7.5 credits (Uppsala University)

Weeks 39-48 at part-time pace (50 %).

The course will take place at campus Engelska Parken, Uppsala University with possibility for distance participation from DASH doctoral students who are not located in the vicinity of Uppsala.

The PhD course “Introduction to Cultural Analytics” is given by the Department of ALM and the Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala (CDHU) in the fall term 2023. The course is targeted towards PhD students in the humanities and social sciences who do not yet possess specific computational or technical skills, but who are interested to learn more for their future thesis work.

The aim of the course is to introduce methods for computational text analysis from a humanities and social sciences perspective. After completing the course, students are expected to have gained the following knowledge and skills:

• knowledge about computational text analysis methods and their relevance for humanities and social sciences tasks
• knowledge about machine learning and its basic concepts, as well as such methods’ possibilities and limitations
• practical skills to employ computational methods for text analysis by using existing software, and by following and adapting basic programming scripts
• the ability to critically reflect upon the results derived from computational methods (regarding ethical, statistical, and empirical/material-oriented concerns)
• the ability to highlight epistemological concerns regarding computational and statistical methods from a humanities and social sciences perspective

The course consists of the following thematic areas: introduction to cultural analytics and Python, data curation and analysis, data collection (web scraping, APIs, social media), natural language processing and computational text analysis, machine learning.