Lecturer Methods of Historical Research

I taught this course together with Auke Rijpma and Pim Huijnen. The purpose of this course was to familiarize students of the Research MA programme History with computational techniques to analyse structured and unstructured data.

A main goal of the course was to provide students with sufficient information to form their own opinion of the extent to which digital resources and tools change the heuristics of historical enquiry. In this course students worked with tools for the analysis of unstructured (textual) and structured (numerical) historical data within the R environment. We composed our own handouts, instruction manual, and example code by using open source software (R), Github, several Digital Humanities blogs, and existing handbooks. Students were trained in the use of analytical tools in a ‘hands on’ setting, in which they worked on their own research projects.

More information and the syllabus can be found here on Github