IQLA-GIAT International Summer Schoolin
Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data
4th edition
Recent developments in digital methods are not only changing how research is conducted in thehumanities and social sciences, but also how new research is planned and designed. In order toreach the full potential and benefits of this revolution, most research activities need a newgeneration of researchers: data scientists for humanities and social sciences.
Digital methods are being utilised by a variety of disciplines. The growing availability of large
corpora and large databases calls for new methods that are able to deal with new problems, open
the door to new questions and develop new knowledge.
Presentation"Distant Reading", "Digital Methods", "Computational social sciences" and "Statistical learningfrom textual data" are general terms that refer to a wide range of methods that have a common
aim: retrieving information from texts by means of computer-aided tools. Today, computeraided text analysis is an umbrella term referring to a number of qualitative, quantitative andmixed-methods approaches. It is an object of research in many sectors of linguistics, computersciences, mathematics and statistics. Furthermore, computer aided text analysis is used as a
research tool within a number of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology,sociolinguistics, education, history, political studies, literary studies, communication and media
studies. The recent evolution of information technologies (IT) and computational methods has
led to a number of distinct but interrelated sectors (e.g. computational linguistics, information
retrieval, natural language processing, text mining, text analytics, sentiment analysis, opinion
mining, topic extraction, etc.) with interesting industrial applications, such as electronicdictionaries, artificial intelligence, plagiarism detection and similar.
Recent studies have stressed the need for developing, adopting and sharing interdisciplinaryapproaches. The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is the ideal environment for developing
innovative analytical tools by pooling together the research methods from different disciplines.
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is characterized by three main elements:
1. a general part devoted to quantitative methods;
2. a special issue that has changed over time (2019: Data Science and Data scientistsin Humanities and Social Sciences);
3. several lab-sessions dedicated to computer-aided analysis of textual data.
Objectives
Teaching activities at the School will raise questions that can be answered thanks to quantitative
methods implemented within a text analysis framework and other procedures that may be used
to identify and compare text characteristics. The aim is to discuss the strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats of quantitative methods for text analysis with postgraduate students,
early career researchers and scholars of different disciplines. The Summer School aims at:
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sharing information on software, corpora, relevant literature and research results;
promoting a dialogue among different disciplines on emerging research issues;
developing innovative analytical tools and integrated research methods;
introducing postgraduate students and early career researchers to new strains of research
and applications;sharing state-of-the-art techniques in digital methods for text analysis (topic detection,text classification, data visualization).

Does this School fit your needs?
Would you like to take into account a large number of relevant novels, articles published bynewspapers, transcriptions of open-ended interviews, or comments posted on social media inyour research? Are there definitely too many texts for any scholar to read them in a life span?
Why not trying to ask a computer to do this task?
A software package is not able to "close read" a text. On the contrary, by means ofmathematical and statistical tools, it might be smart to "distant read" a text (i.e. collecting data,retrieving relevant information, summarizing features, finding patterns, etc.). Instead of closereading a limited number of texts, why not working with thousands of texts, upload them into
the memory of a computer and ask a software package to produce analyses and results?
Credits
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data is organized by
GIAT – Interdisciplinary Text Analysis Group (www.giat.org) in collaboration with theInternational Quantitative Linguistics Association (www.iqla.org).
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is a project funded by the University of Padova(www.unipd.it) and coordinated by Professor Arjuna Tuzzi (University of Padova).
Application and deadlines
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is open to 20 participants including researchers, scholars andpostgraduate students. The selection of 20 participants is due to the capacity of the laboratory
room.
Applicants should send a file in pdf format including:
1. curriculum vitae;
2. personal mission statement and research interests (max 500 words);
Applications should be sent to the following address: qatd.school@fisppa.it
Deadline June, 27thTuition fee 250 €Schedule
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School will take place from Monday 9th to Friday 13th September
2019.
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is a full-time intensive course held:-On Monday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm-From Tuesday to Thursday from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm-On Friday from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm

On Friday, the last two hours will be left for the final assessment.
Location
University of Padova
Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education & Applied Psychology(Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata - FISPPA)
Sociology buildings
via Cesarotti, 10/1235123 Padova, ITALYClasses
All courses are in English. Teaching activities include lectures and lab sessions, as well astutorials illustrating software tools.
The teaching staff includes researchers and experts from different Universities and Research
institutes:-

Dominique Brunato (ILC / CNR of Pisa, Italy)-

Sascha Diwersy (Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier, France)-

Maciej Eder (Univ. of Kraków, Poland)-

George Mikros (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)-

Stefano Ondelli (Univ. of Trieste, Italy)-

Pierre Ratinaud (Univ. of Toulouse II, France)-

Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian Univ. of Kraków, Poland)

Topics-Computational stylistics-

Stylometry-

Texts and gender-

Topic modelling-

Text classification-

Forensic linguistics-

Author profiling and authorship attribution methods

Final Evaluation and self-assessment
All participants will be requested to complete an evaluation questionnaire to express theiropinions about the main aspects of the IQLA-GIAT Summer School (e.g. organization,teaching, materials, facilities and equipment, expectations, satisfaction rate, suggestions etc. ). It
is worth mentioning that the fourth edition of the Summer School is organized also considering
the results and suggestions obtained through the evaluation questionnaires done in 2013, 2015
and 2017 editions.
All participants will complete a self-assessment questionnaire on technical skills and generalknowledge including 30 multiple choice questions (one correct answer out of four). Grades willreflect the sum of all correct answers (one point) according to the following range: A (29-30points); B (25-28 points); C (21-24 points); D (17-20 points); E (15-16 points).
Website and social networks
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School will provide a specific website within GIAT's domain(www.giat.org) for the distribution of learning resources, links and bibliographic references
before, during and after the Summer School.
The IQLA-GIAT Summer School is also active on Facebook and Twitter.
InfoFor any further information and details about terms, deadlines, application forms and payment
methods, please contact:
qatd.school@fisppa.it