Courses and Seminars

From Vesuvius to Kentucky: a journey into Heritage Science

Scraping, Crawling, Searching: this three-part series will focus on understanding the history of the World Wide Web with emphasis on the genesis of Google’s PageRank and the evolution of tools for finding and organizing information available in a network-connected world. The historical and technical understanding of how PageRank worked when it was developed by Google in the late 1990s will set the stage for a practical understanding of scraping and crawling and useful tools for finding and organizing networked information.
Today in Heritage Science: this three-part series will explore important heritage science tools, covering the basics of imaging technologies (radiography, tomography, spectral imaging, and photogrammetry) and material characterization technologies (x-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy). Examples from collections at museums and libraries around the world will be used to illustrate concepts and provide hands-on demonstrations.
The Basics of Machine Learning: this three-part series will explore the landscape of machine learning tools and techniques, geared for non-experts and non-computer scientists. The goal is for participants to become conversant in the various ML approaches currently in use: how those techniques work, what their requirements are on the data, and what the tools and frameworks are that practitioners are using to implement/apply the approaches.
Virtual Unwrapping of Papyri from Herculaneum: this public lecture will describe the successful virtual unwrapping of scrolls from Herculaneum, telling the story of the Vesuvius Challenge competition.
Heritage Science Work in EduceLab: this public lecture will focus broadly on the heritage science work completed by B. Seales’ team and on the new capabilities of the EduceLab infrastructure being built at the University of Kentucky.

Computational Humanities

The workshop Handwritten Text Recognition and Layout, divided into two focused sessions, provides comprehensive training in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Layout Analysis techniques. The first session will concentrate on layout annotation, offering practical insights and hands-on experience. The second session will delve into HTR, with participants learning to use eScriptorium for effective text recognition. By the end of the workshop, attendees will have gained a deeper understanding of both HTR and layout analysis, equipped with the skills to apply these techniques in their research and projects.
The course Introduction to Computational Humanities delves into the dynamic field of Computational Humanities. Participants will explore key articles and groundbreaking research that highlight the transformative potential of computational methods in the humanities. Through guided discussions and critical analysis, we will uncover how digital tools and techniques are reshaping disciplines such as literature, history, linguistics, and cultural studies. Up to two guest speakers, including Florian Cafiero, will provide insights into specific applications like stylometry, demonstrating the power of computational analysis in understanding textual patterns and authorship. A reading list will be provided in the weeks before the course starts.
The course Natural Language Processing for Computational Humanities combines hands-on sessions with insightful lectures to provide a comprehensive introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the context of Computational Humanities. Participants will engage in annotation tasks and collaboratively build a project around a specific corpus, focusing on key NLP techniques such as lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, abbreviation resolution, named entity recognition, and sentence classification. The course features a lecture from Benoit Sagot, former professeur invité at Collège de France in computer science, who will share his expertise and insights into the applications of NLP in the humanities.
The course Computer Vision for Computational Humanities explores the intersection of computer vision and the humanities, delving into the concept of distant viewing, a term coined by Lauren Tylton and Taylor Arnold. Participants will learn about image annotation algorithms, such as YOLO, and engage in various image annotation tasks. The course will feature at least one guest speaker who will provide expert insights into the application of computer vision techniques in the humanities. Through a hands-on project, participants will collaborate to create and release a dataset by the end of the course.

XML-Based Technologies for Historical and Literary Texts: Encoding, Processing, and Visualizing with TEI, XSLT, XQuery, and eXist-db

To date, the de facto standard technology for the digital representation of historical and literary texts is the XML vocabulary developed from the defining work within the academic consortium of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The work of the TEI has fostered the birth and development of digital archives of texts useful for the critical reconstruction and publication of literary works in any language, of any literary genre, and for any historical period. The course will delve into the basics of text encoding in XML/TEI format while introducing technologies and languages of the XML ecosystem defined and maintained by the W3C consortium. These include languages such as XSLT and XQuery, which are useful for manipulating and querying collections of texts represented through XML markup language. Finally, the course aims to introduce the XML-native environment eXist-db for the management, querying, and Web visualization of documents in XML format.

Coding for DH: Python and Domain-Specific Languages

Digital humanists need to develop simple scripts to automate daily operations on documents, such as retrieving data from data providers through RESTful APIs, cleaning noisy texts acquired through OCR or HTR, and computing textual statistics. Python is a general-purpose programming (and scripting) language that is easy to learn, concise, and powerful. Following an introduction to the basic statements of the language, useful libraries such as NLTK, spaCy, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, and GeoPandas will be illustrated.
Following a theoretical introduction to similarity evaluation and alignment algorithms, pivotal for Digital Philology, Python libraries for text alignment, such as string2string, will be presented, discussed, and utilized. Whereas general-purpose languages are ready-to-use and well equipped, domain-specific languages (DSLs) are the most suitable solution for complex annotations that must be understandable not only to digital humanists, but also to traditional scholars. The creation and use of a DSL for collaborative philology will be explained, exemplified and discussed.

Training programme in digital and printed critical edition

Classes and seminars will concentrate on the art of producing both print and digital multilingual critical editions using the so-called single-source publishing method from LaTeX formatted documents. As such, the courses will address getting to grips with and mastering the encoding of critical editions in LuaLaTeX using the ekdosis package (https://www.ekdosis.org). The work will involve typesetting texts equipped with different layers of critical notes in any writing direction accepted by LuaTeX. In addition to printed texts and production of books, classes will cover the conversion of .tex source files so as to produce TEI xml-compliant critical editions, to wit database-driven and actionable segmented texts that can be searched according to various criteria: main edited text, variant readings, translations or annotated borrowings between texts and so on.