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[Call] for talks at Oxford's Digital Humanities Summer School [Oxford]

Martin Hadley and I are organizing a 5-day Wolfram Language workshop at Oxford’s Digital Humanities Summer School “Analysing Humanities Data: An Introduction to Knowledge-Based Computing with the Wolfram Language”. Here’s a brief overview from the course description:

This example-led workshop will provide a comprehensive introduction to techniques for analysing a wide range of humanities data with the Wolfram Language; from text analysis, image processing, and visualization, to network analysis, time-related and geographic computation, and machine learning. The course assumes no prior knowledge of any programming language. Participants will learn the concepts needed to import, manipulate, and analyse humanities data using both the natural-language input and scripted interfaces to the Wolfram Language and to share their data and applications in the cloud. Part of the material in the course will be drawn from William Turkel’s open-access textbook, Digital Research Methods with Mathematica 

We’re looking for one or two experienced WL users who would be interested in coming to Oxford between July 4th and 8th (at our expense, naturally) to give a c. 3/4 or hour long presentation/talk on some aspect of the WL relevant to the humanities. This need not be text related! Yes, we do more than just read old books :^) Potential topics for your presentation might include geodata & geocomputation, network analysis, general graphing & plotting, time series analysis, an intro. to machine learning, sound analysis & sonification, using MMA with R-Link… etc.

Martin (who is a data scientist for Oxford University IT Services, and previously worked as a consultant for Wolfram Research,(https://uk.linkedin.com/in/martinjohnhadley) will be teaching the course. My research background is in the humanities (I’m digital project manager for http://culturesofknowledge.org) and I am still a WL beginner, so I'm collaborating with Martin to make our examples and data as relevant as possible to our predominantly 'newbie' humanities/social sciences audience.

If you’re at all interested or curious to learn more, please let us know sooner rather than later, as we’d like to firm up the syllabus quite soon. We can host you for one or two nights in Oxford (including travel) if you’d like to give one presentation, or for as long as 5 days if you’d like to stay longer and give two talks (or perhaps even assist us with running the class itself).

Although we didn’t plan this, this is a particularly auspicious time to be learning the WL for the first time, with lots of new resources newly available from WR and elsewhere, and huge potential for applying it in the humanities.

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse
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Hi Michiel, thank you very much for your offer. Yes, I'd be very interested in seeing what you've been working on in the areas you listed. These are all topics we're planning to introduce at the workshop as well. Over the next two weeks I am putting together a list of potential case studies and datasets relevant to humanities research, so your note comes at exactly the right time. You can reach me at arno.bosse@gmail.com.

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse

Hi, I'm working as Datascientist in the sociale science, especially marketing. Two years ago I gave een presentation on the European Wolfram Conference in Frankfurt about finding patterns in soccer/football-matches. I'm using Mathematica especially for visualiation/animation and storytelling. I've many examples how to do it. For example, website-traffic (for a energy-company) in relation to churn-behaviour. In this analyses I wanted to investigate the difference in web-pages customers visit in relation with their actual behaviour: are they looking for a other energy-supplier or do they stay. For a large fashion retailer in the Netherlands I found interesting patterens in different customer behaviour between customers who buy online and customer who vs the traditional shop. For al this examples (and many others) I worked with Graphs-Networks, Machine Learning, geographic visualization & geo-computing. If you want, I can mail you some of this examples.

With reards, Michiel van Mens
POSTED BY: Michiel van Mens

A quick update on this event.. with the addition of Jon McLoone we now have four experienced instructors for our workshop on 'Analysing Humanities Research Data with the WL'. The final course description is available on the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School site. We've opted to divide the five-day workshop as follows: 1) WL fundamentals, 2) Texts, Graphs & Networks, 3) Image Processing, Sound Analysis & Machine Learning, 4) Semantic import, geographic visualization & geo-computing. 5) Saving & sharing applications and data in the cloud.

If you review the schedule, you'll see that during the middle of the week (Tue/Wed/Thu) each of the special topics (e.g. image processing) are bookended on each end with sessions introducing the relevant WL functions and programming patterns and and an opportunity for assisted, hands-on practice exercises. As a result, if you or someone you know is looking for an extended, beginner/intermediate level introduction to the WL, I think it'll be worth taking a careful look at the workshop, even if your professional or research interests are in areas far removed from the humanities. It is, after all, being taught by three physicists! ;^)

More seriously, I hope to return to this point in a future post, once the research case studies and examples for the individual topics have been concretized—there's more potential for overlap between the (digital) humanities and other research areas than people may initially think. One of the things that most attracted me to the WL is its potential serve as a bridge between disciplines.

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse

We're very pleased to have received commitments from Vitaliy Kaurov and Marco Thiel to join us for the 'Analysing Humanities Data with the Wolfram Language' digital humanities workshop this summer at the University of Oxford. But we think we still have funding for one more (preferably EU based) presenter to join us.

Think of it this way.. when will you next get the chance to spend a few days teaching and coding with a group of experienced WL developers such as this — and all at someone else's expense?
POSTED BY: Arno Bosse

I should add that although we've been fortunate enough to receive funding to invite one or two presenters, we probably can't afford to do it if you're based far away across the Atlantic or in Asia. Mind you, do contact us all the same, and we'll try to make a case to the powers that be! But ideally, you'd be based in the UK or e.g. continental Europe.
POSTED BY: Arno Bosse
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