Digital Methods in the Humanities

Anita Auer, Lettres UNIL

Michael Piotrowski, Lettres UNIL

Loïc Jeanson, Lettres UNIL

Jennifer Thorburn, Lettres UNIL

Tobias Hodel (University of Bern)

Tobias Hodel is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. He got a PhD from the University of Zurich in History (2016) and specializes in machine learning-based approaches for historical text documents.

Isabella Di Lenardo (EPFL)

Isabella di Lenardo is a research scientist at the EPFL with expertise in the fields of Digital Urban History, Art History and Archeology and digital humanities. She has expertise in geographic information systems, digital urban history, and digital art history, to participate and coordinate large international academic projects with public institutions and private companies. Thanks to her work of coordination of international projects she consolidated her technical knowledge in automatic systems for the extraction of historical information, data processing, creation of exploration interfaces for scientific communities but also wider and more diverse audiences. These innovative methodological approaches have been the subject of numerous publications and some books in preparation. A large part of her activity has also privileged teaching, holding ex cathedra courses in Digital Urban History field, at the EPFL since 2014, and Digital Art Hstory and Urban History in other universities on an international scale. She is also coordinator of the Local Time Machines for the Time Machine Organisation.

Sébastien de Valeriola (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Sébastien de Valeriola is mathematician, actuary and historian. He holds the digital humanities chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His research interests cover the application of quantitative methods in the humanities, with a special focus on machine learning techniques, historical network analysis, text mining and image analysis.







 

Pablo Diaz (UNIL)

Bio: Pablo Diaz is a sociologist. He is the ethics officer of the University of Lausanne. He also works as a research fellow at the Swiss Centre for Expertise in Social Sciences (FORS) where he conducts research and provides support to the scientific community on personal and sensitive data management. He is particularly interested in research data sharing issues in the era of open science.

Ian Gregory (Lancaster)

Ian Gregory is Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University where he co-directs the Lancaster Centre for Digital Humanities. His main area of expertise is in Spatial Humanities, the use of geospatial technologies to understand the past. He has written or edited eight books on this subject, most recently Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A geographical text analysis (with Joanna Taylor). He has held grants from multiple funders including the European Research Council, Economic & Social Research Council, Arts & Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Evelyn Gius (TU Darmstadt)

Evelyn Gius is a Professor of Digital Philology and Modern German Literature at Technical University Darmstadt and head of the fortext lab. She completed her studies of German Literature, philosophy and computer science in Hamburg and Naples with a thesis on computer-readable lexical resources and received her PhD at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the narrative structure of conflict narratives. In her research, Evelyn Gius focuses on narrative theory, manual annotation, operationalization, segmentation, and conflict. She leads the development of the annotation platform CATMA as well as the platform fortext.net where beginner-friendly materials for Digital Humanities are provided. Her current research projects include EvENT, a project on events as minimal units of narration, and KatKit, a project on the operationalization of humanities concepts in the framework of applied category theory from mathematics. Gius also serves as chair of the Digital Humanities Association in the German-speaking areas ("Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum", DHd), as co-editor of the Open Access Journal of Computational Literary Studies (JCLS), and as co-editor of the Metzler/Springer Nature book series "Digital Literary Studies"

Wouter Haverals (University of Antwerp)

Wouter Haverals is a postdoctoral researcher, working at the Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISNL), and the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism (ACDC). In his research, he unites two disciplines: traditional philology and computational literary studies. For his PhD thesis, Wouter explored the potential of artificial intelligence to reconstruct the rhythm of medieval Dutch poetry. As a postdoc, Wouter contributed to the ERC-project ‘Constructing Age for Young Readers’ (CAFYR), utilizing computational stylometry to uncover implicit and explicit notions of age in a vast corpus of literature aimed at young readers. Currently, he is involved in the ‘Silent Voices’ project, which seeks to uncover the stylistic characteristics of the writings of a group of closely collaborating medieval monks.
 

Anne Klammt (Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TUDresden)

I am a trained archaeologist who gained experience in archaeological fieldwork in Austria, Egypt, Germany, and Ukraine as well as in working for museums and research institutes. In my doctoral thesis, I applied descriptive statistics and spatial interpolations to give a quantified base for my interpretation of shifting preferences in settlement locations during the early Middle ages. I shared my insights by teaching GIS to archaeologists and graduates from other disciplines at the Universities of Göttingen and Regensburg. In 2015 I started to work in the broader field of Digital Humanities as managing director of a local hub and later a scientific coordinator for CLARIAH-DE. From 2020 on I was for three years as a research director responsible for the Digital Humanities at the German Center for Art History in Paris (DFK Paris) an institute, that forms part of the Max Weber Foundation. One of my projects was the semantic enrichment and republishing of three 20 years old bibliographic databases on art critics in journals from 1870 to 1960. What started in 2021 as purely curational work soon developed into a deeper reflection on data curation and the archaeology of databases in the humanities. Further, the design of a new GUI for the databases implied to reflect, how the presentation of historical journals in the interfaces of libraries like the Gallica (Bibliothéque national de France) but also the access via our website impacts our perception of the source material. Finally, the project spawned trials on applying methods of computer vision and NLP to historical journals.

Floor Koleman (UNIL)

Dr. Floor Koeleman is an art historian and expert in digital humanities. She studied Man & Identity at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and completed her BA in Art History and research MA in Art and Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Floor’s PhD project was part of the doctoral training unit Digital History and Hermeneutics hosted by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). Her dissertation “Visualizing Visions: Re-viewing the seventeenth-century genre of constcamer paintings” received the Excellent Thesis Award from the University of Luxembourg. Floor currently is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne in the project “Towards Computational Historiographical Modeling: Corpora and Concepts.” Her focus has shifted from early modern pictures of collections to the enigmatic paintings of sixteenth-century artist Dosso Dossi.

The summer school is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students/researchers from the humanities and social sciences with an interest in applying and critically assessing digital methods in their respective disciplines.

Programme

At the end of the course:

• The participants will be introduced to and familiarised with a wide range of different digital methods that are currently applied in the humanities and social sciences;
• The participants will learn to apply digital methods to different/new disciplines in the interactive workshops. In that, they learn to approach data in new and dynamic ways;
• The participants will be made aware of the existence of different perspectives on data, notably (a) preparation and architecture/infrastructure, (b) data treatment/analysis, and (c) societal impact and outreach.
• The participants will learn technical skills and how to work with different types of data, e.g., multimodal, editions, historical documents, music, etc.
• Critical thinking regarding digital humanities will also be stimulated through exercises that will be presented in the welcome session and discussed in the closing session of the summer school.
• Participants will attend lectures and interactive tutorials delivered by well-known and emerging experts in the fields of digital humanities and a range of disciplines that employ digital methods. The summer school will provide an excellent opportunity to meet researchers in the field, to network with the participants and to develop best practices. Participants will be able to gain a range of theoretical and practical skills that they can apply to their own research field and specialised data.

Participants will attend lectures and interactive tutorials delivered by well-known and emerging experts in the fields of digital humanities and a range of disciplines that employ digital methods. The summer school will provide an excellent opportunity to meet researchers in the field, to network with the participants and to develop best practices. Participants will be able to gain a range of theoretical and practical skills that they can apply to their own research field and specialised data.

3 ECTS can be earned (pass / fail option) by satisfying the following requirements:

• preparatory reading and data preparation for the different hands-on workshops as well as preparatory reading for the lectures;
• attending and contributing to lectures and workshops during the summer school, including additional research presentation session/s;
• preparing and presenting one’s research at a dedicated session;
• writing a reflexive essay following the summer school (details to be provided during the summer school).

CHF 200.- (Students and PhD)

CHF 300.- (Professionals)

The fees include:

• Tuition fees
• Course materials
• Lunch and Coffee Breaks
• Social activities

During the online registration process, applicants are asked to provide a motivation letter (max. 2 pages), a CV, as well as a one-page abstract of your research project (if applicable).

Your motivation letter must comprise the following information:  

- Your motivations

- An overview of your experience with different (a) data, (b) digital methods, (c) software/tools

We will ask you to proceed to the payment of the tuition fees only after a formal confirmation of your participation has been sent to you. 

The Solidarity Scholarships aim at supporting students who would not be able to cover summer schools’ costs in full. The selected candidates will see their tuition fees as well as their travel, accommodation and meals costs covered. Depending on each candidate’s situation, a financial support may be added to partially cover other expenses during the stay. The deadline for scholarship applications is April 14, 2023.

To be eligible, candidates must:

• Be currently enrolled in a higher education institution located in an ODA recipient country ;
• Have successfully applied to the school they wish to attend;
• Be able to attend the entire school;
• Require external financial support to be able to attend the school;
• Have obtained excellent academic results;
• Be covered by health insurance for the duration of the school.

Candidates who wish to apply for the Solidarity Scholarship must first sign up for one of the summer schools. Once accepted, candidates will receive the link to the online form to apply for the scholarship. Along with personal and academic information, the following documents will be requested (to be submitted in French or English):

• Full curriculum vitae;
• Motivation letter, with connections between the summer school and your academic goals as well as information regarding the necessity of a financial support;
• Proof of residency (such as a copy of your lease, an official invoice with your address indicated or other official documents) ;
• Copy of university degree certificate with final grade(s);
• Proof of current enrolment in a higher education institution;
• English certificate (if needed);
• Letter of support from an academic.

Rooms have been prebooked  at the Youth Hostel Lausanne Jeunotel . Rooms will be given on a “first come first serve” basis.

Buffet breakfast, bed linen, and transportation pass for Lausanne are included in the reservation. If you would like to book a room, please contact us.

Prices*:

Single room: from CHF 91.- per night
Room shared by two people : from CHF 59.- per person per night
Dormitoryby (4 people) : from 48 CHF.- per person per night

Taxes: CHF 2.60.- per person per night

*Please note that prices are indicative and subject to change, depending on the date of booking