Digital Health Humanities: Showcasing “Archives as Data” for Analysis

UCSF Archives & Special Collections includes numerous digitized collections documenting health sciences topics ranging from institutional, community, and individual response to illness and disease to industry impacts on public health. We make many of these collections available as data that can be computationally analyzed for health sciences and humanities research.

Voyant Cirrus term frequency visualization generated from AIDS health crisis workshops file data, 1986 from the UCSF AIDS Health Project Records, UCSF Archives & Special Collections (data available in the No More Silence dataset).

If you are curious about working with data from the UCSF Archives and Special Collections, the Digital Health Humanities (DHH) pilot program will showcase our “archives as data” throughout the month. In two upcoming sessions, we’ll provide an orientation to available data as well as methods for finding, accessing, and exploring these data resources:

Voyant Bubbleline term occurrence visualization generated from Letter from the FDA to Purdue re: new drug application for OxyContin Controlled-Release Tablets data, 1995 from the Kentucky Opioid Litigation Documents collection, UCSF Industry Documents Library (data available from from item page link or as part of collection dataset).

Python for Data Analysis series workshops

DHH programming also continues to partner with the Data Science Institute (DSI) to offer workshops on tools and methods well-suited to conducting research with “archives as data.” March workshops in the DSI Python for Data Analysis series will dig in to text analysis using natural language processing and building machine learning models:

Through these workshops and selected companion follow-up sessions with troubleshooting and guided process walkthroughs, researchers can learn and practice data analysis techniques and get familiar with data from our collections. Check out the library’s events calendar to find and register for the latest offerings!

OpenRefine workshops

If you have data you’d like to work with but it needs tidying and preparation attend a DSI OpenRefine workshop. This workshop will cover techniques for cleaning structured data, no programming required! There will be two OpenRefine sessions this month:

Previously-held DHH session slides, linked resources, and recordings are available on the CLE. There you will find materials from a Digital Health Humanities Overview session and recorded walkthroughs for Unix, Python, and Jupyter notebooks basics. Related resources will be updated on the CLE following DHH sessions.

Questions?

Please contact DHH Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu. The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

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