Digital Methods and Datasets for Urban History
DH-604 / 2 crédits
Enseignant(s): Di Lenardo Isabella, Invited lecturers (see below)
Langue: Anglais
Remark: To register for the workshop, please send an email to paul.guhennec@epfl.ch by Friday January 17, 2025 including a short summary (no more than 150 words) of your research
Frequency
Only this year
Summary
This week-long workshop introduces the latest tools and methods that allow to explore, manipulate, visualise, and question large-scale datasets in the context of digital urban history.
Content
This workshop offers researchers the opportunity to discover, explore, and understand, through computational approaches, new perspectives of a city's (Venice) long history through unpublished datasets. Some key themes will be able to be explored such as the evolution of urban structure, types of owners, networks and more recent socio-economic specificities. For the first time, and before their official publication in 2025, these data will be made available to all researchers interested in understanding ways of digitally manipulating the datasets and, through a large-scale approach, prospect new historical representations hitherto little explored.
This week-long workshop will combine daily presentations and tutorials by the researchers that helped curate those datasets to introduce the latest technical tools for the manipulation of data in historical research. Presentations will cover cartographic visualisation, named-entity recognition and extraction, point cloud manipulation, conversion of structured data to networks, semantic segmentation of visual documents, and the use of foundational models (LLMs) in knowledge extraction.
Each afternoon will consist of hands-on projects where researchers will be able to apply these tools to the various Venice datasets we will provide, in whichever disciplinary approach -” from urban history to economic history, or art history. The last day of the week will be dedicated to the presentation and discussion of the projects results.
Detailed programme
Monday
09h30-11h General introduction and Presentation of the sources
11h-12h30 Introductory lecture: A Panorama of the Venice's cultural and urban history.
14h-15h15 Group formation
15h30-17h First exploration of the datasets and group work session #1
Tuesday (Texts and Maps - Part 1)
09h30-11h Text processing, entries classification, named-entity recognition in historical documents
11h-12h30 Map processing, alignment, annotation, semantic segmentation
14h-15h15 Group work session#2
15h30-17h Group work session #3
Wednesday (Texts and Maps - Part 2)
09h30-11h Textual data structuring, network construction, quantitative metrics
11h-12h30 Cartographic data structuring, GIS, visualisation, quantitative analysis, street network analysis
14h-15h15 Group work session #4
15h30-17h Group work session #5
Thursday (Image)
09h30-11h Point cloud manipulation, volume and façade extraction, contextualisation through other sources
11h-12h30 LLMs and historical sources, data alignement, prompt engineering
14h-15h15 Group work session#6
15h30-17h Group work session #7
Friday
09h30-11h Group project presentation #1
11h-12h30 Group project presentation #2
Keywords
digital humanities, urban history, digital history
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, the student must be able to:
- leverage cutting-edge digital methods to interrogate large-scale datasets, and critically engage with their usage in historical research.
Dans les plans d'études
- Nombre de places: 30
- Forme de l'examen: Exposé (session libre)
- Matière examinée: Digital Methods and Datasets for Urban History
- Cours: 15 Heure(s)
- Projet: 30 Heure(s)
- Type: optionnel