This post is about my experiences at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute<\/a> (DHSI) held at the University of Victoria, June 5-10 2013. \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Last month I attended my first DHSI on UVic\u2019s idyllic campus. In just five days I became proficient in the notoriously difficult ArcGIS; moved my research several, big steps forward; and met some wonderful folks working on amazing projects.<\/p>\n The course I was enrolled in, \u201cGeographical Information Systems (GIS) in the Digital Humanities,\u201d asked attendees to bring their own data. Being a DH newbie, I had no idea what kind of data was out there or how to find it. I exchanged a few emails and then met with my university’s newly hired GIS expert about where to find data on my topic. She had some excellent recommendations for providing historical context data (UK Met Office<\/a> for weather, Botanical Society of the British Isles<\/a> for botany, and Natural England<\/a> for wildlife populations, to name a few). But when I described my project in detail she looked at me and said, \u201cWell, it sounds like we\u2019re going to need to build your dataset from scratch.\u201d I spent the next month trying to figure out what exactly a dataset really was and how to build one for my research on Edith Holden\u2019s naturalist field books<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what I learned in the process:<\/p>\n Of course you don\u2019t always have to build a dataset from scratch. There\u2019s more data out there than you probably expect. Start with government agencies and societies organized around your topic or data need (e.g. The Royal Astronomical Society<\/a>). In a larger project or with the right resources, you may be able to work with a developer or Computer Science experts to build an algorithm to collect digital data for you.<\/p>\n But for most of us, building a dataset often comes down to manually inputting columns and columns of data, gleaned from digitized or undigitized texts, into spreadsheets. While the work is often monotonous, the results can be invigorating. Here\u2019s a static snapshot of the dynamic map my dataset has helped me create and a little foretaste of a future post:<\/p>\n\n