The WVU Humanities Center invites faculty, staff and students to explore the digital humanities with musicologist Jada Watson from the University of Ottawa during two events March 22 at noon and 7 p.m.
Watson will lead a virtual lunchtime workshop that will help break down the barriers for those who want to get into digital humanities research, but aren’t sure where to start or don’t have the budget or expertise for sophisticated data mining tools. This workshop will introduce some of the basic and intermediate capabilities of Microsoft Excel, which can serve as an entry-point into data-driven research. The workshop will go over guidelines for organizing and formatting data on worksheets, some key formulas and functions and how to create simple graphs and pivot tables. Throughout the session, participants will also learn best practices for data management and file-naming conventions.
Later that evening, she will also hold a lecture following an introduction by her longtime collaborator and WVU professor of musicology, Travis Stimeling. Event details and registration links are included below.
Register for the March 22 at noon Lunchtime Workshop: Using Data in Humanities Research.
Watson’s research focuses the development of genre cultures and communities, such country music and geography, with an interest in issues related to identity, gender, sexuality, race, class, politics and the environment. Her current research incorporates data-driven analyses of country music’s geo-cultural history through the use of bibliographic metadata. Her work has appeared in The Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, Popular Music, and Music, Sound and the Moving Image. She also has chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Country Music and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter.
This event is part of the WVU Humanities Center 2020-2021 Speakers Series. Learn more about this series and upcoming events.