Advances in computational methods have created new opportunities to apply digital methods not only to historical and philosophical research, but also to discovery and meta-analysis in these disciplines as well as the sciences and sustainability research. This hands-on course provides an introduction to digital and computational methods -- from managing digital data to computational analysis. Using their own data, you will be introduced to data and metadata management, text mining, citation analysis, data visualization and other computational methods.

We hope to..

Give you a clearer picture of the landscape of methods available for humanities research;
Help you to develop a "computational" perspective, by imparting a deeper understanding of how humanistic questions can be translated into computational problems;
Provide a space in which you can tinker and experiment with new tools and techniques that might enhance your own research.

Full Disclosure

It is impossible for one course to capture the full breadth and depth of computational humanities. Our orientation is toward the analysis of texts and text collections, and so most of our material starts from that perspective. Nevertheless, the tools and techniques that we will discuss are widely applicable beyond text-oriented projects.

Overview

Module 1: Digital Materials & Collections
Module 2: Introduction to Networks
Module 3: Corpus Analysis and Topic Modeling
Module 4: Web Services and APIs
Module 5: Integrated Approaches

Procedure

This course is divided into five sequential modules, each of which builds on the previous modules in various ways. Each module is organized into five components:

Software requirements. This section details the software that you will need in order to complete the module. It is important that you work through this section as early as possible, so that we can help you to troubleshoot any problems that will inevitably arise.
Reading. This course is focused more on hands-on activities than it is theory or historiography, so we hesitate to call any of these readings "required." But we will point you to helpful articles, blog posts, and other resources that contextualize or provide background information. It is a good idea to peruse these readings if you have time, but it is not strictly necessary.
Online Tutorials. Each module involves a variety of skills and knowledge components, and we have broken these out into bite-size tutorials. This way you can focus on the skills that are most foreign to you. You should work through these tutorials prior to our in-person meetings, and revisit them again as needed afterwards.
In-person meetings. During our class meetings, we will spend some time contextualizing the methods that we are focusing on this week, and walk through the main techniques. We'll also address any questions or issues that are nominated for discussion (see Getting Help).
Assignments. We'll give you a set of procedures that we'd like you to complete prior to our next meeting. Usually this will involve collecting or preparing data that we will use in the next module, so it is very important that you complete this in time. Start early, so that we can help you if you run into trouble!

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