Humanities tools and services development and maintenance is welcome to join.\nIf you would like to become part of DHTech, join us now.\nThe development of software specifically designed for the Digital Humanities has become more and more important as Digital Humanities projects become increasingly computationally sophisticated. At the Digital Humanities Conference 2017 in Montreal, a group of software developers, scholars with programming expertise, and project managers got together to develop an infrastructure for collaboration and cooperation in regards to tool development. The result was the establishment of DHTech.\nDHTech organizes a variety of activities to connect and support the digital humanities technology community. These include regular virtual meetups for exchange of experiences, workshops and mini-conferences at major conferences (we are present at almost every DH conference), a bi-monthly newsletter highlighting news and opportunities, a job board for career opportunities, and working groups that collaborate, for example, on creating a community code review process.\nThe original DHTech logo was designed by Johannes Biermann and Alexander Steckel. That logo was adapted and updated by Rebecca Sutton Koeser in 2023 (read about the logo redesign).\n","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/about/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"About DHTech"},{"author":null,"body":"DHTech is a community of people doing technical work in the digital humanities. Since 2021, we are a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).\nSteering Committee Robert Casties (2021-2024) Research Scholar, Research-IT, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Julia Damerow (2021-2025) Lead Scientific Software Engineer, Digital Innovation Group and School of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University Jose Angel Hernandez (2024-2025) Florida State University Rebecca Sutton Koeser (2021-2025) Lead Research Software Engineer, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton Jeffrey R. Tharsen (2021-2025) Associate Director of Technology and Lecturer in Digital Studies, University of Chicago Malte Vogl (2021-2024) Research Software Engineer, ModelSEN project, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology Former Steering Committee Itay Zandbank (2021-2022) CEO, The Research Software Company Cole Crawford (2023-2024) Senior Software Engineer, Arts and Humanities Research Computing, Harvard University Repository Maintainers awesome-dhtools: Moritz Mähr and Diego Siqueira Governance The DHTech ADHO Special Interest Group (SIG), hereafter DHTech, will be led by a steering commitee. The steering committee will be made up of 5 to 7 members, and shall always be an odd number to avoid any danger of tied votes.\nThe initial steering committee members were chosen as interim leadership as the DHTech organization structure becomes more formalized as an ADHO SIG. After one year, half of the initial steering committee will rotate off and be replaced by new members selected via self-nomination and member vote. Members interested in serving on the steering committee will have the opportunity to nominate themselves with a short paragraph communicating their interest. Nominee statements will be shared with DHTech members for review and voting. All members of DH Tech will be allowed to vote on nominees, and the nominees with the most votes will be elected.\nAfter the first year, steering committee members will serve a term of two years to provide continuity as new committee members rotate on and off each year. Steering committee members who are unable to complete their term of service may step down early. Their spot on the committee will be filled by a member of DH Tech; the top unelected nomineee from the most recent election will be asked to serve first.\nAll members of DHTech are members of the DHTech ADHO Special Interest Group, whether or not they are members of ADHO or an ADHO Constituent Organization.\n","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/SIG/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"ADHO Special Interest Group"},{"author":null,"body":"","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/categories/","section":"categories","tags":null,"title":"Categories"},{"author":null,"body":"Welcome to the creative core of DHTech! The DHTech community thrives on collaboration, experimentation, and shared problem-solving. Our community projects showcase this spirit by bringing together developers, researchers, and digital humanists to create tools, libraries, and resources that benefit the wider field. These initiatives often grow out of hackathons, working groups, or individual contributions that are opened up for collective use and improvement. Our current community projects are:\nHugo-Bibliography Hugo Bibliography is an open-source Hugo plugin designed to help you fetch and format bibliography data to include into your Hugo site. It comes with a series of shortcodes, scripts to fetch bibliographic data, and built-in features to format your bibliography.\nCore Maintainers:\nTatsat Jha Undate Undate is a python library for working with uncertain or partially known dates. It was made by Rebecca Koeser during the 2022 DHTech Hackathon.\nCore Maintainers:\nRebecca Sutton Koeser Awesome-Digital-Humanities Awesome Digital Humanities is a curated list of tools, resources and services supporting the Digital Humanities. There are sections for Bibliography, Data Anaylysis, Publishing, and more.\nCore Maintainers:\nMortiz Mähr Diego Siqueira Interested in contributing to one of our projects or start a new one? Join DHTech and get in touch with us on Slack or via email!\n","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/community-projects/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Community Projects"},{"author":null,"body":"DHTech members with a common interest can form a DHTech working group. To be considered a working group, DHTech asks that the group:\ndesignates two people to serve as point of contact between the working group and the steering committee. writes a short paragraph for this page describing the group. provides bi-monthly updates about what the group is doing and how people can get involved to be included in our newsletter. The benefits of being recognized as an official working group are that the group:\nis included on the list of working groups on this page. can optionally have their own GitHub repository and website under the DHTech GitHub organization. can apply to use some of the money we get from ADHO as a SIG to further the work of the working group. Current DHTech Working Groups Code Review Working Group The Code Review Working Group works on developing a community code review system for the digital humanities. The group meets on the third Wednesday of every month 11am-12pm ET. Please join the #code-review-wg channel on Slack or get in touch with Julia Damerow (jdamerow@asu.edu) if you are interested in joining.\nGuides for submitting code for review or volunteering to become a reviewer are avialable on the DH Community Code review, along with related information and links to recent reviews.\nEducation \u0026amp; Training Working Group The Education \u0026amp; Training Working Group focuses on creating a collection of educational materials in topics such as version control, documentation practices, and packaging while highlighting DH use cases. The group meets on the second Thursday of every month 9am-10pm ET/3pm-4pm CET. Please join the #education-wg channel on Slack or get in touch with Jose Hernandez (jah22q@fsu.edu) if you are interested in joining.\n","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/working-groups/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"DHTech Working Groups"},{"author":null,"body":"Jobs in the Digitial Humanities Tech Space Do you have a job to submit to the board? Please fill out this form.\nResearch Software Engineer Summer Fellow at Princeton University A 10-week remote summer fellowship. The fellow will help with developing new language models for error correction of ancient Greek to support philologists on the Princeton Logion Project Posted on: March 6, 2026\nCloses on: 31 March 2026 ","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/job-board/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Job Board"},{"author":null,"body":"DHTech is an international grass-roots community of Digital Humanities software engineers. If you identify with that, you are welcome to join us!\nYou can participate in our workhops by following the event invitation links; no registration is necessary. Fill out the DHTech signup form to be added to our Slack and be subscribed to our low-volume announcements mailing list. ","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/join/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Join DHTech"},{"author":null,"body":" Connolly, A., Hellerstein, J., Alterman, N. et al. (2023). Software Engineering Practices in Academia: Promoting the 3Rs—Readability, Resilience, and Reuse. Harvard Data Science Review, 5 (2), https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.018bf012 Koeser, R., Damerow, J., Casties, R. et al. (2025/01). Undate: humanistic dates for computation: Because reality is frequently inaccurate. Computational Humanities Research, 1 e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/chr.2025.10006 Thakur, A., Milewicz, R., Jahanshahi, M. et al. (2025). Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely to Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software. Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering, 2 (FSE), 2216-2239. https://doi.org/10.1145/3729369 Code Review Bhandari Neupane, J., Neupane, R., Luo, Y. et al. (2019). Characterization of Leptazolines A–D, Polar Oxazolines from the Cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp., Reveals a Glitch with the “Willoughby–Hoye” Scripts for Calculating NMR Chemical Shifts. Organic Letters, 21 (20), 8449-8453. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216 Cleary, B., Painchaud, F., Storey, M. et al. (11/2012). Contemporary Peer Review in Action: Lessons from Open Source Development. IEEE Software, 29 (6), 56-61. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2012.24 Damerow, J., Koeser, R., Carver, J. et al. (2024). Code review in digital humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 40 (Supplement_1), i18-i26. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae052 Eisty, N., Carver, J. (01/2022). Developers perception of peer code review in research software development. Empirical Software Engineering, 27 (1), 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10053-x Fagan, M. (1976). Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development. IBM Systems Journal, 15 (3), 182-211. Koeser, R. (2015). Trusting Others to ‘Do the Math’. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 40 (4), 376-392. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2016.1165454 Nangia, U., Katz, D. (2017). Track 1 Paper: Surveying the U.S. National Postdoctoral Association Regarding Software Use and Training in Research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.814220 Petre, M., Wilson, G. (2013). PLOS/Mozilla Scientific Code Review Pilot: Summary of Findings. Arxiv, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1311.2412 Petre, M., Wilson, G. (2014). Code Review For and By Scientists. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1407.5648 Reinhart, M., Schendzielorz, C. (2024). Peer-review procedures as practice, decision, and governance—the road to theories of peer review. Science and Public Policy, 51 (3), 543-552. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scad089 Rigby, P., Bird, C. (2013). Convergent contemporary software peer review practices. 202-212. https://doi.org/10.1145/2491411.2491444 Rokem, A. (2024). Ten simple rules for scientific code review. PLOS Computational Biology, 20 (9), e1012375. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012375 Thongtanunam, P., McIntosh, S., Hassan, A. et al. (4/2017). Review participation in modern code review: An empirical study of the android, Qt, and OpenStack projects. Empirical Software Engineering, 22 (2), 768-817. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9452-6 Digital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025 Casties, R. (2025). There and back again—how to preserve your data during transformations. 2 6-12. https://doi.org/10.63744/EZFV8PwG9Frz Damerow, J., Nelson, D., Hernandez, J. et al. (2025). Developing Training and Education Resources for Research Software Engineering in DH. 2 13-18. https://doi.org/10.63744/X9dgVaDTvJHY Folsom, J. (2025). Extending Recogito Studio with Plugins. 2 19-24. https://doi.org/10.63744/yYHjphZVP1PZ Girard, P. (2025). Historical data visual exploration meets static web technologies. 2 25-31. https://doi.org/10.63744/K0GZLdLczoqm Kálmán, T., Chambers, S., Gietz, P. et al. (2025). Clouds for Crowds—Implementing Federated AAI for the Digital Humanities. 2 32-37. https://doi.org/10.63744/a9oVejGuN3UN Koeser, R. (2025). Undate in Action. 2 38-53. https://doi.org/10.63744/SFtXXpIE4ERh Koeser, R., Hernandez, J., Damerow, J. et al. (2025). Proceedings of Digital Humanities Tech Symposium 2025: Introduction. 2 1-5. https://doi.org/10.63744/dCDQd0sTPLEk Mähr, M., Twente, M. (2025). One Template to Rule Them All: Interactive Research Data Documentation with Quarto. 2 54-67. https://doi.org/10.63744/X90VnKkYV5Hb ","date":null,"link":"https://dh-tech-github-io-pr-210.onrender.com/literature/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Literature Related to Research Software Engineering in DH"}]