Kathryn Hempstead 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 Kathryn's experience at the summer school here:
I'm a DPhil Student in English at Oxford working on a large scale textual analysis of English recipe books from the seventeenth century - with no background in programming to help me complete the analysis. For me, the five days of the Text2Tech strand were lifechanging. I went into Summer School with a clear goal of learning new textual analysis methods that I could apply directly to my project and Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Kaspar von Beelen, and Federico Nanni delivered this and then some.
Something I was quite nervous about in the week before the programme was not having enough knowledge of programming key words and basics, but from the moment I entered the classroom it was clear that this strand is set up to help true beginners get up to speed on digital humanities text processing techniques. The best way to describe my background knowledge was having watched and attended some tutorials on Natural Language Processing, and having read enough papers in my field to know the opportunities afforded by digital techniques. The demonstrations I had seen before Sumer School were in python, where I had no knowledge of the basics and honestly thought you needed some kind of degree to operate in.
Before DHOxSS trying to digitally analyse text felt like I was running around in level 3 of a video game really struggling as I didn't have any of the basic rules or controls. Text2Tech and the individual support from Mariona, Kaspar, and Federico, to follow the metaphor, gave me the game tutorial, and guided me through levels 1, 2, and 3, and demonstrated all the ways I'll be able to expand my new python text processing skills into the future. Something I really appreciated was the attention to both the skills element of python, but also the way the instructors gave use the general shape of how the field has progressed to today.
When I enrolled in DHOxSS I was expecting to come away with skills, but what I wasn't expecting was to come away with so many connections and new friends from across the world working on similar research problems or with a shared enthusiasm for the future of digital humanities. The tea and coffee breaks, lunch, and the evening events were a great place to meet new people from across disciplines and fields and learn about all the different ways DH is being utilised across institutions and projects globally. It was also a great opportunity to present the issues I've been coming up against in my work and find out all the different and creative ways others further along in their DH journeys have solved the same problems.
I've come away from Summer School with more enthusiasm for how I can integrate a variety of text processing through python including word vectors and NLP into my project. The most significant thing for me is that I now feel confident in using the skills taught in Text2Tech for my own project. The blank Jupyter Notebook no longer scares me, but gives me a sense of excitement and possibility.
