Text & Data Analysis Summer School 2022

Each day of the Summer School is structured around four main teaching blocks:

• every morning, an academic researcher will deliver a talk discussing examples of their own research projects in Text and Data analysis and showcasing good practice.
  
   
• the second part of the morning and the early afternoon will be devoted to hands-on activities, with two workshops that will guide you through the practicalities of learning and applying a particular digital skill. All practicals will be done in R and you will be able to code along with the instructor.
  
   
• a BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) session will conclude each day, providing you with the opportunity to bring your own data sets and research questions to the class. This will allow you to apply and tailor what you are learning to your own project, share insights and collaboratively troubleshoot any issues you may encounter.

On the first day of the Summer School, Professor Melissa Terras will give an inaugural lecture, and on the last day of the course there will be a Ceilidh evening.

This course will equip you with knowledge of all the main techniques required to conduct Data and Text Analysis.

On the first day, you will learn how to extract data from scanned documents and how to use such data to perform basic Text Analysis.

On the second day, you will be shown how to collect information from websites and how to perform Sentiment Analysis.

On the third and fourth day, the focus will shift to the analysis of structured data. You will be given an overview of how to perform descriptive statistics analysis, before moving on to more complex statistical modelling (from Null-Hypothesis Tests to Regression and Mixed Effects Modelling).

The last day will be entirely dedicated to techniques and good practices in Data Visualisation.

For the whole duration of the Summer School, you will be using real-life data with a strong British and Scottish connotation (e.g. census and election data, ScotGov webpages, and texts written by Scottish Poets).

The course is aimed primarily at researchers from Scottish higher education institutions, with a marked interest in developing their digital and computational skills. We will also consider Scotland-based professionals who are keen to upskill their digital methods.    

The hands-on classes offered daily will involve live coding in R. For this reason, a general knowledge of the interface of RStudio is required, as well as an understanding of how coding works.

We will shortly release a video tutorial covering the basics of the coding platform that we will be using, to help you get ready for the Summer School. 

More detailed information will be given to the attendees upon acceptance.

This Summer School has no course fee, but places are limited.

In order to be considered, please fill in the Expression of Interest Form through the link below detailing how attendance will enhance your research/work.

· 28 March – Applications open

· 22 April – Applications close

· 2 May – Attendees are notified

· 6 – 10 June – Summer School takes place