This week we are reflecting on the DARIAH-FI online workshops with doctoral researchers that took place during the spring 2024. The team from Tampere University, which is responsible for the Evidence-Based Infrastructure Development work package (WP), organized two events in collaboration with the University of Helsinki and other WPs of the research infrastructure (RI).

The first event took place on March 2024 with the developers of the Nordic Tweet Stream, a multilingual monitor corpus of geolocated tweets and associated metadata from the Nordic region created in the University of Eastern Finland by Mikko Laitinen, Paula Rautionaho, Masoud Fatemi and Mehrdad Salimi.

A total of 41 participants of various backgrounds (e.g., media and communications; computer and information science; languages and literature) registered for the event, which consisted of a presentation of the resource and a hands-on assignment where the attendees could live test the different functionalities of the Nordic Tweet Stream. Along with the testing, participants also had the opportunity to ask any questions and make suggestions for improvement to the developers.

The second event took place on May 2024 with the developers of the Twitch Chat Collector and Analysis Tools, a set of digital resources to collect and analyze large samples of chat data from the game stream service Twitch created in the University of Jyväskylä by Raine Koskimaa, Jari Lindroos and Ida Toivanen in collaboration with Jaakko Peltonen (Tampere University).

In this occasion, a total of 31 participants of various backgrounds (e.g., media and communications; educational sciences; languages and literature) registered for the event, which followed the same structure of the workshop that took place on March 2024. Participants first enjoyed a walkthrough of the digital resources, where they learned what they can do with them, and then had the opportunity to complete a couple of exercises using the Twitch Chat Collector and Analysis Tools with the support of the developers.

In both online workshops, participants were highly engaged in the testing and looked forward to hearing more about the resources in the future. The number of participants registered for the events also shows the necessity of keep organizing this type of trainings, which attracted not only doctoral researchers but also scholars in more advanced positions. For this reason, we encourage our readers to keep an eye on the event calendar for upcoming online workshops that might be organized during the fall with other resources developed under the framework of the RI. In the meantime, the team from Tampere University will provide soon a document including best practices for organizing this type of trainings in a more systematic way.

All the best,

Anna Sendra Toset from Tampere University

Photos: NASA & Fausto Sandoval on Unsplash