Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data

Accés a la pàgina

Digital methods have been utilised by a variety of disciplines and the growing availability of large corpora and large databases (the BIG DATA era) calls for new methods to deal with new problems, open the door to new questions and develop new knowledge.

“Quantitative analysis of textual data”, “Digital Methods” and “Distant Reading” are general terms that refer to a wide range of methods sharing a common aim: retrieving and summarising information from texts by means of computer-aided tools. Today, computer-aided text analysis is an umbrella term referring to a number of qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. It is an object of research in many sectors of linguistics, computer sciences, mathematics and statistics and it is used as a research tool within a number of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, sociolinguistics, education, history, political studies, literary studies, communication and media studies. The recent evolution of information technologies (IT) and quantitative methods has led to a number of distinct but interrelated sectors (e.g. computational linguistics, information retrieval, natural language processing, text mining, text analytics, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, topic extraction, etc.) with interesting industrial applications (e.g. electronic dictionaries, artificial intelligence, computer-aided translation, plagiarism detection, web reputation).

Recent studies have repeatedly stressed the need for developing, adopting and sharing interdisciplinary approaches and the IQLA-GIAT Summer School is the ideal environment for developing innovative analytical tools by pooling together the research methods of different disciplines.

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is characterized by three main elements:

a general part devoted to quantitative linguistics;
a special issue addressing a relevant methodological problem (2017: topic detection and authorship attribution in Elena Ferrante’s case-study; 2015: measuring style and computational stylistics; 2013 measures and methods in authorship attribution);
several lab-sessions dedicated to computer-aided analysis of textual data.

This year’s IQLA-GIAT Summer School will also include a Workshop on Elena Ferrante’s case-study.

 

Objectives

Teaching activities will raise questions that can be answered by implementing quantitative methods and other procedures that may be used to identify and compare the characteristics of texts within a text analysis framework. The aim is to discuss with students, young researchers and scholars of different disciplines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of text analysis quantitative methods . The participants selected for the IQLA-GIAT Summer School have the opportunity to exploit different tools within the same environment and the same tool in different environments.

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School aims at:

sharing information on software, corpora, relevant literature and research results;
promoting a dialogue among different disciplines on current research issues;
developing innovative analytical tools and integrated research methods;
introducing students and young researchers to new strains of research and applications;
sharing state-of-the-art knowledge in:

Quantitative linguistics;
Digital methods for text analysis (topic detection, text classification);
Authorship Attribution methods and dedicated software packages;
Content mapping and data visualization;
Computer-aided analysis of textual data.

 

Credits

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data is organized by GIAT – Interdisciplinary Text Analysis Group (www.giat.org) in collaboration with the International Quantitative Linguistics Association (www.iqla.org) and the Department of Computational Linguistics (Computerlinguistik und Digital Humanities) of the University of Trier (www.uni-trier.de).

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is a project funded by the University of Padova (www.unipd.it), coordinated by prof. Arjuna Tuzzi (University of Padova).

 

Application and deadline

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is open to 20 participants including researchers, scholars and postgraduate students. The selection of 20 participants is due to the capacity of the laboratory room.

Applicants should send a file in pdf format including:

curriculum vitae;
personal mission statement and research interests (max 500 words).

Applications should be sent to the following address:

qatd.school@fisppa.it

Deadline: July, 31st

Tuition fee: € 200

The tuition fee does not include accommodation, travel or any other expenses.

 

Location

University of Padua

Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education & Applied Psychology

(Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata – FISPPA)

Sociology buildings

via Cesarotti, 10/12

35123 Padova, ITALY

 

 

Schedule

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School will take place from Monday 4th to Friday 8th September 2017.

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is a full-time intensive course held:

On Monday from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm
From Tuesday to Thursday from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm
On Friday from 9.30 am to 4.00 pm
On Friday, the last two hours will be devoted to the final assessment.

 

Classes

All courses are in English. Teaching activities include lectures and lab sessions, as well as tutorials illustrating software tools. The teaching staff includes researchers and experts from different Universities: Duquesne University (Pennsylvania, US); Toulouse II (France), Trier (Germany), Athens (Greece), Neuchatel (Switzerland), Kraców (Poland), Roma “La Sapienza”, Padova and Trieste (Italy).

 

Lecturers and topics

Andrei Beliankou (Univ. of Trier, Germany)

Quantitative Linguistics (provisional title)

Maciej Eder (Univ. of Kraków, Poland)

Introduction to distributional semantics: topic modelling and word vector representations

Patrick Juola (Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

Authorship Attribution – JGAAP (provisional title)

Reinhard Köhler (Univ. of Trier, Germany)

General Methodology in Empirical Linguistics. Evaluation of Data and Hypothesis Testing
A Crash Course in the Central Terms and Concepts of Science

Vittorio Loreto (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)

Data compression schemes for authorship attribution

George Mikros (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)

Author profiling: Detecting author’s gender in social media

Sven Naumann (Univ. of Trier, Germany)

Syntactic Complexity
Topic Modeling

Stefano Ondelli (Univ. of Trieste, Italy)

The Impact of Sociolinguistic and Morphological Factors on Corpus Design

Pierre Ratinaud (Univ. of Toulouse II, France)

IRaMuTeQ – corpus indexation, manipulation and simple description
The Reinert method in IRaMuTeQ

Jan Ribicki (Univ. of Kraków, Poland)

Stylometry with the package ‘Stylo’: Explanatory methods
Stylometry with the package ‘Stylo’: Supervised methods

Jacques Savoy (Univ. of Neuchâtel Switzerland)

Other Applications of Authorship Attribution Methods

Other activities (Valentina Rizzoli, Irene Saonara, Stefano Sbalchiero)

Quality Assessment of the School
Final Evaluation and self-assessment
Free Lab time
Tutorship

 

Final Evaluation and self-assessment

All participants will be requested to fill in a questionnaire to express their opinions about the main aspects of the IQLA-GIAT Summer School (e.g. organization, teaching, materials, facilities and equipment, expectations, satisfaction rate, suggestions etc.). It is worth mentioning that the third edition of the Summer School is organized also considering the results and suggestions obtained through the evaluation questionnaires done in 2013 and 2015 editions.
All participants shall complete a self-assessment questionnaire on technical skills and general knowledge including 30 multiple choice questions (one correct answer out of four). Grades will reflect the sum of all correct answers (one point) according to the following range: A (29-30 points); B (25-28 points); C (21-24 points); D (17-20 points); E (15-16 points).

 

Website

The IQLA-GIAT Summer School will provide a specific website within GIAT’s domain (www.giat.org) for the distribution of learning resources, links and bibliographic references before, during and after the Summer School.

 

Info

For any further information and details about terms, deadlines, application forms and payment modalities, please contact:

qatd.school@fisppa.it

Dott.ssa Valentina Rizzoli
Dott.ssa Irene Saonara
Dott. Stefano Sbalchiero