Author Archives: Kathryn Stine

Text Analysis Workshops for Digital Health Humanities

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Upcoming UCSF Digital Health Humanities programming includes new text analysis workshops in collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and the UCSF Data Science Initiative (DSI). These workshops will orient you to the digital health humanities research potential of content from the vast HathiTrust Digital Library and UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections as well as common computational text analysis exploration approaches.

HathiTrust elephant logo with images from UCSF University Publications collection
Images from the UCSF University Publications collection in HathiTrust.

HathiTrust now includes more than 17.5 million digitized volumes from partner research library collections, including the University of California. Many of these volumes are useful for health humanities research, from documentation of institutional history, to government documents and published literature. Content from HathiTrust is made available for computational analysis primarily through HTRC tools and services.

HathiTrust Research Center Data and Tools for Digital Health Humanities: An Overview | May 19, 2023

On May 19, 2023 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, join HTRC’s Associate Director for Outreach & Education Janet Swatscheno, to learn about finding health-related resources in HathiTrust. The session will cover curating resources into collections, finding or establishing a textual corpus for your research, and tools for exploring and analyzing text as data.

Text Analysis for Digital Health Humanities: Using HTRC Data and Tools | May 26, 2023

On May 26, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, DSI Instructor, Geoff Boushey is offering a companion workshop to the HathiTrust overview that will provide hands-on opportunities to learn and apply Python coding to conduct text analysis. The data will be derived from HathiTrust collection materials, including extracted features (metadata, derived text features, text as tokens) and full text from the publicly available UCSF University Publications collection, which documents histories of health sciences teaching, learning, and student activities from 1864 – 2009.

Jupyter Notebook Collection Data Exploration: No More Silence | June 2, 2023

Are you interested in familiarizing yourself with Python and using Jupyter Notebook to explore datasets? Join digital archivist, Charlie Macquarie, and DSI instructor Geoff Boushey on June 2, 2023 for a day-long novice-friendly workshop. They will guide you step-by-step through a data exploration notebook tailored to exploring a sample of the No More Silence dataset. You will get familiar with common data preparation and analysis tasks using Python. Research questions and attendant code will increasing in complexity throughout the session. This workshop is designed for learners who are new to computational textual analysis but have basic familiarity in Python programming concepts.

The No More Silence dataset represents materials from the AIDS History Project collections. The collections provide numerous opportunities to identify and contextualize how activists, journalists, researchers, and care providers responded to the epidemic and developed critical relationships.

Questions?

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

Archives as Data Research Guide Now Available!

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To help researchers in finding and understanding how to work with data from archival health sciences collections, we have compiled and published the Archives as Data research guide. “Archives as Data” refers to archival collection materials in digital form that can be shared, accessed, analyzed, and referenced as data. Using digital tools, researchers can work with archives as data to explore and evaluate characteristics of collection materials and analyze trends and connections within and across them.

AIDS History Project Collections document included in the No More Silence dataset with Python code used for analysis.

UCSF Archives and Special Collections makes data available from a number of our digital collections. Researchers will find information in the guide about accessing and using such data as well as descriptions of both the form and content this data takes. As well, you’ll find a growing set of links to to learning resources about various data analysis methods used to work with archives as data.

This new Archives as Data research guide provides researchers with a centralized resource hub with brief descriptions of collection materials as well as links to the datasets that have been prepared from them, including:

  • The No More Silence dataset, an aggregation of data from selected collections included in the AIDS History Project which range from the records of community activism groups to the papers of health researchers and journalists.
  • Data from the Industry Documents Library, comprising collections of documents from the tobacco, food, drug, fossil fuel, chemical, and opioid industries, all of which impact public health.
  • Selected datasets from the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic and dedicated to collecting and publishing the data required to understand the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, with data collected from March 2020-March 2021.
  • Data from digitized UCSF University Publications, from course catalogs to annual reports, newsletters, and more.

We look forward to updating the guide as more data from UCSF Archives and Special Collections becomes available, and anticipate expanding to include links to “archives as data” of interest for digital health humanities work made available by other institutions and organizations.

To learn more about how we are making archives as data available at UCSF, check out recordings and resources from our recent sessions on Finding and Exploring Archives as Data for Digital Health Humanities!

The Archives as Data Research Guide has been published as part of the UCSF DIgital Health Humanities pilot program. Please reach out to the Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu with any questions about DHH at UCSF. The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

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

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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.

Launching the Digital Health Humanities Pilot

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We are excited to launch digital health humanities pilot programming starting January 2023! Digital health humanities (DHH) is an emerging discipline that utilizes digital methods and resources to explore research questions investigating the human experience around health and illness. The Digital Health Humanities Pilot (DHHP) will facilitate new insights into historical health data. Participants will learn how to evaluate and integrate digital methods and “archives as data” into their research through a range of offerings and trainings.

Participants at the first workshop for the No More Silence project, a precursor to digital health humanities pilot programming

The programming from this pilot will bring a humanistic context to understanding institutional, personal and community responses to health issues, as well as social, cultural, political and economic impacts on individual and public health. The DHHP will offer researchers from all disciplines (including faculty, staff, and other learners) tailored workshops, classes, and skill-building sessions. Workshops will encourage the use of “archives as data” and utilize datasets from holdings within the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (including the AIDS History Project and Industry Documents Library, among others). Additionally, in spring 2023 we will be hosting the Digital Health Humanities Symposium. The symposium will provide space to consider theoretical issues central to this emerging field and highlight digital health humanities projects. More information on the symposium will be shared soon.

The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

Register for an upcoming Digital Health Humanities overview session

Are you interested in learning how DHH can inform your research? We invite you to participate in our virtual session, Digital Health Humanities: An Overview of Methods, Tools, Archives, and Applications, Thursday, January 19, from 1 to 3 p.m. PT.

This session will include an orientation led by Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine and Digital Archivist, Charlie Macquarie. We will discuss various approaches in DHH research, including getting familiar with data analysis and programming skills, and will share an overview of the UCSF Library’s archival collections data available for research.

For questions about digital health humanities at UCSF, please contact Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu.

Register Now

Collaborating with the Data Science Initiative

The Data Science Initiative (DSI) is offering workshops in the coming months to support researchers interested in implementing DHH approaches. Follow-up sessions will be available for researchers to reinforce and contextualize programming foundations in practical application. Check out the upcoming sessions:

We invite you to check out the library’s events and classes calendar for upcoming DHHP (and related DSI) programming. If you are unable to attend any of the sessions listed above, we advise referring to the DSI Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) (accessible with MyAccess credentials) for recordings and resources.