Programme
Fourteen Tuesdays, 14:00–17:15, 15 September to 15 December 2026, at Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, Room F-123. The Lab starts at 14:00 sharp — not a quarter past.
From Session 2 onwards every session is hands-on on your own machine. Materials, datasets and anything that cannot be published openly are in the ILIAS course space.
Who teaches what
Hodel Tobias Hodel Spadini Elena Spadini Beretta Francesco Beretta Hart Stephen Hart Demleitner Adrian Demleitner Prada Ziegler Ismail Prada Ziegler Course team all three convenors
Badges below mark who leads each session.
Sessions
Session 1 (15 September 2026)
Programme information · Introductions · Individual consultations Course team
Information on the MA Major, MA Minor and the doctoral track; introductions; consultation slots. Prepare an answer to the orientation questions on the session page.
In the Intro: Welcome · What is DH
Session 2 (22 September 2026)
Get to know your computer Demleitner
Command line · paths · data storage · file naming conventions.
In the Intro: What is DH? · What is data?
Session 3 (29 September 2026)
Get to know useful stuff Hodel
Markdown · Obsidian · GitHub · VSCodium.
16:00 — Final-year meeting (I): report on projects.
In the Intro: Forms of data and metadata
Session 4 (6 October 2026)
Replacing Excel with SQLite for data management Beretta
Data modelling in practice: draw.io · SQLite · QuickDBD.
In the Intro: Data structures
Session 5 (13 October 2026)
From Linked Open Data to RiC-O, LRM and CIDOC-CRM Hart
The formal ontologies of archives, libraries and museums.
In the Intro: Data modelling: Linked Open Data
Session 6 (20 October 2026)
Introduction to APIs Hodel
Calling the Zotero API, including token setup · APIs of cultural heritage institutions (examples).
In the Intro: Data publication: the web as interface
Session 7 (27 October 2026)
Introduction to scholarly editing as a form of data publication Spadini
TEI, hands-on: encoding, validating, transforming, publishing.
In the Intro: Data modelling: editions
Session 8 (3 November 2026)
Introduction to Omeka Hodel
Data standards · controlled vocabularies · the API · what to use when: GitHub Pages or Omeka.
16:00 — Final-year meeting (II): report on status.
In the Intro: Data analysis: networks
Session 9 (10 November 2026)
Introduction to Colab / Noto Hodel
Notebooks · enough Python to adapt an analysis · topic modelling.
In the Intro: Data analysis: text corpora
Session 10 (17 November 2026)
Data cleaning and connecting: OpenRefine Demleitner
Clustering · GREL · reconciliation against Wikidata, hands-on.
In the Intro: Geovisualisation
Session 11 (24 November 2026)
Text recognition: introduction to eScriptorium Hodel
Segmentation · transcription · ground truth · training and evaluation, hands-on.
In the Intro: From algorithms to machine learning
Session 12 (1 December 2026)
GenAI in action: multimodal LLMs in the humanities Prada Ziegler
Transcription, extraction, classification — and how to check any of it.
In the Intro: LLMs: stochastic parrots and research agents
Session 13 (8 December 2026)
Workflow presentations Course team
Everyone presents their workflow; structured feedback from the group.
In the Intro: Data feminism
Session 14 (15 December 2026)
Presentations: Master Minor and Master Major Course team
Final-year presentations; for Major students a test run for the defence.
In the Intro: FAIR, CARE and digital sustainability
Assessment
See the Assignment page.