This seminar is specifically designed for social science and humanities researchers and students who have no prior experience with digital methods. It aims to demystify these techniques and provide a comprehensive introduction to their applications, benefits, and practical implementation. In just two hours, you will gain valuable insights into how digital methods can be applied to your research

Speaker biog: William Mattingly received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Kentucky. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral research fellow in the Smithsonian Institution's Data Science Lab. There, he researches and develops ethical AI systems for historical archives. He specifically focuses on the application of natural language processing methods on multilingual archives. At the Bitter Aloe Project, he is developing methods for knowledge extraction from documents produced by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he explores how we can develop semantic search to allow researchers to discover documents more effectively. He has published five open source textbooks on Python and machine learning designed for humanists and has co-authored several articles on the ethical and practical applications of AI on archival records.

William will be drawing on examples from his ongoing research as well as his collaboration with CASPS co-director Dr Jordan Tchilingirian studying the transformation of social protection and conflict prevention expertise about on the MENA region.