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Kristoffer L. Nielbo edited this page Feb 2, 2021 · 2 revisions

Cultural Data Science Aarhus University

Welcome to the Cultural Data Science Wiki! All contributors are welcome to add course relevant pages.

The humanities face a revolution in the amount of data available for answering our most important questions. This includes the mass digitalization of historical texts and visual artefacts, a proliferation of social interaction via text online, and an increase in digitalization of geopolitical data. At the same time, the statistical and computational methods required to analyze this data have advanced rapidly.

Digital humanities and humanistic data

Students and scholars from the humanities are well placed to use these methods to make important contributions within and outside of their research areas. New fields like digital humanities, computational linguistics, and humanistic data science are becoming increasingly important, both within and outside of the university. In Cultural Data Science, you will acquire the computational and statistical tools needed to start working in these fields. The course will focus on textual, geospatial and visual data, and will be of particular interest to students from Linguistics, cognitive Science, History, Anthropology, Religion Science, and Language and Literature. The course prepares students to apply their core humanistic knowledge to new data driven forms of academic work. The program is designed to be accessible to those without prior knowledge of statistics or programming.

Questions

  • How can humanities scholars best make use of the massive amounts of data available to help understand human culture?
  • How can we use computational methods to mine historical and contemporary texts, and to draw lessons about culture and cultural evolution from very large text databases (e.g. including traditional media, social media, and historical records)? How can we use computational methods to map the interactions between human culture and the geospatial environment, both in historical and contemporary contexts?
  • How can we use computational methods to better understand visual artefacts of culture, including artistic and archeological artefacts?
  • How can we use computational and statistical methods to better track the evolution of culture in the spatial environment, in textual expression, and in the production of visual artefacts?
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