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Introduction to Digital Humanities and Social Analytics - Period 1
Computer Science Program
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dates: mid Aug 2025 - late Dec 2025
Introduction to Digital Humanities and Social Analytics - Period 1
OVERVIEW
CEA CAPA Partner Institution: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Primary Subject Area: Humanities
Instruction in: English
Course Code: L_AABAALG076
Transcript Source: Partner Institution
Course Details: Level 200
Recommended Semester Credits: 3
Contact Hours: 84
DESCRIPTION
This course consist of three modules:
1 Study of current developments in the digital humanities and social analytics through reading, evaluation and discussion
2 Introduction to hermeneutics, data criticism and tool criticism.
3 Practice in working with structured data, data curation and modelling
The humanities and social sciences have more and more digital material at their disposal. Increasingly literature, newspapers, archival sources as well as library and museum catalogues become available in digital formats. Meanwhile digital born data from social media, news media government bodies and all sorts of institutions allow scholars to work with enormous amounts of new data on human behavior and communication. How can humanities researchers and social scientists use digital data to support their research? What are the digital tools at their disposal and how can these tools provide new perspectives and research questions? In this course you will be introduced to this cross-disciplinary research field, to the data collections, computational tools and methods used. In class we will also discuss what is really new about digital humanities and social analytics and evaluate both the promises and the limits of some digital methods.
Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. We will discuss hermeneutics in relation to source-criticism and evaluate what the methodological and theoretical implications are of the use of digitized data, quantitative methods and large datasets. A first step in data-oriented research is a critical understanding of the providence, characteristics, shape and limits as well as the potential of a given dataset. In this course, students will familiarize with the ?research data lifecycle?: Starting with the critical analysis of how data are generated or how they are created through digitization of original sources (objects), how data are formatted and structured, how they can be cleaned and annotated, how they can be modelled and analyzed, and finally documented, stored and published. Practical choices that are to be made in the course of this process have crucial implications for the way data can be used in research. In class we will discuss the use of ontologies and different data formats and data models. Practical problems such as the heterogeneity of humanities and social media data, incompleteness, disambiguation, partiality and bias will be discussed as well.
Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.
1 Study of current developments in the digital humanities and social analytics through reading, evaluation and discussion
2 Introduction to hermeneutics, data criticism and tool criticism.
3 Practice in working with structured data, data curation and modelling
The humanities and social sciences have more and more digital material at their disposal. Increasingly literature, newspapers, archival sources as well as library and museum catalogues become available in digital formats. Meanwhile digital born data from social media, news media government bodies and all sorts of institutions allow scholars to work with enormous amounts of new data on human behavior and communication. How can humanities researchers and social scientists use digital data to support their research? What are the digital tools at their disposal and how can these tools provide new perspectives and research questions? In this course you will be introduced to this cross-disciplinary research field, to the data collections, computational tools and methods used. In class we will also discuss what is really new about digital humanities and social analytics and evaluate both the promises and the limits of some digital methods.
Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. We will discuss hermeneutics in relation to source-criticism and evaluate what the methodological and theoretical implications are of the use of digitized data, quantitative methods and large datasets. A first step in data-oriented research is a critical understanding of the providence, characteristics, shape and limits as well as the potential of a given dataset. In this course, students will familiarize with the ?research data lifecycle?: Starting with the critical analysis of how data are generated or how they are created through digitization of original sources (objects), how data are formatted and structured, how they can be cleaned and annotated, how they can be modelled and analyzed, and finally documented, stored and published. Practical choices that are to be made in the course of this process have crucial implications for the way data can be used in research. In class we will discuss the use of ontologies and different data formats and data models. Practical problems such as the heterogeneity of humanities and social media data, incompleteness, disambiguation, partiality and bias will be discussed as well.
Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.