Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable

Convenor: Jacob Forward, CDH Methods Fellow

Jacob will offer hands-on experience of a full research pipeline in this methods workshop, from data collection and cleaning to deploying large language models (LLMs) to uncover new insights from our textual sources.

The session will cover:

• An overview of how digital neural networks operate and how they can be effectively used in LLMs to grasp the patterns in language.
• Discover how to web-scrape text to create a dataset of primary sources you want to explore.
• Use LLMs to help generate and debug the code necessary to clean your dataset and convert it into an appropriate file type,
• Discus best practices when working with AI to produce code.
• Explore our sources by deploying LLMs in a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Discuss the merits of ‘fine-tuning’ vs RAG.

If you don’t have any experience of coding, Jacob hopes to show you just how much you are capable of, and if you have a technical background, you can look forward to pushing the boundaries of your skill.

About the convenor: Jacob is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. His research focuses on the discourse of crisis in post-Cold War American politics, specifically the language and metaphors politicians use in connection with terrorism, immigration, natural disasters, and financial shocks. His method involves fine-tuning language models on distinct corpora of political speeches, and then querying the fine-tuned models to augment his discourse analysis.

More broadly, his research interests include the dynamic between terrorism and federal authority, the debate over national security and civil liberties since 9/11, the psychology of non-literal language, and the ethics and opportunities of leveraging AI tools for humanities research.

Jacob previously read for an MPhil in American History at Cambridge (King’s College), and a BA in History at Oxford (Keble College). He has worked for History and Policy at the Institute for Historical Research and consulted on research projects at the School of Advanced Study.

This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here.

Convenor: Dr Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk

Do you find yourself ‘stuck’ in your research or practice because the websites that you need are not working anymore? Perhaps you’ve heard about the Internet Archive and the Wayback machine, but not sure how to use them? Are you worried about the ethics of using archived websites in your research or practice? Or are you a keen enthusiast of web preservation and a fan of the early Internet and web archives?

If any of these apply to you, or you just want to learn and share more on the topic, come and join one of the limited places to discuss the positives and challenges one can encounter when turning to media archaeology. This workshop is aimed at the beginners. Together, we will:

• Learn about /share experiences using early Internet platforms or archived websites for research or practice.
• Discuss the ethics of working with the early Internet platforms, the benefits that media archaeology can bring to different communities, as well as its limitations and the dangers.
• Discover strategies for using early Internet platforms in research and processes of anonymising users and minimising resource visibility in the dissemination of research.
• Practice analysing the data gathered using different tools.

About the convenor:

Syaivo received their PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Their work focuses on Ukraine and is located at the crossing of social movements studies, the histories and theories of sexuality and gender, and visual culture studies. Their current research aims to understand better the Internet's role in sustaining or limiting sexual and gender dissent in Ukraine. They are a co-editor of the Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies journal and collaborate with the Invisible University For Ukraine. They work as a History of Art librarian but prefer doing research at home in the company of a cat called Soya.

This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here.