Course Quantitative text analysis for humanities scholars: A corpus-based approach to large-scale text analysis

Course description

The course offers an introduction to analyzing texts through a combination of close reading strategies and quantitative corpus-based approaches.

The course aims to introduce participants to the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct large-scale analyses of discourse in various contexts using quantitative corpus-based methods. During the course, we will work mainly with media texts as an example, but the methods introduced will be applicable to many different types of text, e.g., social media posts, policy documents, news articles, and literary texts. We will mainly be working with corpora of English texts, but the methods introduced can equally well be applied to Danish text corpora.

Upon completing the course, participants will have acquired a deeper understanding of the process of constructing a digital text corpus. They will have learnt how to operationalize research questions effectively and have gained hands-on experience in performing large-scale text analysis through quantitative corpus linguistic methods.

The quantitative and corpus-based approach presented in the course is relevant in a wide range of different research contexts including sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, media studies, literary studies and more.

The course also includes a basic introduction to working with text in Python. Participants will learn to use Python to preprocess and analyze large text corpora, they will also learn how to use NLP tools to identify linguistic patterns and features in discourse.

No prior experience with Python or statistics is required.

Aim/Learning outcomes

• This course aims to introduce participants to the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct large-scale analyses of discourse in various contexts using quantitative corpus-based methods.

Requirements for participation

• No prior experience with Python or statistics is required.

Target group/Participants

• The course is especially relevant for early-stage PhD-students, but it is also relevant for later-stage students already working with corpus-based approaches or discourse analysis.

Language 

• English

Lecturers

• Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen
• Yuri Bizzoni
• Ea Lindhardt Overgaard,

Literature

• Baker, P. (2012). Acceptable bias? Using corpus linguistics methods with critical discourse analysis. Critical Discourse Studies, 9(3), 247–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.688297
• Jacobs, T., & Tschötschel, R. (2019). Topic models meet discourse analysis: A quantitative tool for a qualitative approach. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(5), 469–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2019.1576317
• Manovich, L. (2020). Cultural analytics. The MIT Press.
• Nordahl-Hansen, A., & Kvernbekk, T. (2020). Construct Validity in Scientific Representation: A Philosophical Tour. Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk & kritikk, 6, 88–99. https://doi.org/10.23865/ntpk.v6.1704
• Ondelli, S. (2018). Treat Texts as Data but Remember They Are Made of Words: Compiling and Pre-processing Corpora. I A. Tuzzi (Red.), Tracing the Life Cycle of Ideas in the Humanities and Social Sciences (s. 133–150). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97064-6_7

Venue

• 24 November 2026. 10.00-16.00
• 25 November 2026. 09.00-16.00
• 26 November 2026. 09.00-16.00
• 27 November 2026. 09.00-14.00

Course dates:

• 24 November 2026 10:00 - 16:00
• 25 November 2026 09:00 - 16:00
• 26 November 2026 09:00 - 16:00
• 27 November 2026 09:00 - 14:00