Silent Disco: Understanding and Creating Word Embeddings
Online
Our 'Silent Disco' workshops are based on tutorials from the Programming Historian website. This training event will follow content from the tutorial, Understanding and Creating Word Embeddings.
Word embeddings allow you to analyse how different terms are used in a collection of texts by capturing information about their contextual usage. Through a primarily theoretical lens, this session will teach you how to prepare a corpus and train a word embedding model. You will explore how word vectors work, how to interpret them, and how to answer humanities research questions using them.
The workshop will take place via Microsoft Teams in a ‘Silent Disco’ format. Participants will have the flexibility to choose whether to follow the Python or R script and work through the tutorial at their own pace. The facilitators will be available via Teams Chat to reply to any questions that arise during the workshop, and to help with installation, troubleshooting, or other issues.
To attend this course, you will have to join the associated Microsoft Teams group. The link to join the group will be sent to attendees prior to the course start date, so please make sure to do so in advance.
This silent disco will be facilitated by Somya Iqbal and Aybuke Atalay.
After taking part in this event, you may decide that you need some further help in applying what you have learnt to your research. If so, you can book a Data Surgery meeting with one of our training fellows.
More details about Data Surgeries.
Those who have registered to take part will receive an email with full details on how to get ready for this course.
If you’re new to this training event format, or to CDCS training events in general, read more on what to expect from CDCS training. Here you will also find details of our cancellation and no-show policy, which applies to this event.
Level
This workshop requires the following pre-knowledge:
Basic familiarity with Python and Jupyter Notebooks in Google Colab, or basic familiarity with R/RMarkdown in RStudio
- A local IDE setup on your PC (IDLE, Spyder, or Jupyter Notebooks)
Learning Outcomes
What word embedding models and word vectors are, and what kinds of questions we can answer with them
How to create and interrogate word vectors using Python/R
What to consider when putting together the corpus you want to analyse using word vectors
The limitations of word vectors as a methodology for answering common research questions
Skills
Application of word vectors on text data
An ability to interpret word vectors from model outputs
- Extrapolate the embedding concepts to your own work from applied packages and learning resources in the session
Explore More Training
- Beyond Social Networks: Advanced Uses of Gephi in Humanities Research
- Comparing Sentiment Analysis Models in R
- Digital Method of the Month: Text Analysis
- Getting Started with Text Analysis with Python
- Modelling Unstructured Data with Bert
- Silent Disco: Introduction to LDA Topic Modelling
Return to the Training Homepage to see other available events
