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 lesson 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 work on the tutorial at their own pace. The facilitator 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.
This is an intermediate-level event. No previous knowledge on the topic is required/expected but you will need to be familiar with running code in Python Notebooks either on your local installation or via server-based services such as Noteable or Google Colab.
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 Jessica Witte.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're interested in other training on text analysis, have a look at the following:
- Silent Disco: Introduction to Sentiment Analysis
- Digital Method of the Month: Text Analysis
- Introduction to Text Analysis with Python
- Introduction to Topic Modelling with Bert
- Introduction to Network Analysis with Gephi
- Beyond Social Networks: Advanced Uses of Gephi in Humanities Research
