DHOXSS 2025 - attending Applied Data Analysis
Elena Russo was awarded a bursary to attend the Applied Data Analysis strand of the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Elena's experience at the summer school here:
IÂ grabbed my messy notes on Python, checked that my laptop was charged, and put on my name badge. One last sip of coffee and I was ready to head out. This was my morning routine for the most fun (and demanding!) week of my summer.
In August, I took part in the Digital Humanities Summer School in Oxford. I am a History PhD student and, to be honest, not one of the most tech-savvy ones: my biggest 'digital' achievement was using the library printer. This changed a few years ago: with the rise of digital methods in humanities, boosted by AI, I started slowly learning to code. Although I understood the basics, I could not fully grasp the potential of these methods in my discipline until this summer school. Finally, a space where learning and discussing digital approaches was targeted to my field. I was worried about not being at the right level for the program, but I decided to apply, and the chance paid off!
I was part of the Applied Data Analysis strand, which introduced data analysis techniques and their practical use for humanities scholars. The class focused mostly on the Pandas library in Python. During the course, we went through how to get from messy to tidy data, the basics of data analysis and visualization, advanced topics (modeling), and applications (geo mapping, network analysis). We also covered networking methods and language models. I was impressed by the amount of content we were able to go through in only a week; focused 9-to-5 classes made the most of our time in Oxford. I was grateful for the help of Ellen and Paul, the strand instructors, who patiently guided us through the program.
During the course, we were also invited to work on our own project. I brought original data collected from Trieste's archives, listing officers of an important 19th-century Adriatic steamship company and their origins. By the end of the week, I had created a map showing the employees' distributions, using GeoPandas methods. It was so satisfying to code everything from scratch myself!
The cherry on top of the program were the evening events. My favorite was the poster presentation held in the Weston Library. All dressed up, eating fancy nibbles and drinking prosecco, some of the participants presented their research. The topics were varied: from using geomapping to represent the distribution of traditional Sardinian costumes, to language models tracing differences in German and Slovenian translations. This evening encapsulated the potential that digital humanities have!
After a week spent puzzling over 'KeyErrors', 'SyntaxErrors', and 'IndentationErrors', but also filled with laughter and 'wow' moments in class, I went back to my normal life, excited to apply everything I learned to my work.
