Research IT

Introducing Unix to Digital Humanities

Research IT members recently took part in a University of Manchester Digital Humanities workshop – “Introduction to data, the command line and automating tasks for the digital humanities”. The workshop was led by Jez Cope, Research Data Manager, University of Sheffield Library and support was provided by Gerard Capes and David Mawdsley (Research IT, UoM).

The half-day workshop was an overall gentle introduction to working with data using the command line for digital humanities. The first part of the workshop was an introduction to the principles of working with data, jargon busting, foundation software skills whereas the second part focused on using the shell to manipulate files and search within them. For many participants this was their first introduction to the Unix shell and it was well received. Gerard and David were on hand to answer the many questions and to help guide participants through the exercises.

This was the first in a series of three workshops with the others entitled “Early English Books Online and the Digital Archive: A Case-Study” and “How to Create a Digital Edition: A Beginner’s Guide to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)”.

If you are interested in further training events from Research IT please check our list of training courses. If you would like to discuss a specific training requirement with us then please get in touch.