Ronald Robson 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 Ronald's experience at the summer school here:
As someone whose primary interests lie in literature and philosophy and who only late in my academic life discovered the most humanistic aspects of the “hard sciences”, the Digital Humanities (DH) field struck me as a natural way of resettling methods and questions that had preoccupied me in a more naive way.
But in Brazil, where I spent my entire academic life (up to the doctorate in Literary Theory) and where I concentrated my non-academic efforts (as a writer and independent professor), it would be extremely difficult. It is not easy to find here a place and a body of people with the theoretical background and the technical skills that could serve as a bridge to conduct more confident research in DH. This was exactly what the Digital Humanities at Oxford School Summer School (DHOxSS) provided me, thanks to a bursary Gale kindly granted me.
Of course, one week is just one week. It implies that the instructors in the From Text to Tech workshop strand – Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen, and Mariona Coll Ardanuy – had the difficult task of conveying in a few days the basics of Python programming and a broad overview of Large Language Models (LLMs) architecture and their role in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with additional hints on how we could train our own models for our specific DH aims. Fortunately, they achieved these goals with exemplary wit and at a reasonable pace – this last aspect all the more impressive.
As I already had some knowledge of programming, the first three days of training served as a way to translate the elements of Python I already knew to the specific context of NLP. The last two days offered a treatment of the more up-to-date tools for the treatment of texts for DH purposes in a very structured way I never found in any place. So be mindful of not dismissing the DHOxSS as no more than an institutional program for content that could be easily found online for free: it's not. As I said, it is a program that harmonizes in a single line the DH feeling with the technical issues it entails and requires. This approach inspired some thoughts on how to organize my experimental pedagogical DH curriculum from a Brazilian perspective – FLUSSER_project – in a more natural way.
I need to say something about the talks presented at the beginning and the end of the week, not just for the mere record, but because they were striking. The open keynote by Professor Caroline Bassett on AI and creativity challenged the audience to consider new ways of thinking not only about AI's potential to create art and especially literature, but also about human creativity in the face of artificial and autonomous modes of creation. Her observation that literature already is “artificial”, with a long history of attempts to generate texts in an automatic and almost algorithmic manner (from the surrealists, for example, to authors like Raymond Queneau), was quintessential. The closing keynote by Professor Katherine McDonough introduced a subject I must confess I was completely unaware of: the difficulties of treating maps, in a digital medium, in a way that recognizes them as not just image artifacts but also as textual ones.
For one week, all this was a hell of a ride. A very good one indeed, with a lasting impact on my work.
