From Text to Tech - Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2026

This hands-on workshop offers an introduction to natural language processing in Python, from processing texts to extracting meaning from them, as well as the basics of automated semantic analysis with machine learning.

We will focus on practical applications (from preprocessing texts to enriching them with linguistic knowledge via part-of-speech tagging or syntactic parsing) and we will show how to work with raw, semi-structured, and tabular data.

We will also provide an overview of semantic analysis using word embeddings, and how this technique can be used for a large variety of humanities research, such as tracking semantic change or understanding biases in a corpus.

At the end of the workshop, participants will have acquired basic practical skills and knowledge on how Python can be used for processing humanities textual data.

You will leave with an understanding of key aspects of natural language processing and how these can be applied to their research in the humanities.

Federico Nanni

Federico is a Senior Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, working as part of the Research Engineering Group. He has a background in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval, with a focus on their applications in various research contexts, from Digital Humanities to Digital Libraries to Computational Social Science.

Prior to joining the Institute, he completed a PhD in History of Technology at the University of Bologna. He then worked for five years at the Data and Web Science Group of the University of Mannheim. He also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Foundation Bruno Kessler, Aarhus University and the University of New Hampshire.

Since joining the Turing, Federico has worked for four years on the Living with Machines project and on AI Safety research.

Kaspar Beelen

Kaspar Beelen is a digital historian at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, who explores the application of machine learning to humanities research.

After obtaining his PhD in History (2014) at the University of Antwerp he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.

As a researcher on the Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data (Dilipad) project, he published several papers situated at the interface of data science, political science and history, which explored a wide range of topics including the representation of women in Westminster, the evolution of public health discourse, and the use of effect in parliamentary language.

In 2016, Kaspar moved to the University of Amsterdam where he first worked as a postdoc for the Information and Language Processing Systems group and later became an assistant professor in Digital Humanities (Media Studies).

Between 2019-2023, Kaspar worked at the Turing Institute as a research associate for the Living with Machines project. Currently, he is the Digital Humanities Technical Lead at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Mariona Coll Ardanuy

Mariona Coll Ardanuy is an established researcher at the Computational Humanities group of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She is a computational linguist interested in the application of natural language processing methods to humanities research.

Mariona has a background in linguistics and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Göttingen. She has experience both in the academic and the private sector. During her PhD, she worked as a researcher at the Trier and Göttingen centres for Digital Humanities. After that, she spent two years at an AI company, prior to joining the Alan Turing Institute as a research associate for the Living with Machines project (2019-2023), where she focused on developing methods for exploring and mining nineteenth-century digitised newspapers. She has also been a post-doctoral researcher at the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology research centre of the Universitat Politècnica de València.

Exact timings are subject to change before summer school commences.

09:00 - 10:30: Opening Keynote: Information & Interaction: Scholarship at the Nexus of (Hu)Man and Machine

Abstract: The Digital Humanities are a broad community. It embraces methodological diversity, and brings together domain experts from across the wide landscape of the Humanities. Events such as the DHOxSS stand as testament to the richness of the field, and present us with unique opportunities for information exchange, knowledge acquisition, and upskilling. This talk takes a moment to recognise the community of DHers that has contributed to a body of work that uses the Linked Data information publication paradigm with datasets from the Humanities. These projects are case study examples that celebrate the ways in which the Digital Humanities are not just about developing computational systems, but also about the immense value and effect of human infrastructure as part of our research.

Speaker: Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (RMIT University)

Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is an Associate Professor, Information Interaction at the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

10:30 - 11:00 Refreshment break

11:00 - 12:30 Introduction to programming in Python

Abstract: The session provides a basic introduction to programming for digital humanities using the Python language.

Among the topics covered are assignments and variables, data types, conditional statements, and reading/writing data.