IIITH Resources

Objective: The objective of the HSL 1 course is preparatory hands-on practical training designed to understand the potential of computational humanities
a) Introduction to computational methods
b) Using social theory to read, analyse and interpret various kinds of data. Students will be taken through various exercises. Each exercise will involve the use of computational tools, followed by analysis and interpretation of the results generated by the computational tools. Therefore, each exercise will incorporate both computation and analysis using social science methods/theories. An important element of all the exercises will be to identify not just the potential, but equally the limitations of computational methods in the social sciences.

Course Topics

Class 1-2
Introduction
General intorduction, followed by introduction to the various problems connected with generation, visualisation and interpretation in Big Data analysis.

Class 3-4
Bag of Words exercise
This exercise involves creating a Bag of words from monographs using computational tools, followed by a brief analysis. Students will be given two texts, on which the Bag of Words will be performed. Analysis of the BoW results will follow. Students will be encouraged to understand the similarities and the differences in the texts (revealed both by and without BoW exercise). They will be introduced to the importance of historical/sociological/political context. Students will also be ancouraged to read the texts, to be able to benefit from the exercise.

Class 5-7
Identification and interpretation of correlations in social data
Computational tools will be used to draw correlations between the sets of social data (education and income/education and infant mortality, presence of natural resources and income etc). Analysis of the results will follow. Students will be encouraged to ask themselves why certain social data is closely correlated and more important, why not. This will require an understanding and appreciation of historical/sociological/political context and theory.

Class 8-10
Working with Tweets
This exercise involves using computational tools to crawl and analyse tweets. This will be followed by an analysis of results, from a social science perspective, wherein students will identify the political/sociological context of the tweets. Students will particularly be encouraged to see the potential as well as the limitations of using computational tools.

Class 11-13
Working with Newspaper Articles
This exercise invloves using computational tools to scrape and analyse newspaper articles. This will be followed by an analysis of the results, from a social science perspective, wherein students will identify the political/sociological context of the articles. Students will particularly be encouraged to see the potential as well as the limitations of using computational tools.

Class 14-16
Working with Political Data
This exercise involves scraping of election-related data from various sites (Association for Democratic reforms, Election Commission of India, Lokniti, etc). This will be followed by organization of this data in a manner that facilitates further analysis. Students will also learn to present data in useful ways. Students will be encouraged to analyse the data from a sociological/political lens.