Digital Humanities

This lecture provides a historical and methodological survey of corpus and computational linguistics from the emergence of computer-based language research in the 1940s and 1950s to contemporary corpus methods, natural language processing, and large language models. Using exemplary research questions, corpora, methods, and algorithms, it introduces major areas including corpus design and annotation, corpus querying and quantitative analysis, computational text processing, tagging and parsing, statistical and machine-learning approaches, neural methods, language models, and current developments in NLP and AI. The lecture aims to acquaint students with the history, principal research areas, methods, and methodological foundations of corpus and computational linguistics within the digital humanities / digital philology and to enable them to relate linguistic and textual research questions to appropriate computational and corpus-based approaches. Over the 15 weeks of the semester, students will develop a broad overview of the field through lectures, selected texts and papers, and engagement with current research. The lecture emphasizes both the historical foundations of computational language research and the development of contemporary approaches to the analysis of digital textual and linguistic data. Assessment / Grading: The lecture conludes with a final examination (in-person, on-site, bring-your-own-device) that forms the foundation for the grading of the class. Detailed information on the course requirements, examination mode and grading will be provided in the first week of the lecture.