Python

Organizing committee:

• Mike Kestemont (mike.kestemont@uantwerpen.be)
• Thomas Crombez (thomas.crombez@uantwerpen.be)
• Walter Daelemans
• Dirk Van Hulle

The target audience con­sists of (early-stage) resear­chers in the Humani­ties, who wish to apply digi­tal methods in their own re­search prac­tice but who, so far, have had little or no signi­ficant initia­tion to the use of digi­tal methods.

The focus is on text analysis using the popu­lar scrip­ting language Python, which is rapidly becoming the standard program­ming language for computa­tional text ana­lysis in digi­tal Humani­ties.

Covered topics include:

• basic text proces­sing tasks
• using text-mining tool­kits such as Pattern and NLTK
• applications of text proces­sing (e.g., sentiment mining, topic classi­fication, auto­matic clustering)
• XML parsing (e.g., TEI-XML) in Python

For the work­shop, the instruc­tors will make use of a so-called Python note­book – a success­ful and enga­ging teaching for­mat. Python notebooks are a course book and coding ‘sandbox’ at once. Experience with previous EADH and DARIAH-DE Summer Schools in Nijmegen and Göttingen has shown that this format is extremely engaging for resear­chers who have had no signi­ficant expo­sure to digi­tal methods yet.

The fol­lowing team of dynamic and experien­ced Python instruc­tors have kindly con­firmed their partici­pation in the inten­sive full-week teaching pro­gram:

• Folgert Karsdorp (Meertens Institute), one of the Python instruc­tors in the Nijmegen Spring School
• Matthew Munson (University of Göttingen), DARIAH-DE, orga­nizer of the Göttingen Summer School
• Tom De Smedt (Sint Lucas Ant­werpen College of Art), main developer of the Pattern package for Python and experien­ced Python instruc­tor

The partici­pation fee for the Spring Academy is 100 euros, and in­cludes five days of instruc­tion together with lunches and cof­fee breaks. The work­shop takes place on the City Cam­pus of the Univer­sity of Ant­werp, which is loca­ted in the histo­rical city centre. All parti­cipants are expec­ted to arrange for their own accom­modation. We can waive the partici­pation fee for two appli­cants, but we are unable to cover travel expen­ses. Resear­chers who wish to apply for the fee waiver should in­clude a brief motiva­tion.

Parti­cipants are expec­ted to bring their own lap­top. Instal­lation instruc­tions will follow short­ly before the work­shop starts. Previous expe­rience in program­ming or statis­tics is not required.

Please apply by sen­ding your cv to Mike Kestemont (mike.kestemont@uantwerpen.be) before 21 February 2014. Applica­tions will be accep­ted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Sponsored by EADH, the European Association for Digi­tal Humani­ties and by the Departments of Literature and Linguistics of the University of Antwerp.