Description, Themes & Objectives
This winter school is aimed at beginners, but all levels of experience are welcome!
This winter school (3 consecutive days + 1 presentation day) aims to familiarize you with two broader approaches to digital research that are relevant for cultural historians in various fields of interest. These two approaches are distant reading techniques with R and spatial analysis with QGIS. Our winter school provides an opportunity to experiment with and reflect on textual and spatial data. We will be working with a variety of textual corpora and cultural data (e.g. travel guides) to address your research questions.
Concerning distant reading, we will discuss key methodologies such as web scraping, topic modelling and distributional semantics (‘word embeddings’). Concerning QGIS, we will Construct spatial databases, visualize data and create historical maps.
The winter school offers lectures, seminars and individual assignments tailormade by experts on text mining, GIS and visualization. At the end of this winter school, you will know how to explore, analyze and visualize large datasets. You’ll be able to critically reflect on the ways in which ‘going digital’ adds to, changes or challenges, your own practice as a historian.
Best wishes,
Maarten Van Dijck
Ralf Futselaar
Pieter van den Heede
Register (0/15 spaces left)
This course is fully booked. For a spot on the waiting list, contact huizinga@uu.nl