Postgraduate Course: Text Remix (fusion on-site) (EFIE11004)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | PLEASE NOTE this course is only available to EFI students.
This course will introduce some programming concepts and practice using text as data, as well as text-based procedures and games as a means to stimulate creative experimentation and skills. Further, the course will explore some of the ways that text can be algorithmically generated, or collected and then analysed. |
| Course description |
The course will explore practical creation and co-creation of text with human and/or computational partners. In particular, the course will concentrate on ways of categorising, transforming and responding to source text resulting in the creation of new experimental creative pieces or forms.
The practical work in the course will involve programming though Notebook-based worksheets. Students will therefore be introduced to some basic concepts and practice in computer programming using text as a data source to drive their exploration of these concepts. For example, the first tasks will be to replicate some simple text-based games in code to stimulate the creation of new artworks.
The programming content will be built to include some simple automata (e.g. Markov chain text generator, twitter bot), web scraping to obtain text data, and an introduction to some aspects of natural language processing, including ChatGPT. We will cover some quantitative text analysis ideas and discuss qualitative analysis.
Taught sessions will cover a mix of time spent on:
(1) Lectures/sharing of examples;
(2) Text-based games;
(3) Code-alongs;
(4) Discussion and peer feedback on creative and coding tasks;
(5) Group working and discussion.
As this is an introductory course, students do not need to have had previous experience in programming or creative writing.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - On-Site Fusion Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. This approach (our 'fusion' teaching model) offers students flexible and inclusive ways to study, and the ability to choose whether to be on-campus or online at the level of the individual course. It also opens up ways for diverse groups of students to study together regardless of geographical location. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities.
Students should be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- Unless the lecturer or tutor indicates otherwise you should assume the session is being recorded.
As part of your course, you will need access to a personal computing device. Unless otherwise stated activities will be web browser based and as a minimum we recommend a device with a physical keyboard and screen that can access the internet.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Develop and implement simple text games and automata in a suitable programming language.
- Scrape text from various sources and conduct simple analyses using these as data.
- Generate new creative pieces using text and computational techniques as inspiration and input.
- Understand and be able to use critically some simple computational models for analysing a piece of text.
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Reading List
All these texts are electronically accessible apart from the Hannah Fry.
Essential
Excerpt from: Shane, Janelle. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Wildfire, 2019. pp.168-184 are available in digitised form on the resource list but we would recommend the whole book.
Vasilev, Yuli. Natural Language Processing with Python and Spacy. No Starch Press Inc. 2020.
Recommended
Downey, Allen B. 'Think python 2nd edition' - https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/
Fry, Hannah. Hello World: how to be human in the age of the machine. London: Black Swan, 2019
Hartman, Charles O. Virtual Muse Experiments in Computer Poetry. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, c1996.
Kac, Eduardo. Media Poetry an international anthology. Intellect, 2007.
Schäfer, Mirko Tobias, and van Es, Karin. The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
1) Students will develop key knowledge skills through analysis of readings, presentations and the production of research material.
2) Students will use computational methods to address questions and issues of interest to researchers across a range of disciplines.
3) Students will develop original and creative responses using text as a source of data.
4) Students will communicate with peers and academic staff in a collegial setting, be introduced to a range of ICT applications to support and enhance work at this level, and will gain a grasp of basic programming concepts.
5) Working in small multidisciplinary teams, students will develop communication, autonomy, accountability and skills in working with others. |
| Keywords | Text,data science,digital humanities,machine learning,natural language processing,creativity |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Stuart King
Tel: (0131 6)51 7032
Email: S.King@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr David Murphy
Tel:
Email: dmurphy7@ed.ac.uk |
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