Cambridge Digital Humanities course timetable

Convenor: Jacob Forward, CDH Methods Fellow

Jacob will offer hands-on experience of a full research pipeline in this methods workshop, from data collection and cleaning to deploying large language models (LLMs) to uncover new insights from our textual sources.

The session will cover:

• An overview of how digital neural networks operate and how they can be effectively used in LLMs to grasp the patterns in language.
• Discover how to web-scrape text to create a dataset of primary sources you want to explore.
• Use LLMs to help generate and debug the code necessary to clean your dataset and convert it into an appropriate file type,
• Discus best practices when working with AI to produce code.
• Explore our sources by deploying LLMs in a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Discuss the merits of ‘fine-tuning’ vs RAG.

If you don’t have any experience of coding, Jacob hopes to show you just how much you are capable of, and if you have a technical background, you can look forward to pushing the boundaries of your skill.

About the convenor: Jacob is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. His research focuses on the discourse of crisis in post-Cold War American politics, specifically the language and metaphors politicians use in connection with terrorism, immigration, natural disasters, and financial shocks. His method involves fine-tuning language models on distinct corpora of political speeches, and then querying the fine-tuned models to augment his discourse analysis.

More broadly, his research interests include the dynamic between terrorism and federal authority, the debate over national security and civil liberties since 9/11, the psychology of non-literal language, and the ethics and opportunities of leveraging AI tools for humanities research.

Jacob previously read for an MPhil in American History at Cambridge (King’s College), and a BA in History at Oxford (Keble College). He has worked for History and Policy at the Institute for Historical Research and consulted on research projects at the School of Advanced Study.

This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here.