Summer Research Program: 2020-2021

Project duration:

7 weeks
30 November to 18 December 2020 
18 January to 12 February 2021 

Project profile:

COVID-19 considerations:  The project can be completed under a remote working arrangement but with occasional face to face meetings by arrangement. 

Description:

The use of computational text analysis is rapidly expanding both within academia and industry. By tapping into Big Data and using computational methods, digital text analytics allows us to gain insights about language and society that could not be discovered using traditional close reading methods. Yet, students and researchers in HASS are not systematically trained in digital text analytics and resources that would support researchers, that take an interest in computational approaches to studying language and society, are largely lacking.

This project addresses this lack of resources and aims to create web-based language technology related resources that enable interested researchers to acquire, build, and teach language technology related skills.

The resources students are expected to create in the context of the program are, for example,

• tutorial-style webpages for self-study that detail how to process and restructure data and show how specific methods such as concordancing, sentiment analysis, or web crawling are implemented;
• short videos (screen casts) which show how to go through a tutorial-style webpage;
• exercises, as well as questions and answers for existing tutorials.

During the course of the program, students will

• receive training in basic web design, basic programming, text and data analysis, as well as Best Practices in Data Science;
• apply these skills to new data sets and create teaching materials that show how text and data analytic methods can be applied in HASS research;
• be supervised throughout the research period for consistency and accuracy purposes.

At the end of the program, students are expected to submit a Markdown document which details a case study that exemplifies the implementation of language technology and enables others to copy and adapt these case studies to pursue their own research.

In addition, students will become co-authors of a publication that evaluates existing training materials in the context of text and data analytics in HASS, highlights shortcomings of these teaching materials, details the production of digital teaching resources, and communicates experiences with creating digital HASS training materials.

Number of hours per week: 

36 hours per week

Expected outcomes and deliverables:

Scholars will gain skills in basic programming and, by the end of the program, they will be comfortable users of basic data visualization techniques and quantitative data analytics methods. Scholars will have the opportunity to pursue a project representing a case study that exemplifies the use of language technology. Students have to submit this project in the form of a Markdown document at the end of the program.

Suitable for:

This project is open to students who

• have some (at least very basic) experience with R
• feel comfortable with using computers or language technology (e.g. concordance or transcription programs, Office applications, etc.)
• have experience with or are willing to learn basic statistics and programming
• feel enthusiastic about creating web-based learning and teaching resources in the context of language technology

Number of participants required: 

3

Primary Supervisor:

 Dr. Martin Schweinberger ​

Further info: 

Please contact Dr Martin Schweinberger via email