Methods Fellows Series | Digital Investigation Toolbox for Humanities Researchers

New

Convenor: Liz Stevenson, CDH Methods Fellow 2024/25

Are you a humanities researcher or scholar with no coding experience who would like to begin using digital analysis tools productively, manageably, and in a way that meets your needs?

Come and join one of the limited places to create a toolbox of basic text mining skills and methods that you can apply to your own humanities research and a simple but clear understanding of online resources with which you can do this, such as

• EEBO,
• Github and
• The R Graph Gallery,

and coding languages and workspaces like

• R and
• R Studio.

We will cover the underlying basic theory and philosophy behind text mining, and then equip you with the commands you need to perform tasks such as authorship attribution and statistical analyses of literary materials. This will include the basic creation of topic models, and execution of word frequency analyses, along with other similar methods of investigation.

You will leave with the coding tools to create simple but attractive visualisations and graphs of your results.

About the convenor:

Liz is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Renaissance English at Darwin College, having studied English at Stanford University, USA, where she also completed a BA (2016) and MA (2017). Liz’s work revolves around the relationship between digital analysis and subjective understandings of meaning and physicality in Renaissance literature. She is currently completing her dissertation using R-based topic modelling, MFW & MDW analyses, and language field volume analyses to argue for the categorisation of Shakespeare’s plays according to linguistic fields on the basis of the plays’ atypical generic behaviour compared to broader Elizabeth and Jacobean stage works of literature.

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.

CDH Methods sessions are open to the University of Cambridge staff and graduate students who want to learn and apply digital methods and use digital tools in their research, these sessions may be of particular interest to:

• PhD students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Other Cambridge students and staff welcome

Please complete this pre-workshop questionnaire to assist with the organisation. You will need to be logged onto your University Google Account instructions here

Number of sessions: 1

In-person workshop with presentations, demonstrations, discussions and practical activities.

If you require help before the session, such as accessibility support, please email our team at Learning.events@cdh.cam.ac.uk for further assistance.

You will need your own laptop for this session.