DH WORKSHOPS & LECTURES

Grounded in a critical digital humanities perspective, this workshop examined how different modalities of writing and reading — handwritten, digital, and AI-assisted — shape thought, expression, and knowledge production.

Part of the FORTHEM Europa Forum BIP Reading for a Stronger Europe: From Pixels to Pages — Reading Europe Differently (ValoS001), Riga, 8–12 June 2026.

Dace Krecere-Vule and Haralds Matulis share experience working with the Neputns bibliographic dataset to study cultural heritage authorization strategies.

5 June, 15:00–17:00, ILFA LFK reading room. Especially suited for beginners, but useful for experts too — we start from the very first steps: selecting a dataset, deciding whether to use digital methods, and the practical steps, difficulties, and insights encountered when doing data analysis as a humanities researcher and a DH researcher.

The full process — from a research idea to building a digital dataset and processing it with digital methods (Python, Excel, Voyant, Flourish).

A conversation with University of Latvia Library (LUL) director Uldis Zariņš.

LUL as an analog and digital library. What are the first digital tools researchers encounter at LUL? And in what ways will AI fundamentally change library work?

A conversation with Aldis Ērglis, head of Emergn Latvia and University of Latvia researcher.

AI tools every humanities person should know. How is AI changing the role of humanities and social science researchers in the job market? And which humanities skills will remain irreplaceable?

Continuing the positively received DH seminar series, we launched a new thematic line — „Digital tools I use”.

Aim: to give ILFA researchers working with digital methods an opportunity to present practical digital (and analog) method workflows. To strengthen ILFA role as a centre of excellence and knowledge in DH in Latvia, these “work in progress” DH seminars are open — primarily for ILFA researchers, while also welcoming participants from the broader DH community in Latvia.

24 April, 15:00–17:00. Ieva Vīvere, „Ko iesākt ar tabulu?!” (Where to start with a spreadsheet?!) — experience with Skandinieki data obtained from the National Library of Latvia. Experiments and insights from processing the data with Excel, OpenRefine, and NodeGoat.

Hands-on workshop at AUEB for students in Digital Methods in the Humanities. Part of my Erasmus+ traineeship (PhD, University of Latvia).

Students used the KWIC (Key Word in Context) method in Google Colab to explore basic computational approaches to textual data. Related open notebook: kwic-notebook on GitHub.

Exploratory data analysis on a concrete example: metadata for Andris Grinbergs’ performance photography album (Excel), used in research by Laine Kristberga. Suitable as a case study for those working with textual data.

Three files published after the seminar document the data analysis process and the use of digital tools in this project:

05 — data exploration overview (PDF)
31 — digital tool workflow for this project (PDF)
README.txt

Guest lecture at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Department of Informatics, for the postgraduate programme Digital Methods in the Humanities. Part of my Erasmus+ traineeship (PhD, University of Latvia), supervised by Dr. Agiatis Benardou.

The lecture surveyed examples from my research and typical digital humanities workflows—working with datasets, AI tools, coding, and data analysis—and how they fit together in practice.

Workshop on digital methods for history research. Part of the ISHA Winter Seminar 2025 "Multiple Baltics" – Reimagining Social, Cultural and Spatial Dimensions of History.

In this workshop we took a brief tour of different digital methods suited for history research. Then we followed up with some ready-made digital tools and showed how they can be suitable in research. In the closing part, we looked at how participants can enhance their regular humanities digital skills with a gentle touch of programming (Python and Google Colab) and use artificial intelligence tools, namely chat assistants, like ChatGPT, Gemini, or others.

Workshop at NOVA University Lisbon for Digital Humanities master students and others interested in DH. Part of my Erasmus+ traineeship in Lisbon DH_Lab.

This workshop is part of my Erasmus+ traineeship (as a PhD student of University of Latvia) in Lisbon DH_Lab, where I learn from their experience in spatial humanities and share my knowledge of critical approaches to LLM and AI tools in humanities research.

Workshop at NOVA University Lisbon for Digital Humanities master students and others interested in DH. Part of my Erasmus+ traineeship in Lisbon DH_Lab.

This workshop is part of my Erasmus+ traineeship (as a PhD student of University of Latvia) in Lisbon DH_Lab, where I learn from their experience in spatial humanities and share my knowledge of Python, textual analysis, and data analysis and data management for DH research.

A practical workshop with computational methods in the Nordplus Life Writing seminar.

Applied text analysis techniques including word counts, tokenization, stopword removal, and keyness analysis, as well as Named Entity Recognition and sentiment analysis to track people, places, and emotions over time in one diary.