Antwerp Spring Academy in DH 2015

Data Visualisation

This three-day workshop will take place from 10 to 12 June 2015  at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, following the DHBenelux 2015 conference hosted at the same location. It offers the perfect opportunity for the conference’s participants (and other interested scholars) to learn how to visualize their data in interesting new ways.

The workshop will be taught by the developers of NodeBox, a data visualization tool created by the Experimental Media Research Group (EMRG). EMRG is a cross domain research group associated with the St. Lucas University College of Arts and Design  (Antwerp, Belgium). During the works­hop, partici­pants will learn  how to cap­ture, prepare, refine and visualize their data; gain insights in the theory of data visualisation; and start to look at data in a dif­ferent way.

The course is limited to 20 participants, who will work on their own data in groups of two. No previous program­ming experience is required. To make the course run as smoothly as possible, interested scholars are required to submit their application together with a partner scholar, and to bring their own data set to use during the work­shop.

Since places for the workshop are limited (i.e. we can only accommodate 10 pairs of scholars), a first selection of applicants will be made on the basis of the quality of their applications. Still, early registration is highly recommended.

Examples of suitable datasets include (but are not limited to): linguistic corpora, literary texts, historical documents, geographical data, and numerical data sets. Please bring your data in easily accessible formats such as plain text files, XML, CSV (comma-separated values), or spreadsheet files.

Call for Applications

• To participate in the workshop, please fill in the application form before 30 April 2015.
• If you are ad­mitted to the works­hop, you will be noti­fied by email. Enroll­ment will be con­firmed only following the pay­ment of the partici­pation fee of € 100. Payment by wire transfer before 1 June 2015.

Participation Fee

The partici­pation fee for the Spring Academy in­cludes three days of instruc­tion together with lunches and cof­fee breaks. All parti­cipants are expec­ted to arrange for their own accom­modation. Parti­cipants are expec­ted to bring their own lap­top.

Schedule

Morning sessions: 9h30 to 12h30
Afternoon sessions: 13h30 to 16h30

The participation fee includes coffee breaks and lunch breaks, provided by Agora Café (which is located in the same building).

Teachers

Frederik De Bleser

Frederik De Bleser is a researcher in the arts at Sint Lucas Antwerpen, studying the link between computers and art. He and the EMRG research team are the creators of NodeBox. The goal of his doctorate is to research the impact of procedural graphics applications such as NodeBox on graphic designers.

Lieven Menschaert

Lieven holds a bachelor degree in social sciences and a master degree in new media. He teaches at the Sint Lucas School of Arts (Antwerp, BE) and the MAD faculty (Genk, BE). He has been giving NodeBox classes since 2006 and is an EMRG member since 2007. He has an interest in design, electronics and physical computing.

Stefan Gabriëls

Stefan Gabriëls joined the Experimental Media Research Group in 2009. He holds a bachelor degree in software engineering and is studying for a master degree in arts. He has a vivid interest in computer graphics and illustration. He is the co-author of NodeBox 3.

Support Staff

Thomas Crombez

Thomas Crombez is lecturer in Philosophy of Art and Theatre History at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Antwerp), and at Sint Lucas Antwerp. As a member of the research group ArchiVolt, he focuses on the history of avant-garde and performance art. Further interests are new methodologies for doing research, such as digital text collections and data visualization. Crombez also works as a researcher at the Research Centre for Visual Poetics of the University of Antwerp. At the same institution, he initiated the Platform for Digital Humanities.

Mike Kestemont

Mike Kestemont is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium (departments of Linguistics and Literature), working on a grant of the Research Foundation of Flanders. He enjoys research in computational text analysis, in particular for historical texts. His main domain of expertise is authorship attribution.

Tom De Smedt

Tom De Smedt has a doctoral degree in arts, a master’s degree in audiovisual arts and a bachelor’s degree in software engineering. He is affiliated with the Computational Linguistics Research Group (CLiPS, University of Antwerp) and co-founder of the Experimental Media Research Group (EMRG, St Lucas University College of Art & Design, Antwerp). Research interests include computational creativity, computational linguistics, computer graphics and machine learning.