Category: RARA

Springtime is the right time for exchange

Team members in the Austrian National Library's State Hall

In Vienna ODL project members exchanged ideas and good laughs

In May ODL project teams gathered in Vienna for a workshop

Finally, after a long pandemic the teams gathered on site in Vienna. On the 17th and 18th of May, ODL team members from the KB and the Estonian National Library visited the Austrian National Library for a two-days workshop.
The workshop format offered the possibility to apply different tools from the design thinking and gamestorming toolbox in order to reflect upon our work accomplished and the steps ahead.
“Learning from each other” is a core “brick of ODL”. This includes not only the success stories but also challenges and pitfalls, though we are “facing similar problems”. You guess right! The “ODL tower” stood until the end.

Ron Hol adding his brick to the ODL tower.

After nearly two years of remote exchange over online applications, we really took advantage of using paper, sticky notes, whiteboards and a Jenga tower ;-).
The exchange meeting was also a good opportunity to evaluate the status at midterm and to discuss the workpackages ahead.
We are very much looking forward to the next exchange meeting at the KB!

Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities 2021

Digital Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences

The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities 2021: «Digital Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences» took place on 23-26 August 2021. It was organised in cooperation with the National Library of Estonia and the University of Tartu.

The target audience was students, researchers and specialists of digital tools in memory institutions. According to the times, the Summer School was in hybrid form – both online and on site. It was attended by 204 students, researchers and specialists.

Keynote lecture: Mila Oiva – Uncovering the Formation of Fake History Narratives

Moderator Mariann Proos, August 24th @09:30.

Keynote lecture: Jonas Nölle – Virtual Reality: A new tool for studying human behaviour in the lab

Moderator: Andres Karjus, August 25th @09:30

Dong Nguyen – NLP for robust and reliable measurements

Moderator Artjoms Šeļa, August 26th @09:30

Linda Freienthal – The KRATT at NLE – how did we do it

August 26th @14:00

The Summer School offered the opportunity to get acquainted with new methods from specialists in the field and to think about various digital technological possibilities. The contacts and ideas created during the summer school will hopefully become fertile ground for new digital technology applications in humanities, social sciences and digital archives.


International Summer School of Digital Humanities

On Aug 23-26, as part of the activities in the Open Digital Libraries project, the National Library of Estonia, in collaboration with Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society at University of Tartu, is organizing a summer school for graduate students.  The summer school gathers graduate students and GLAM professionals across the Baltic States to learn ways to apply innovative digital methods to their work in research or organization. The summer school follows the earlier events of the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities and Digital Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences.

The summer school will provide an introduction to data analysis and methodological principles for working with (digital) data in humanities and social sciences. It will include nine parallel workshops in three days and one additional day for students to discuss their own projects. Topics to be discussed: text-driven automated indexing, computational data harmonization, social media analysis, Bayesian statistics, data processing and visualization and natural language processing.

The summer school also features four keynote lectures from noted experts from Europe who discuss their own work. The speakers Richard McElreath, Mila Oiva, Jonas Nölle, and Dong Nguyen will discuss the use of digital methods in cross-cultural research, the spread of online pseudohistorical narratives, the use of virtual reality for scientific experiments and the use of natural language processing in digital humanities.

The summer school is designed to take place in hybrid form, with participation available fully online, but the workshops taking place also on site at the National Library of Estonia.