Applied NLP for humanities research

Abstract

Natural language processing (NLP) has become a field of interest for many researchers within the humanities. However, framing humanities research questions as NLP problems and identifying suitable methods can be a difficult task. Taking previous and ongoing projects from the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University (CDHU) as a point of departure, this chapter presents concrete use cases of how humanities research questions can be approached using various NLP methods and tools, from ready-to use text analysis tools to programming libraries that require basic familiarity with Python. Two case studies from the field of history and literature will be introduced to illuminate how texts can be processed for humanities research purposes. With this chapter, we hope to give the reader the means to directly explore NLP methods for their research as well as encourage further learning.