Courses and training at the Taylor Institution Library
You will need to book a time slot to use our open libraries. Check individual libraries for more details. Find out what to expect when you visit a library and our latest service updates.
The Taylor Institution Library will be closed on Saturday 28 – Monday 30 August (inclusive) and Monday 6 – Tuesday 7 September (inclusive).
New students
The libraries offers students library inductions and information skills sessions.
Digital Editions Course
This course runs termly and is for anyone interested in creating digital editions, whether students, researchers or library staff. Participants in this course create their own digital editions of out-of-copyright texts. The completed editions are deposited in ORA-data for long-term preservation and reuse, as well as being published on the Taylor Editions website.
All sessions are available online. While you can do them at any time, they have been designed around the 8-week term, and you are strongly encouraged to do one session each week. Registration is not required, and there will be no formal classes.
If you need any support or advice as you complete your digital edition, you are encouraged to contact Emma Huber by email (emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) or on Microsoft Teams.
Hands-on sessions cover:
- beginner’s TEI-encoding
- creating digital images in a range of ways, using equipment available in the library
- transcription principles
- introduction to issues relevant to digital projects such as preservation, metadata, delivery, and dissemination.
It’s fun! Digitising a text can help you see things you hadn’t noticed before. Understanding how a digital text is created can give a greater understanding of what can be legitimately interpreted from such texts using digital tools and may suggest new ways of answering research questions.
An insight into the whole lifecycle of a digital text is very useful preparation for preparing grant applications for larger projects. The digitised texts, even if not part of a large funded project, will be available for reuse and as such will be a valuable contribution to future research.
There is an introductory session in week 1, which gives advice on choosing a text to digitize. In the following sessions, there is a short talk on various themes (see programme) followed by the opportunity to ask questions and receive guidance on projects. You should aim to come to at least the first half hour of each session and allow another hour a week of working in their own time on their projects. One-to-one help will be available throughout term for anyone requiring extra assistance.
These sessions do not cover the analysis of the digitized text using digital tools, although advice will be available on the types of tools available, and who to contact for further information.
These sessions do not cover the analysis of the digitised text using digital tools, although advice will be available on the types of tools available, and who to contact for further information.
- Emma Huber, Subject Librarian for German
- Frank Egerton, Sackler-Taylor Operations Manager
- Joanne Ferrari, Subject Consultant for Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American literatures and languages, and Subject Team Leader at the Taylor Institution Library
- Johanneke Sytsema, Subject Consultant for Linguistics, Dutch and Frisian and Fellow of the Frisian Academy
Introduction to Digital Humanities
This course is online, and can be started at any time, at your own pace.
This is an introductory-level course for beginners to Digital Humanities. It covers basic principles of how to model Humanities material as data, and how to produce visualisations using some popular free DH tools. This is a practical course, with course participants invited to submit the data they create to a collaborative project.
- Session 1 – General introduction to computing, programming (worksheet)
- Session 2 – Data modelling (databases and XML) (worksheet, data tables)
- Session 3 – Data modelling (networks and ontologies) (worksheet)
- Session 4 – Digital objects and datasets (worksheet)
- Session 5 – Voyant Tools for statistical analysis (worksheet, dataset-translations-estc-date-order.txt, dataset-translations-estc-SUBJECTS-ONLY.txt, Dataset by decade – subject only.zip)
- Session 6 – Palladio for geographic visualisations (worksheet, tables for exercise 2)
- Session 7 – Gephi for network analysis (resources)
- Session 8 – Reconstructions, simulations and visualisations
As well as some core skills and insight into whether Digital Methods could work for them, participants will learn about other DH activity and resources at Oxford and how they could get more involved.
For further information, please contact Emma Huber (emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).
