Text as Data: Language Models, AI, and NPL Techniques for Historical and Literary Texts

With the recent explosion in availability of digitized historical and literary texts and the availability of powerful language models, researchers are increasingly turning to computational tools for the analysis of text as data. But not all text is equally amenable to computational approaches. Historical texts often require specialized approaches to bridge the gap between the books as originally produced and analysis-ready data. In this course, students will learn to prepare and analyze historical and literary texts for natural language processing. We will also consider questions of interpretation and the ethics of corpus construction.