Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

Text Analysis for Historical Language Research

Taught at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW-GA 3023), Fall 2023. This course met 1 time a week in a 3-hour block.

Course Description

This course introduces students to computational research methods helpful for producing data-driven scholarship involving large collections of historical-language text. Drawing on relevant topics in exploratory data science, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing, the course provides a forum for students to develop hands-on skills in computer programming (using Python), focused primarily on managing textual data, string manipulation, text mining and analysis, language modeling, and data visualization. Special attention will be given to the use of word embeddings and transformer models and their applicability to historical-language text collections. Demonstrations throughout the course will draw primarily on English-language examples, but because of the philological range and diversity at ISAW, students are encouraged to work with digitized text collections in the languages most relevant to their research. There are no prerequisites, though students are expected to be open to reading, writing, and editing computer programs; students are required to bring notebook computers to class. Note that historical-language text for the purpose of this course covers texts or collections of texts written before the Early Modern period.