CLARIAH-AT Summer School: Machine Learning for Digital Scholarly Editions

September 8-12, 2025

Call for Applications

Abstract

Machine learning is increasingly shaping research in the Digital Humanities, offering powerful tools for analyzing and enriching textual data. Using the Python library BERTopic, participants will explore various steps of topic modeling. Building upon BERTopic’s modular architecture, students will be introduced to several essential machine learning methods, such as embedding, dimensionality reduction, and clustering. Through practical sessions, students will learn to apply these techniques to historical texts. The aim is to give non-experts a high-level practical overview of how to use the BERTopic library and the essential theory behind its modules.

The school is intended for both students and researchers with an interest in the intersection between digital scholarly editing and Machine Learning. After attending the school, participants will have a basic understanding of machine learning algorithms and be able to assess their possible applications as well as strengths and limitations. Participants will be able to practically use BERTopic on their own data. 

Organizers and Hosting Institution

This one-week school will be hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities of the University of Graz in collaboration with the Know Center Graz, under the “COMET K1 Zentrums Know-Center GmbH – Research Center for Trustworthy AI & Data” cooperation, the Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory of Graz University of Technology, and the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE). The school is funded by CLARIAH-AT.

Requirements

A basic understanding of digital editions, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and Python programming is expected for participation. Participants will work with Jupyter Notebooks and GitHub.

Application

The school is limited to 24 participants. If you are interested in participating, please submit a letter of application including a short CV (max 2 pages) to Roman Bleier ( roman.bleier@uni-graz.at ) and Martina Scholger ( martina.scholger@uni-graz.at ).

The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2025. The summer school committee will evaluate each application and select participants by 30 April 2025.