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This course examines computer-aided methods used in digital humanities and the social sciences for analysing discourses, an object of study that draws together multiple ways that language reflects and shapes social meanings. Within this context, it introduces concepts and methods for analysing natural language data and applies these through a series of practical lab classes. The first part of the course focuses on classic discourse analysis methods drawn from corpus linguistics, as well as the essential preprocessing steps used to prepare texts for a range of analytical purposes. In the second part of the course we study topic modeling, a technique for unsupervised, exploratory data analysis that has been widely used in digital humanities, and, finally, consider supervised text classification methods to identify discursive attributes such as sentiment, genre, or style.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:Apply exploratory data analysis methods relevant to the humanities to a corpus of textsPreprocess text data in a range of ways and provide appropriate justification for these in their analysesExplain the social and cultural contexts of data analysis and interpretation practices and their implicationsIdentify ethical and political dimensions to discourse analysis and text mining methods.
By permission of the Programme Coordinator
For further information see Humanities Head of Department
Baker, P. 'Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis'. Bloomsbury, 2006. (Available from UBS).
Domestic fee $923.00
International Postgraduate fees
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see Humanities .