Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics

The course was focused, as its name tells, on fundamentals about quantitative studies in the Humanities. Though it was open to interested ones coming from any field, it addressed scholars/students from Humanities. Case studies focused on written, relatively small and unstructured corpora, for instance, speeches by politicians during the French Revolution, the New York Times' archive, specialized journals of philosophy, Russian private diaries.

The instructors were enthusiastic, produced well-ordered expositions and interacted with students via forums (though, I didn't use them much). They were Simon DeDeo, a physicist turned into a Humanities researcher, and David Kinney, a philosopher interested in philosophy of science and epistemology. They got interviewed in the Santa Fe Institute's podcast one finds in the Santa Fe Institute's YouTube channel.

After each lecture where the instructors model, in the sense that they show examples, how quantitative research is thought and done, there come assignments. They didn't ask for concrete applications of technical natural language processing or other sophisticated statistical methods, but rather requested imaginative and plausible proposals that, eventually, could lead to concrete applications using basic notions of ratios and probabilities. Or constructive criticism to some imagined research project, with pedagogical purposes. That is, how you would apply an analytic approach.

Frequently, answers had a word limit, which takes more time to compose than non-constrained explanations, if done thoroughly; there were deadlines. All homework was assessed with a peer-system: it was mandatory to read, score and evaluate in black and white at least other three students' texts during each assignment. As people from all around the world took the course, sometimes drafts were hard to interpret due to difficulties with English. Me, as a non-native English speaker, advise putting time and using supportive tools in order to ensure a good experience to oneself and others.

There was a week-off to accomplish peer-reviews, when at the same time invited scholars explained their research and got interviewed by the instructors (there was no assignment related to these guests). Contrasting with the rather historical corpora used in the main lectures, some guests also presented investigations on contemporary issues. This contributed to rounding the model-facet of the class, as they showed further applications with a more diversified range.