Course code KomZT048
Faculty Faculty of Social Sciences
Credit points, number of lectures
Credit points ECTS Credit points Total number of auditorium hours Number of lecture hours Number of seminars and practical work hours Number of student independent work hours
2 3 32 8 24 48
Course annotation The aim of the summer school is to promote acquisition of the basics of programming and text encoding for digital humanists and digital social scientists.
The programme includes workshops and lectures in:
1. programming with Python;
2. text encoding and digital scholarly editions;
3. topic modeling;
4. metadata analysis and visualisation with Palladio;
5. digitized newspapers in Europe;
6. neural machine translation;
7. eye-tracking in researching reading behavior;
8. digital sociolinguistics.

Lectures and workshops are co-taught by an international team of researchers and practitioners of digital humanities and digital social sciences.
The working language of summer school - English.

Coordinator of the summer school - Anda Baklāne (Mg.Phil.), a Head of Digital Research Services at the National Library of Latvia.
Results By the end of the summer school students will have the following knowledge, skills and competence.

Knowledge about:
1) the principles of programming in general;
2) the types of text encoding (labelling), the different coding standards and the encoding required for the performance of the various text analysis tasks;
3) distributive semantics and topic modeling, about methods and digital tools used in this field;
4) the use of eye movements in text-reading research;
5) facilities for visualization of object-relations networks;
6) the largest digital newspaper libraries/collections in the world, their functionality, their exploitation capabilities;
7) significant research projects related to collections of digitised newspapers;
8) the operating principles of machine translation algorithms, from historical dictionary-based approaches to statistical and machine-learning techniques, as well as the use of neural network technologies;
9) the day-to-day possibilities for the use of machine translation;
10) the possibilities to connect biographical, bibliographic database and text-corpus data to study historical language changes or to make other findings that would not be demonstrated by examining each group of sources individually.

Skills to
1) use the programming language “Python”;
12) create a text encoding corresponding to A SPECIFIC standard;
13) prepare research results on the “Palladio” visualization platform;
14) develop the flows of activities for the modelling of topics, including pre-processing of data, modelling of own data, as well as data post-processing and visualization of results;

15) to plan research of texts in humanitarians and social sciences, using acquired knowledge and skills;
16) to evaluate and choose the best methods for coding, data processing (pre - and post-processing), modelling, visualization;
17) to prepare proposals for improving the functionality of digital newspapers;

18) to analyse historical language changes based on the results of digital analysis of different texts.
Requirements for obtaining credit points To get credit scores, the following requirements must be fulfilled:
1) participate at least in three lectures and four workshops;
2) two practical jobs have to be completed and evaluated.

Final grade consists of:
1) attendance of lectures and workshops (70%);

2) exam work - completed and evaluated practical works (30%).
Study programmes 2nd Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities: Essential of Coding and Encoding