Publication
Proceedings of the Workshop on Teaching NLP for Digital Humanities
Peggy Bockwinkel; Thierry Declerck; Sandra Kübler; Heike Zinsmeister (Hrsg.)
Workshop on Teaching NLP for Digital Humanities (Teach4DH-2017), located at co-located with GSCL 2017, September 12, Berlin, Germany, Vol. 1918, ISBN ISSN 1613-0073, CEURS, RWTH Aachen University, 9/2017.
Abstract
Given that we live in a digital world, the importance of computational methods for processing infor-mation has increased over the past years. Not only in fields like biology or geology, but also in the humanities and social sciences, computational approaches have broadened the questions asked in re-search in these fields. The field of Digital Humanities (DH) emerged and with it the challenge to in-troduce students with little computational background to technical methods, or students with little mathematical background to statistical methods. Computational Linguistics (CL) is centrally located at this intersection since it focuses, among other things, on extracting information from unstructured text. It is thus in a position to provide methods to DH that will allow DH practitioners to use sophisticated computational methods without having to develop them from scratch. However, it is unclear at this juncture to what degree DH scholars need to be educated in the foundations of CL, including pro¬gramming and statistics.
Therefore, the aim of the current workshop was to provide a forum for CL and DH teachers to share experiences, to discuss best practices, to introduce teaching concepts, and to reflect on DH teaching. Some of these reflections, for example on the advantages of interdisciplinary between humanists and computational scientists can be found in the contributions by Ballier and Lissón, by Lam and Wong, and by Viehhauser et al. The workshop also intends to foster collaborations and to cross-fertilize knowledge and approaches across DH disciplines.
The wide range of teaching concepts presented in the workshop covers a five-day course on text mining for humanities scholars and social scientists (Wiedemann and Niekler), an online NLP course (Clematide et al.), a course specialised on corpus linguistic methods in combination with annotation tools (Barteld and Flick) and several courses offered for students as part of their humanities curricu¬lum (Ballier and Lissón; Faaß and Heid; Lam and Wong; Vela and Kermes).
Certain didactic concepts were assembled: Besides the classical lectures with tutorials, blended learn¬ing with the focus on hands-on sessions was favoured; with different characteristics like bootcamps and screencasts (Faaß and Heid), project seminars (Viehhauser et al.), collaborations with students on DH topics for their BA and MA thesis in the context of software projects (Declerck).
The skills students have already acquired during their humanities studies, but also the obstacles they face when starting to use computational methods are presented Ballier and Lissón and by Lam and Wong. Some of the challenges of teaching for a non-CL audience are discussed in the contributions by Ballier and Lissón, Lam and Wong, Viehhauser et al., and Vela and Kermes.
The Teach4DH workshop is held in September 2017 at the annual conference of the German Society for Language Technology (GCSL) at the Humboldt University in Berlin. It is co-organized by GSCL's SIG Education and Profession and supported by CLARIN. This volume presents the proceedings from the workshop. The workshop had 12 submissions, out of which 10 were accepted and are presented in the proceedings.
The workshop is related to workshops on didactics for NLP and CL, especially the four ACL work¬shops on issues in teaching computational linguistics (2002, 2005, 2008, and 2013), and a D-SPIN WP6 Workshop on Sprachressourcen in der Lehre 2011. It also addresses issues previously discussed in the DHd (Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum)-AG Referenzcurriculum Digital Hu¬manities.
Related but without a focus on didactics are the Workshops of the ACL Special interest group on Lan-guage Technology for Digital Humanities Research (LaTeCH) and the recent workshop on Language Technologies for Digital Humanities Workshop (LT4DH).