Digital Humanities Winter School 2025
Call for Applications
The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi will be organising a Winter School in Digital Humanities to be held from 17 to 22 February 2025 in the IIT Delhi campus. The Winter School will focus on digital tools for computational analysis of texts and is aimed at providing participants a headstart in digital tools and methods. It will help participants to conceptualise their research problems in the light of digital tools and methods and give them the knowhow of performing end to end processes – data acquisition, text mining, data cleaning, data wrangling, data analysis and visualisation. Other than hands-on sessions, the Winter School will also include lectures that would present multiple theoretical perspectives on the role of computational methods in humanities research.
Agenda for the Winter School
The Winter School in Digital Humanities 2025 will concentrate on training participants around key tools in computational methods with a particular focus on the analysis of texts through text mining and analysis, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, data visualisation, and how they can be applied to cultural artefacts, literature, languages, and historical analysis. The curriculum is structured to offer foundational training in a multilingual and multicultural context. The programme for the Winter School shall include:
Text Analysis with Voyant tools
Voyant Tools is a suite of text analysis and visualization tools that work within the browser. Participants can upload a text or provide a URL and Voyant will index the text and allow the user to try different analysis tools from the playful to text mining. Voyant now has a notebook programming extension, Spyral which allows users to document and share their experiments. Tutorial materials for Voyant can be found at: dialogi.ca . The workshops at the Winter School will train participants to use Voyant effectively and introduce them to Spyral so they can document their projects.
Duration: 6 hours over 6 days
To be conducted by Geoffrey Rockwell.
Bootcamp on Python for the Humanities
A series of workshops to introduce participants to the basics of programming using the Python programming language. Participants would learn the concepts and use of variables, data structures, conditional statements, loops, functions, regular expressions and visualisation. The objective of the bootcamp would be to get participants on a self-learning curve whereon they can learn more computational tools and techniques from online and published sources. The initial sessions of the Python bootcamp would commence through online sessions from the first week of February 2025 and would culminate in in-person hands-on sessions during the week of the Winter School.
Duration: 10 hours (online; pre-workshop) and 5 hours (in person)
To be conducted by Arjun Ghosh.
Text Mining and Low Tech
This workshop introduces participants to fundamental concepts of Natural Language Processing (NLP) through hands-on paper-and-pencil activities. This workshop teaches the underlying ideas behind advanced techniques like topic modelling. Participants engage in interactive exercises where they manually sort, categorize, and cluster text data, simulating processes such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). By simplifying NLP models into clear, manageable steps, the workshop fosters a deeper understanding of text mining principles, making them accessible to non-technical participants. It’s particularly beneficial for humanities scholars seeking to explore digital methods and grasp the concepts behind NLP models.
Duration: 6 hours over 6 days
To be conducted by Shanmugapriya T.
Perspectives on Data Analysis in textual research
Throughout the Winter School the participants would have the opportunity to gain critical insights from a range of scholars on the possibilities and pitfalls of working with data in humanities research.
Faculty for the Winter School
Geoffrey Rockwell: Professor of Philosophy and the Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada and one of the leading thinkers and makers in the Digital Humanities. Along with Stéfan Sinclair, Geoffrey Rockwell is best known for the award winning text analysis platform Voyant and co-authored Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities.
Arjun Ghosh: Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.
Shanmugapriya T, Assistant Professor (Digital Humanities) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad.
Sanil V. : Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.
Naveen Thayyil: Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.
Jajwalya Karajgikar: Applied Data Science Librarian at University of Pennsylvania.
Vinayak Dasgupta: Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.
Rohan Chauhan: Senior research scholar at the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies.
Why IIT Delhi
IIT Delhi, a renowned leading institute in technological advancement, is uniquely positioned to host this initiative. With state-of-the-art facilities and expertise in fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML), IIT Delhi offers participants an unparalleled opportunity to engage with digital tools tailored for humanities research. For example, attendees will have the chance to utilise Lipikar, an advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool developed by IIT Delhi, which supports 15 Indian languages and allows participants to create their own corpora for research.
Who can apply?
The Winter School in Digital Humanities is designed for scholars in the humanities who have little or no exposure to technology to learn the basics of computational tools in humanities research. It is open for humanities scholars at various levels – masters students, research scholars and early career scholars. Applicants should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline (such as literature, philosophy, history, languages, culture studies). The workshop is open for those who don’t have any background in coding/ programming. If you are someone who has any experience in working with programming languages like R, Python, Java script etc. this workshop is not for you.
Technology requirements
Participants should bring a laptop that can run a current browser like Chrome or Safari. If you can, try installing Voyant on your laptop. You will need to have a recent version of Java installed. The instructions can be found at: https://github.com/voyanttools/VoyantServer/releases/tag/2.6.17
If you cannot install it – it is fine. You can use the local Voyant installation at IIT Delhi.
For the Python bootcamp we will be learning through Google CoLab.
Participation fees
Students: INR 2000 (Two Thousand Rupees only)
Faculty members, Post Doctoral Scholars and other professionals: INR 6000 (Six Thousand Rupees only)
This would cover the cost of food during the day time (Lunch, Tea and Snack). This will not cover the cost of your travel and accommodation. You will need to book/arrange your own travel and accommodation in Delhi during the period of the Winter School. No accommodation is available in the IIT Delhi campus.
In the event that there are more applications than can be accommodated at the 2025 edition of the Winter School the faculty will shortlist a set of participants. Selected participants will be required to transfer the fees to an account at IIT Delhi within a week (approx end of Dec 2024). If a participant does not transfer the requisite fees the seat will be offered to another applicant.
What you will receive?
The Winter School will provide you:
- Soft copies of the course material and program
- Participation/completion certificate signed by the organizers
- Lunch, tea and snacks for during the winter school
A limited number of bursaries may be available. Please indicate the same in your application.
Participants who attend all lectures will be issued a Certificate of Completion.
Contact
Arjun Ghosh
Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Email: iitdelhidh@gmail.com
How to apply?
Applications for the Winter School can be submitted using the Online Application Form.
Applicants would be required to submit: A short CV
A short statement on their interest in the Winter School
Applicants would also be required to select two texts -
- one English text that is in a plain text file (.txt format.) and
- a text in an Indian language that is also a plain Unicode (UTF-8) text file*.
The applicants will experiment with these two texts using the tools that they learn during the Winter School.
- In the event that a UTF-8 file is not available, applicants can also bring a hard copy or a copy scanned at sufficient resolution and clarity to use the state-of-the-art Indian language OCR facility at IIT Delhi to produce plain text files. OCR facility is currently available for Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali. Applicants would also be required to write short notes about why they find their chosen texts to be interesting.
Last date for applications is 10 December 2024.