Are you a literature student interested in digital humanities but not sure where to start? Are you a historian with hundreds of text documents you want to analyze but not sure what questions you could ask at scale?

This two-part series will briefly introduce you to the kinds of questions you can ask of texts with digital humanities and how to prepare your materials for this work. We will be primarily using examples written in English, but we will briefly discuss some issues working in other languages. Pursuing work of this kind takes time and commitment: it cannot be learned in just a few hours. But hopefully participants will come away from the series with a plan for the possibilities for working text analysis into their own research and a plan for further study to carry out this work.

The first session will cover basic steps necessary to prepare your texts for processing:

• What is a text as the computer understands it?
• How do I get a text in a format I can use it? Working with physical books
• Gathering materials from the web
• Building your own corpus
• How to organize your project
• Working with non-English texts

No prior experience is necessary for the workshop. Participants should come with a laptop that can connect to the internet. Participants will not need to install anything for this particular workshop, though we can work with individuals interested in running the software on their own machines after the workshop.