Workshops of the Service Center for Digital Humanities Münster
Programming for Humanities Students I: Basics in Python (teaching language: German)
May 20, 2022 from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
(Dr. Christian Lück, Mirko Westermeier)
This hands-on workshop is an excellent opportunity for humanities researchers to take sound first steps in programming without prior knowledge. The goal of the course is to teach important principles of programming and to enable participants to design and implement their own programs by means of examples and exercises. The subject of the exercises is the processing of text, which is important for the humanities, so that the participants acquire the competence to carry out simple analyses themselves, e.g. concerning the vocabulary of a text or the frequency of letters and word forms.
As a programming language we use Python, a beginner-friendly language that is widely used in this field and for which there are many tools that are important for questions in the humanities. Participants learn what is behind variables and values, what expressions and statements are; they get to know basic data types (such as numbers and text) and data structures (such as lists and dictionaries). They use control structures (conditional execution, loops) to control the program flow. On the basis of practice-oriented problems, we will practice central "algorithmic thinking" in order to apply the known tools in a targeted manner to a concrete question (What exactly do we do if we want to determine the proportion of abbreviations in a text?) and to develop a program to solve the problem.
The workshop is open to all humanities researchers at University of Münster as well as students of the Digital Humanities certificate. The number of participants is limited to 20. Participants should bring laptops connected to the WLAN. Python 3 and the Python development environment IDLE should have already been installed before the workshop starts. Detailed installation instructions will be made available on the learning web well in advance. At a "garage meeting" before the workshop day, we can work around installation difficulties together; the date will be announced on the Learnweb in good time. On the day of the workshop itself we can start smoothly. It is planned to hold the workshop in presence. Please register by 13.05.2022 at scdh@uni-muenster.de.
Examination: Blog contribution, 1 ECTS
Programming for Humanists II: NLP with Python (teaching language: German)
June 3, 2022 from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
(Dennis Voltz)
As more and more texts are available in machine-readable digital formats, it is becoming increasingly easy to analyze texts by machine. Natural language processing (NLP) plays a central role here. This sub-discipline of computational linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence is crucial for effectively analyzing large amounts of unstructured, text-heavy data. NLP is undergoing rapid development as new methods and toolsets converge with an ever-increasing amount of data.
In this workshop, you will explore the fundamental concepts of NLP and its role in current and emerging technologies. To do this, we will take an in-depth look at the Python library "SpaCy". By the end of the workshop, you will be able to independently develop and apply the most basic NLP processes, such as POS tagging and named entity recognition.
It is possible to attend this workshop without any programming knowledge. However, to fully grasp all technical concepts, it is recommended to attend the first part of the workshop or to have a rudimentary knowledge of Python.
The workshop is open to all humanities researchers at the University of Münster as well as students of the Digital Humanities certificate. The number of participants is limited to 20. Participants should bring laptops connected to the WIFI. It is planned to hold the workshop in presence. Registration is requested by 27.05.2022 at scdh@uni-muenster.de.
Examination: Blog contribution, 1 ECTS
