DIGI405-25X3 (O) Special non-calendar-based Three 2025 (UC Online)

Texts, Discourses and Data: the Humanities and Data Science

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 14 July 2025
End Date: Sunday, 14 September 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 27 July 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 24 August 2025

Description

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.

Learning Outcomes

  • By the end of the course, students will be able to:
  • Apply a range of computer-assisted text analysis methods with broad applications, drawing examples from humanities and social sciences.
  • Explain how text analysis results are connected to social, cultural and linguistic factors and contexts.
  • Identify ethical and political dimensions to computer-assisted text analysis methods.

Prerequisites

Subject to approval of the Programme Coordinator.

Course Coordinator

Christopher Thomson

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage  Description
Active participation 20% Each week there will be activities to complete to support your learning. You will write a weekly Learning Journal to record and reflect on your work.
Corpus exploratory analysis 30% Analyse written texts using corpus linguistics techniques.
Presentation 15% Give a presentation to the class about the development of your final project and receive feedback.
Final project 35% Apply skills and concepts learned throughout the course to produce a final project on a selected problem or topic.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $1,084.00

* 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 .

All DIGI405 Occurrences