Department of English

Among the recent trends in the humanistic disciplines, “Digital Humanities”
has without any doubt been at the forefront in the past few years, but
the fact remains that, beyond buzz-words such as data, metadata,
text-mining or information extraction, few people know what exactly this
label encompasses, and even fewer have tried to apply its methods and
principles to their work. This course proposes a structured approach to
some of the main tools used by digital humanists in real-life textbased
projects; students will be introduced to XML and the TEI, to XSLT, to R
(through the Stylo package) and to simple Python scripts (through NLTK, the
Natural Language Tool Kit). All classes will be divided into two parts:
a theoretical introduction and application exercises, and a hands-on
section. The corpora we will use together will be mostly literature texts,
but students are welcome to bring their own research materials, if they
are exploitable with the tools we'll be learning.