Dear colleagues,

From March 31 to April 5, 2025, we are holding a week-long text-focused  DH Spring School in Potsdam, Germany. The School is aimed at students and early-career scholars* who are beginning to explore Digital Humanities (DH) and are interested in working with textual sources. Participation is free.   

The concept of the DH school

While traditional hermeneutic approaches remain crucial in the humanities, computational methods offer additional perspectives for textual analysis. The Spring School aims to guide participants through the process of formulating a research question about a textual source to developing a comprehensive research project. The School provides an introduction to several computational methods and offers an opportunity for the students to reflect on the prospects of applying those methods to their own research projects/interests. 

"Text as Data" features intensive discussions, workshops, and lectures tailored for students across all humanities disciplines who are interested in computational approaches to text. The focus of the week-long Spring School is on the following themes:

• (mindful) Research design, operationalisation and corpus selection
• Topic modeling
• Stylometry
• Mapping of textual data
• Network analysis

Who's doing the DH school

The school is co-organised by the DH Network of the University of Potsdam and the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Lecturers and workshop organizers are leading researchers from DH and NLP institutions in Berlin, Erlangen, Krakow, Potsdam, Prague, and Trier.  The venue of the School is the University of Potsdam (Campus Am Neuen Palais). The preliminary timetable will be published soon on the School  webpage .

How to apply

Those interested in attending the school are welcome to submit their applications via the  following link until November 30th, 2024. The number of places is limited.

We also offer students a limited number of travel grants of max. 300 euro per person. To apply for a travel grant please use this  separate form .

Feel free to tell your students and everyone who could be interested!

Best,
Anastasia Glawion (Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Daniil Skorinkin (Digital Humanities Network, University of Potsdam), Dinara Gagarina (Department of History, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

* While this is the pool of people we primarily have in mind, we are open to applications from everybody interested in digital methods in the humanities.