DHOXSS 2024 - Applied Data Analysis | Digital Scholarship @Oxford

Sergio Alonso Mislata was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Sergio's experience at the summer school here:

I had long awaited to have the chance to attend a DHOx Summer School at Oxford, and thanks to everything falling into place personally and professionally, and thanks very particularly to a generous bursary from the Enriching Exhibitions Scholarship (EES) Project, my long-simmering wish finally became a reality: I managed to attend DHOxSS 2024, which took place at St. Anne’s College.

Hartland House, at St. Anne’s College, first day of school. Inscribed on the south side of the building, a word of advice: “Get knowledge. Get riches. But with all thy getting get understanding”. Proverbs 4:7

Photo by Sergio Alonso Mislata

My DHOxSS2024 course of choice was Applied Data Analysis, which was delivered by Sven Najem-Meyer and Paul Guhennec, from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne: amazing teachers, knowledgeable beyond any possible expectations and remarkably patient and perseverant in their educational mission.

As a (Special Collections) cataloguer within a major academic institution library, I tend to fantasise about the future of library catalogues, and I see many points of convergence between Digital Humanities and the latest trends within the library world. When joining the DHOxSS 2024 Applied Data Analysis course, I was interested, at a basic level, in gaining a better understanding of the possibilities for using Python and Pandas to analyse data of varied nature and from different sources. I saw this as a great opportunity to set up a path to start refining my basic data-manipulation knowledge and skills for library-specific purposes. In the long term, I would like to build up (or contribute to the building up of) a dataset of local authorities with institutional and externally-sourced metadata that could hypothetically be used to make a future expansion of the functionalities of my institution’s library discovery system possible.

The truth is that my Python skills were below what it would have been necessary to navigate seamlessly through the course, and I really needed to push myself to stay on track: I still enjoyed every second of it though, and I finished the course with a very clear vision of how it would be possible for me to establish a pipeline to achieve the goals I have in mind.

Outside of the course, there were also other events taking place during the week.

“Mainstreaming Open GLAM, Emerging issues, opportunities & unknowns in the growing movement around open access to digitised cultural heritage collections”, by Andrea Wallace, and "The multiple politics of data loss", by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, were the very interesting School’s opening and closing keynotes.

There were also two workshops conducted by the EES Project team. On the first workshop, we were given a historical and theoretical background introduction to Quire, “an open-source multiformat publishing tool designed for longevity, discoverability, and scholarship”, developed by the Getty Institute and currently being refined by the EES Project team. On the second workshop, of a more hands-on nature, we were helped to install Quire on our laptops and introduced to its main functionalities.

Beyond the purely academic, there were plenty opportunities for socializing and networking during the week, and it was always great to get to meet people from mine and other courses, to have the chance to hear about their fields of expertise and how they envisioned they could incorporate lessons learnt at DHOxSS 2024 into their current everyday practices or future projects. Drinks reception, banquet dinner, guided visit to Oxford, multiple coffee breaks and generous time allowed for lunches became precious moments to discover what was in other attendants’ minds, share anecdotes and have general good fun in great company.