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Getting Started with Digital Text Analysis for Humanists Part 2

Are you a literature student interested in digital humanities but not sure where to start? Are you a historian with hundreds of text documents you want to analyze but not sure what questions you could ask at scale?

This two-part series will briefly introduce you to the kinds of questions you can ask of texts with digital humanities and how to prepare your materials for this work. We will be primarily using examples written in English, but we will briefly discuss some issues working in other languages.

Pursuing work of this kind takes time and commitment: it cannot be learned in just a few hours. But hopefully participants will come away from the series with a plan for the possibilities for working text analysis into their own research and a plan for further study to carry out this work.

This second session will discuss how to apply computational methods to texts using a series of case studies. Sample topics include:

  • Introduction to Python
  • Counting words at scale
  • Tagging the parts of speech in a text
  • Identifying place names and character names
  • Determining how positive or negative a text is
  • Where to go next

No prior experience is necessary for the workshop. You do not need to have attended session one to attend session two, though the two are useful in sequence. Participants should come with a laptop that can connect to the internet. Participants will not need to install anything for this particular workshop, though we can work with individuals interested in running the software on their own machines after the workshop.

Spaces are limited. Register to attend

Sponsoring Organization(s):

December 6, 2021 10:00 am to 11:30 am

Clemons 407

Event type: Workshop