Digital Tools and Methods

Course goals

In this course you will obtain:
 
i) Experience with basic text analysis using the programming language Python;
ii) Insights into tools and methods used in the field of Digital Humanities;
iii) Familiarity with problems and challenges related to the searchability of large data sets in the Humanities.
 
 
 

Content

Research in the Humanities relies increasingly on the analysis of large quantities of language data. For example, a researcher of Media and Culture interested in the influence of social media on political opinions might want to analyze political views expressed on Twitter. A historian searching for historic texts might need methods to deal with historic spelling variation in order to find relevant documents in a large document collection. A linguist might be interested in studying dialectal variation in a large corpus using quantitative methods.
 
This course will introduce students to digital tools and methods used for research in the Humanities (‘Digital Humanities’). The theoretical part of the course will focus on basic concepts that are essential for working with large quantities of humanities data, including corpora and databases, searching techniques, information retrieval, and statistical language models. In the practical part of the course students will learn how to do basic text analysis using the programming language Python.
 

 

Additional information

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final and may still be modified until the 3rd Wednesday in September. 

This course is open to students from all bachelor's programs in the Faculty of Humanities (except for the bachelor Kunstmatige Intelligentie). No prior programming experience is required.