Welcome to another packed week at GC Digital Initiatives! I want to begin this week’s post by highlighting the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative event taking place on Monday November 14th, 2022. This is a fun opportunity to share a snapshot of your digital humanities interests with the larger CUNY digital humanities community, as well as gain a sense of the exciting work happening at other CUNY campuses. Learn more and sign up here by November 7!

I also want to use this opportunity to share that the application for the January 2023 GC Digital Research Institute is now open! This is an excellent opportunity for beginners to learn new digital skills. Make sure your application is in by November 28th.

This week we’re also offering one workshop that covers how to “Create Elegant Webpages with Bootstrap.” We also will be hosting User Group meetings for those interested in digital mapping and Python. Also, you won’t want to miss GC Digital Fellow Yuxiao Luo’s latest blog post on Updating R using the installr package, which gets you up to speed on using the latest version of R.

You can find out more on our website (http://cuny.is/gcdi), which includes weekly posts about ongoing events, and through social media. Follow us on Twitter (@cunygcdi and @digital_fellows) and now on Instagram (@digital_fellows).

Table of Contents

1. Calls for Applications: Applications are now open for the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, the GC Digital Research Institute, the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants, and the Data For Public Good program. More information about these opportunities are below
2. Workshops: Workshops are structured, hands-on learning opportunities that are free and open to all GC-affiliated students, faculty, and staff. Registration using the links below is required to receive a Zoom link.
3. User Group Meetings: User Group meetings are informal, interdisciplinary, free, and CUNY-wide communities of researchers and pedagogues who use similar digital tools. This week the Mapping User Group and the Python User Group will be meeting. These meetings offer a welcoming space for beginners through advanced researchers to discuss potential projects, current challenges, or specific problems. Instructions on how to join each group can be found below.
4. Python and Web Design Series: If you’ve always wanted to learn how to use Python to improve your research, now is your opportunity to join a short workshop series that GC Digital Fellow Rebecca Krisel and Postdoctoral Fellow Chelsea Lane are leading this month. The series includes 5 workshops that take participants from the basics through ingesting data using APIs. Or, if you’re more interested in website design, you might prefer another series led by Chelsea Lane and GC Digital Fellow Zach Lloyd. Details about both series can be found below. Don’t forget to register for each workshop!

Calls for Applications

DHI Lightning Talks, DUE: Monday Nov 7

Interested in digital humanities at CUNY? Have a project to share? Sign up to attend as an audience member or to present your digital humanities project, research, or questions with students, faculty, and staff from across CUNY’s campuses!
Learn more and apply: General CFP for students/faculty

GC Digital Research Institute, January 18 – 24, 2023, Apply by November 28 @11:59pm ET

The GC Digital Research Institute (DRI) is an introduction to core digital research skills that can be applied widely to different kinds of projects. This institute is catered towards building foundational skills and will be paced accordingly to ensure those who are new will leave feeling more confident in their skills. DRI is designed for beginning learners—those who have little or no prior experience working with a programming language. Participation is free, and open to graduate students, faculty, and staff at the Graduate Center; however, applications are required. The GC Digital Research Institute provides an introduction to computational thinking, vocabularies, and foundational concepts so that participants can develop the necessary skills to become an autonomous learner.
Learn more and apply: GC Digital Research Institute website.

Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants (PDIG) DUE: FRIDAY, November 11^th @ 5 PM
Applications for the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants (PDIG) are supported this year through generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan. Apply for financial support for training in digital skills (up to $500), to start and create a proof of concept digital project (up to $2,000), or to implement a proof of concept (up to $6,000). All Spring 2023 matriculated master’s and doctoral students in good standing are eligible to apply.
More information available on our website: https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/10/17/pdig22-23/
To apply, complete the application at http://cuny.is/pdig22-23.

Data for Public Good DUE: Monday, November 8, 2023 @ 5 PM
For the fifth year, GC Digital Initiatives and the Mina Rees Library are accepting applications from Graduate Center students who have achieved an introductory fluency with the Python programming language to participate in a collaborative project designed to provide experience working with public-facing data and programming to produce a collaborative project for the public good. This year, applications will be accepted as collaborative proposals from groups of 3-8 students. Applications will consist of a proposed dataset and project plan. Successful teams will have the opportunity to work with advisors, draw on local expertise– in project management, outreach, development, Python programming, website design, data visualization, and more– and will each receive $1,000 stipends to support the realization of their project.
More information is available on our website: https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/10/17/d4pg22-23/
To apply, complete the application at http://cuny.is/d4pg22-23.

Workshops

NOTE: All workshops will take place on Zoom. Registration is free but required in order to receive the Zoom link.

Create Elegant Web Pages with Bootstrap, Friday, November 4th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM

Learn how to make use of Bootstrap, a free and open-source CSS framework, to quickly and easily make your webpage look like it was created by a pro! This workshop is the second in the series of our web development track, and assumes a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS.

Learn more and register here: Create Elegant Webpages with Bootstrap

User Group Meetings

GIS User Group Meeting, Thursday Nov 3th, 4:00 – 5:00 PM

Mapping working group is a network of CUNY students, faculty and staff who are interested in sharing methods and techniques, and finding support from others about ways GIS can be used to further research and teaching. This week we will discuss on softwares used for mapping and continue learning from the projects of the members of the group.
Sign up for sessions here.

Python User Group Meeting, Friday Nov 4th, 3:00 – 4:00 PM

Python User’ Group (or PUG for short) is an open and informal collaborative space for experimentation and exploration with the Python programming language. This week in PUG we will review some of the key concepts learned during the Data Analysis with Pandas workshop held online on 10/28. If you were not able to attend that workshop but are interested in continuing with the Fall Python Series, this is a great time to catch up and get ready for the next workshop!
See here for more details and join our PUG commons group to receive the Zoom link!

Python and Web Development Series

Fall Python Series: An Exploration of Research Tools for Beginners, biweekly Fridays from 2-4pm, continuing Friday, October 14th.  

The Fall Python Series comprises 5 total workshops that take students from never having used Python before through skills such as text analysis and data cleaning to web scraping and using APIs. Participants are expected to sign up for all workshops in the series (listed below) and maintain regular participation. If you missed our Introduction to Python workshop on 9/30, you are welcome to catch up using our online curriculum and join us for the remaining workshops. Core skills will continue to be explained and reinforced as we work on projects over the course of the semester and in Python User Group (PUG) meetings that meet alternative weeks on Fridays from 3-4:00PM.

Please register for the following workshops to take part in the Fall Python Series:

• Text Analysis with NLTK, Friday, October 14th, 2-4:00 PM  
• Tables and Pandas and Python! Oh my!, Friday, October 28th, 2-4:00PM
• Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup, November 11th,  2-4:00PM
• Plugging into APIs, Friday, December 2nd, 2-4:00PM

Web Development Series

GCDI is hosting a series of four sequential workshops on web development over the course of this academic year. This fall, we will cover setting up the structure of a webpage using HTML CSS, and Bootstrap, and in the spring, we will add interactivity to our web pages using JavasScript and Leaflet. If you miss a workshop in the series, but want to attend the next one, please check out our online resource on HTML and CSS, or send us an email.

Find out more and register now for the next workshop in the web development series on 11/4 from 1-3:00PM:Create Elegant Pages With Bootstrap.

New on our Blog: Did you know you could update R by using the installr package? Digital Fellow Yuxiao Luo prepared this step-by-step guide to walk you through the process of keeping R up-to-date!

Follow us on social media!
Twitter: @Digital_Fellows, @cunycdi
Instagram: @digital_fellows
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gc-digital-initiatives/