DHOXSS 2025 - From Text to Tech

Laura del Alisal 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 Laura's experience at the summer school here:

Historians are naturally drawn to the past. We feel at home in the analogue, the materiality of books and artefacts, the traditional practice of close reading. Yet we can't ignore that, in the present, technology is reshaping how knowledge is created, circulated, and preserved. How can we, then, remain meaningful by connecting the past with the present (and the future)?

Digital Humanities (DH) offers the answer by bringing computational tools into history (as well as literature, philosophy, the arts, and other humanistic fields). Beyond digitising archives, DH offers new methods such as large-scale text analysis and quantitative approaches to data, and new ways of sharing knowledge through visualisations, interactive websites, and multimedia storytelling. In doing so, DH expands both the questions we can ask and the forms our answers may take.

Like any field shaped by technology, DH evolves quickly. I first encountered it while researching transatlantic networks of revolutionary women for my master’s dissertation, where historical social network analysis (HSNA) revealed patterns that close reading alone did not. But by the time I began my DPhil five years later, GenAI had already altered the landscape. I needed further training to keep pace, and Oxford provided the opportunity. Thanks to a full bursary, I could attend this year’s Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS) at St Anne’s College and update my skills.

The week began with a timely keynote by Professor Caroline Bassett on creativity and generative AI. Then, participants divided into their streams. I had joined 'From Text to Tech', led by Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Federico Nanni, and Kaspar Beelen, probably the most popular course. We started by discussing some successful projects such as Living with Machines, which exemplify DH’s principles of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and open access. Those principles were also reflected in our own group of historians, linguists, medievalists, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals from across the world.

After the introduction, we moved quickly into coding. Programming can seem daunting for us humanists, but our facilitators broke tasks into clear steps. Sessions involved live coding in Google Colab and short, practical exercises. By midweek we were comfortable with Python fundamentals, had learned about text processing and data structures, and had begun using libraries such as Pandas. Later sessions introduced NLP transformers, and LLMs, from their history to their implications for humanistic research. A highlight for me was discovering Ollama, a free tool that runs different LLMs locally on your device, reducing environmental impact.

The week also included plenty of time to socialise, both within and across streams, during the breaks and lunch time. In the evenings, there were events to explore Oxford, which visitors especially valued. These informal exchanges reinforced the collaborative ethos of DH.

Reflecting on the course’s impact for my research, I recall something Mariona said with regard to computational linguistics: “The meaning of a word is not a
definition, it’s the context of the words with which it concurs.” This insight resonates with my investigation on the transformation of the concept of liberty in certain historical political contexts. With the new skills I acquired during the course, I can now analyse multiple text corpora and trace how meanings of words evolve, an approach that complements traditional historical methods in the history of political ideas.

I'm very grateful to DHOxSS 2025 for this opportunity. The week gave me new technical tools, confidence in Python coding, and a network of fellow humanists engaged in digital research. I hope to return in future years, as this field is not only enriching my own work but also reshaping how we think about scholarship in this digital era.