Courses in the summer semester 2023
Workshops of the Service Center for Digital Humanities Münster
Workshops of the SCDH are usually held in German.
Programming for humanities researchers I: Basics in Python
25 May 2023, 2 pm - 6 pm and 26 May 2023, 9 am - 1 pm
(Dr Christian Lück, Mirko Westermeier)
This hands-on workshop is an excellent opportunity for humanities researchers to take their first steps in programming without prior knowledge. The aim of the course is to teach important principles of programming and to enable participants to design and implement their own programmes using 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.
We use the beginner-friendly Python programming language, which is widely used in this field and for which there are many tools that are important for questions in the humanities. Participants will learn what is behind variables and values, what expressions and statements are; they will familiarise themselves with 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 programme flow. Using practical problems, we practise "algorithmic thinking" in order to answer a specific question (What exactly do we do if we want to determine the proportion of abbreviations in a text?) using the familiar tools in a targeted manner and develop a programme to solve the problem.
The workshop is open to all humanities researchers at the University of Münster and 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.
Python 3 and the Python development environment IDLE should already have been installed before the start of the workshop. Detailed installation instructions will be made available on the learning web well in advance. At a "garage meeting" before the workshop day, we can get round any difficulties with the installation together; the date will be announced on the Learnweb in good time. On the day of the workshop itself, we can get off to a smooth start. The workshop will take place in person. Please register by 18.05.2023 at scdh@uni-muenster.de. Please also indicate whether you would like to attend the training as part of the DH certificate or as an employee.
Programming for humanities researchers II: NLP with Python
15 June 2023, 2 pm - 6 pm and 16 June 2023, 9 am - 1 pm
(Dennis Voltz, Katharina Dietz)
As more and more texts are available in machine-readable digital formats, it is becoming increasingly easy to analyse 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 analysing large volumes of unstructured, text-heavy data. NLP is undergoing rapid development as new methods and toolsets converge with a constantly growing volume of data.
In this workshop you will explore the basic 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 and 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. Please register by 08.06.2023 at scdh@uni-muenster.de. Please also indicate whether you would like to attend the training as part of the DH certificate or as an employee.
Credit points: Participation in two SCDH workshops and the (collaborative) creation of a blog post on the DH blog enables you to earn one credit point (1 ECTS) for the certificate.