Archives as Data - Summer Institute 2025
Please note that this workshop has been postponed indefinitely.
We are pleased to announce that we have opened the application process for our third edition of the NEH-funded Archives as Data Summer Institute. The Institute will run from June 2 to June 13, 2025, and will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data. Participants in the Archiving Digital Records workshop, designed for archivists, will learn how to use new technology to improve the description and arrangement of digital or digitized records, especially PDFs, and provide users with new ways to access them. Participants will receive training in using metadata tools such as PDF Processing, OCR Processing, and Named Entity Recognition (NER) analysis. Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. Participants will receive training in using data science technologies like R and SQL and will be expected to attend afternoon lab sessions where they will put these tools into practice.
The Institute will be led by Matthew Connelly and Courtney Chartier, with co-teacher Ray Hicks, who has extensive experience processing and analyzing textual data. The Text as Data workshop will run for two weeks, while the Archiving Digital Records workshop classes will only run for one week. In the second week, participants in the Archiving workshop will be expected to participate in the lunchtime talks and discussions remotely. Attendance is free, and funding is available, although limited, for those who need to travel to participate. Note that we expect all participants to attend daily, and group activities will require everyone to be present and actively contributing.
Please use this form to apply. . In addition to providing a CV, we will ask you to describe any previous experience or training in either processing digital collections (for archivists) or analyzing textual data (for historians). We will also ask you what motivates you to apply to the workshop and what you hope to gain from attending it. The draft syllabi for the workshops as well as the slides from a typical Text-as-Data course are available here.