Chloe Green was awarded a bursary to attend the Text to Tech 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 Chloe's experience at the summer school here:
What do pythons, pandas, and llamas have in common with machine learning? It may sound like a strange riddle—but it is one that we answered in the Text to Tech strand at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2025.
Kaspar von Beelen, Mariona Coll Ardanuy, and Federico Nanni of The Alan Turing Institute led our cohort of newfound programmers on a crash course in the python language (with, luckily, no actual computer crashes along the way). In our updated vocabulary, “pandas” denoted the Python Data Analysis Library, and any references to “llamas” really designated Ollama, the Omni-Layer Learning Language Acquisition Model for machine learning; but still Kaspar, Mariona, and Federico cheered us on with many pictures of pandas and llamas along the way, as we progressed from the basics of coding syntax to methods for designing and utilising our own large language models for humanities research.
The Turing team shared their experiences of work on the fascinating Living with Machines project, through which they are investigating the effects of labour mechanisation on everyday life in the long nineteenth century. Their research questions are of immense relevance to society today, as we all grapple with the implications of AI on work. These questions also resonated with me on a more personal level, as I prepare to enter my second year as a DPhil student in music at Oxford, analysing representations of the bicycle and other transportational technologies in nineteenth-century popular song. Thanks to Kaspar, Mariona, and Federico, I look forward to using my knowledge of python as I tabulate mentions of cycling in my corpus of Victorian music hall songs and evaluate the meanings of industrial technologies to cultures past and present.
I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the expertly organised summer school, which balanced opportunities for deep learning with regular breaks for tea, biscuits, and chat with the instructors and fellow participants. Caroline Bassett’s opening keynote “Creativity and the Machine: Writing, Literature, AI” and Katherine McDonough’s closing keynote “Text on Maps: Bridging the Spatial/Textual Divide in Digital Humanities” gave further context to the technological tools with which we engaged, bringing the summer school attendees from across the strands together to consider the ethical questions and possibilities of using machine learning in our own research projects. Across the week, I met several researchers who were returning to the programme for a second year, and I hope to likewise be back next summer to gain further skills in digital humanities in the stretching yet supportive environment of the summer school.
