On 29th and 30th of October, CETAPS organized a two-day meeting on Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto. Each center delivered different workshops. In our workshop, titled Looking from a Distance, we explained the methods they used in the paper Looking From a Distance: Digital Humanities Insights into the Field of Feminist Utopian Criticism.
The activity used as its corpus the Arus database, available in the CETAPS repository, which contains over 20,000 entries on secondary utopian literature. Using the R language, participants were guided through a step-by-step process used to teach them how to filter the database. Since the paper focused on feminist utopias written in English, participants learned how to build a dictionary to filter relevant words which are useful to their own research. By using libraries such as quanteda, dplyr, and ggplot2, they also learned how to produce different types of analyses and visualizations, including word clouds, word/theme frequency graphs, and network analysis.
Based on the experience of being part of this workshop, I must say it is very gratifying seeing our teamwork reaching so many people. Collaboratively, we have created a narrative explaining our research and making it an outreach project. This workshop also gave us space to show what we, younger researchers, have been developing and how we can dialogue with other important Digital Labs. It was a great opportunity to share new voices but also to inspire new researchers. Besides that, it is certainly an extraordinary chance to learn from experts from different fields and countries around the world. The workshop allowed us to introduce the R language to the public and demonstrate the potential of this tool in the field of Digital Humanities.