Martin Lindner was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Martin's experience at the summer school here:
As a doctoral research student taking the first steps into processing textual data computationally, the Text to Tech workshop at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School by Kaspar von Beelen, Mariona Coll Ardanuy and Federico Nanni, provided an ideal learning environment.
This was firstly due to the breadth of the course – within 5 days we came from ‘print("hello")’, that is, the first basic steps of coding in Python, to understanding the processes behind applications such as ChatGPT, and exploring the use cases for Large Language Models for our own research.
While the learning curve of the Text to Tech Workshop was therefore very steep during the five brief days at St. Anne’s College in Oxford, this course structure brought with it several advantages. After our group had discovered the basics of coding in Python that would be relevant for understanding all of the topics what were to come, the team of Kaspar von Beelen, Mariona Coll Ardanuy and Federico Nanni provided a brief snapshot of various potential use cases and applications for digital humanities research, which in turn, provided us – a very diverse group of scholars from different disciplines in the humanities – with an ideal steppingstone to further investigate the methods that were relevant to us in the weeks and months to come.
In my particular example, I used to the workshop to explore whether incorporating a quantitative newspaper analysis (specifically German-language newspapers from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in the period of 1867-1918) into my DPhil project would be feasible. For my specific research question, the ‘Working with Tabular Data’ workshop section on Day 3 was therefore especially relevant, as I learned how to work with the ‘Pandas’ library in Python in order to perform statistical analyses on text data. I am yet undecided of whether incorporating a quantitative newspaper analysis into my doctorate will be feasible in terms of time resources, but the Text to Tech workshop has definitely provided me with the necessary skills and knowledge to carry out such an analysis, if this plan comes to fruition.
Finally, I would like to point out one particular strength of the Text to Tech Workshop at the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School 2024 that will have benefited everyone taking the course, regardless of whether the topics and methods spoke to their particular research interest or not: that is, the high degree of interactivity during the workshop. Throughout the five days, Kaspar von Beelen, Mariona Coll Ardanuy and Federico Nanni structured the course in such a way that we would run all code live during the sessions, so that we could directly and immediately see how the tools and methods we were exploring worked in practice. Apart from that, each module of the course also contained various practical exercises that we a class could undertake ourselves, by working with well-known data sets and text corpora that were available online. So irrespective of whether the particular questions about our specific research problems we came with were answered during the course or not, I think everyone who took the Text 2 Tech course at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School as a humanities scholar built highly useful skills, not the least simply of learning how to code in Python, that will be beneficial in our future, and more and more digital, careers in any case. A thoroughly useful, fast-paced, and highly enjoyable learning experience!
