Charlie Macquarie
Charlie Macquarie
Charlie is the Digital Archivist for Archives and Special Collections.

Upcoming Beginner Workshop on Digital Archives and Programming

Don’t miss the upcoming workshop Our Collections Our Data: Grassroots Digital Archives and Computer Programming for Absolute Beginners. This four day workshop will take place online on 7/26, 7/30, 8/2, and 8/4, from 9:30am to 12:30pm (PDT) each day. The workshop will be led by Charlie Macquarie, UCSF Digital Archivist, and Dr. Clair Kronk, postdoctoral researcher at Yale University and creator of the Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation (GSSO) ontology, with a presentation from Krü Maekdo, founder of the Black Lesbian Archives, and assistance from Rebecca Tang, programmer with the UCSF Industry Documents Library.

What will I learn?

The workshop will be a gathering place and skillshare for practitioners of queer digital community history, and an introduction to computer programming as a foundation for building, maintaining, and using digital community archives. We will begin by presenting and workshopping ideas for existing digital archival projects and preparing digital material to work with in our later sessions. In the first session we will hear from Charlie about the AIDS History Project and the No More Silence Project — two UCSF Archives projects to document and provide access to the digital history of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic — and from Krü Maekdo about the Black Lesbian Archives and her work documenting digital materials of Black Lesbian history. We will discuss workshop participants own projects, and get started collecting a few digital documents of our own with which to work further.

In the later sessions we will learn the programming language Python to manipulate, manage, and interpret example digital documents from our own materials and collections. We will learn Python as absolute beginners, and no previous experience in computer programming of any kind will be required. We will end with a skillshare, project share, and overview of more advanced topics for future self-directed study.

Who should register?

Who should register for this workshop? People interested in digital humanities, digital grassroots archives, history of AIDS/HIV, and LGBTQ History and the application of computer programming to these topics.

Sign up

No prior experience in computer programming is required.
Expect a slow pace and going over basics and fundamentals.

This workshop is supported by California Revealed and administered in California by the State Librarian. The program is made possible by funding from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.