2023 Winter School: Word Vectors & Embeddings

Description

Note: Workshop is 6 hours and will be conducted over 2 days (11th & 13th December 2023; 8AM to 11AM ET) with each session of 3 hours per day on specific topics.

This workshop will cover the use of word vectors and embeddings for social science and digital humanities applications. It will be taught in R and Python. The first part of the workshop will review the history of word vectors and embeddings in the social sciences. It will go on to teaching how to estimate your own embedding layers. The second half will review applications of word embeddings to answer relevant questions in the social sciences and digital humanities. The focus here will be on replication of existing research as well as applications to additional questions.

About the Workshop: This workshop will cover the use of word vectors and embeddings for social science and digital humanities applications. It will be taught in R and Python. The first part of the workshop will review the history of word vectors and embeddings in the social sciences. It will go on to teaching how to estimate your own embedding layers. The second half will review applications of word embeddings to answer relevant questions in the social sciences and digital humanities. The focus here will be on replication of existing research as well as applications to additional questions.

Pre-requisites:

• Have R and RStudio installed
• Have Python and Visual Studio Code (or code interpreter you prefer) installed

Instructor: Dr. Christopher Barrie is Lecturer in Computational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the study of protest, conflict, and communication. He is particularly interested in advancing the use of digital trace, news, and communications data to study populations that have traditionally been 'hard-to-reach' in the empirical social sciences.