Immaculada Ureña-Asensio was awarded a bursary to attend the Applied Data Analysis strand of the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Inma's experience at the summer school here:
My name is Inma Ureña and last April I defended my thesis dissertation at the Universidad de Jaén. Throughout my doctoral studies, I created a digital scholarly edition of a seventeenth-century Spanish translation of Thomas More’s Utopia (available at http://utopiadethomasmoro-digitaledition.com/). Developing a digital project required extensive theoretical reading along with learning some technical skills, in my case TEI encoding. You might think I was already experienced enough not to need the summer school, but in fact my interest in attending DHOxSS lay in how important I believe it is to keep up to date with projects, tools and wider discussions in Digital Humanities. In this blog post I would like to provide an overview of the different sessions and highlight some of the ideas presented in the online strand “Introduction to Digital Humanities.”
The school began with a warm reception for participants both online and on site. The next three days brought the ample knowledge and expertise of the presenters to our screens. The summer school was opened by keynote speaker Professor Caroline Bassett, whose paper “Creativity and the Machine: Writing, Literature, AI” explored the definition of creativity and the boundaries between human and AI creation, while also questioning whether there will be a space for AI production in the near future.
The first session, “An Introduction to the Introduction,” reviewed the challenges of the field and how DH was particularly integrated within Oxford University’s infrastructure. In the second session, “Machining the Archive,” archives were presented as dynamic spaces for knowledge and memory recollection. The final session, “Digital Editions,” presented digital editions through Patrick Sahle’s 2016 definition and revisited the challenges and opportunities they offer. Before finishing our first day, we also had the chance to get to know the Electronic Enlightenment project.
Day 2 was especially full. The morning began with “A Digital Humanities Tool Kit,” which discussed the affordances and disaffordances of the digital. The talk on “3D Modelling and Digital Cultural Heritage” showcased the use of a 3D digital model of Ancient Rome and presented the SketchUp software. The following session, “Large Language Models and the Humanities,” examined the role of LLMs as research tools (in contrast to their use as research subjects or for research productivity). Lastly, “An Introduction to Linked Open Data and Knowledge Graphs for Cultural Heritage Research” underlined the importance of open access while also warning, in the words of Sanderson (2020), that ontologies usually carry the biased views of people.
Finally, on Day 3, the first session “Introduction to TEI” looked at the main principles of this markup language. Through real examples, we could see what different documents require in terms of structure and data modelling. The last session, “Introduction to Relational Databases,” covered how to structure information into data, using bibliographical data as relevant examples. The various ways of representing datasets make this task compelling, demanding careful planning and clear objectives.
I highly recommend attending the summer school: there were fruitful discussions, excellent organisation, opportunities for networking (even in the online format) and quality resources and materials. I especially valued the wide perspective offered by the online strand, and I am sure this will not be the last time I attend. Thank you very much for the opportunity!
