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»Text as Data« Spring School in Digital Humanities

March 31, 2025 - April 4, 2025, University of Potsdam, Campus »Am Neuen Palais«

The Spring School is aimed at students and early-career scholars* who are beginning to explore Digital Humanities (DH) and are interested in working with textual sources. While traditional hermeneutic approaches remain crucial in the humanities, computational methods offer additional perspectives for textual analysis. The Spring School aims to guide participants through the process of formulating a research question about a textual source and creating a corpus to developing a comprehensive research project.

The Spring School provides an introduction to several computational methods and offers an opportunity to dig deeper into ongoing projects. "Text as Data" features intensive discussions, workshops, and lectures tailored for students across all humanities disciplines who are interested in computational approaches to text. The focus of the week-long Spring School lies in the following themes:

  • Operationalisation of research questions in computational humanities 
  • Topic modeling
  • Stylometry
  • Mapping of textual data
  • Network Analysis

The preliminary timetable will be published soon.

Lecturers and workshop organizers are leading researchers from DH institutions in Berlin, Erlangen, Krakow, Potsdam, Prague, and Trier. The school is co-organised by the DH Network of the University of Potsdam and the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. 

How to apply?

Please submit your application until (NEW!) December 7, 2024 via the following link. Number of places is limited.

We offer students a limited number of travel grants of max. 300 euro per person: You can apply for a travel grant here. 

What about the accommodation for the students?

We have reserved a pool of 20 rooms at 'B&B Hotel Potsdam' for the period from March 30 till April 5. The price for one room is 70,17 euro pro night, which will have to be paid by the participants themselves.  Alternatively, the participants are free to look for accommodation on their own. Unfortunately, at the moment we cannot provide free accommodation on our part, only the aforementioned travel grant of max. 300 euro. The school will start no earlier than 10:00 each day, so that the participants staying in Berlin could also make it in time.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask one of the following people:

  • Daniil Skorinkin (DH coordinator at the Uni Potsdam) at skorinkin[at]uni-potsdam.de
  • Anastasia Glawion (FAU Erlangen) at anastasia.glawion[at]fau.de
  • Dinara Gagarina (FAU Erlangen) at dinara.gagarina[at]fau.de

* While this is the cohort we primarily have in mind, we are open to applications from everybody interested in digital methods in the humanities.