Text-mining platform Constellate offers free summer workshops

This June and July the Constellate platform offers free workshops to teach you the skills – or advance them to a new level – to work with Constellate, a service that provides all the tools for proficiency in data analysis and digital literacy. The Utrecht University Library currently offers access to this platform which allows you to easily analyze articles from JSTOR.

This summer, you may build a dataset, visualize a dataset (did you know that “mother” occurs considerably more frequently than “father” in scholarly literature about the foster care system?), and even work in the Constellate Lab using our Jupyter Notebooks or your own (a feature usually only available to individuals at participating institutions.)

To launch you on your explorations of text analysis and Constellate, this platform is offering six hour-long webinars every Tuesday at noon EDT (= 18.00 uur Nederlandse tijd):

• June 21: Introduction to Constellate
• June 28: Constellate, the Technology
• July 5: Considerations when Building a Good Dataset for Text Analysis
• July 12: What Can You Do with Word Counts?
• July 19: Topic Modeling Together
• July 26: Introduction to the Constellate Trial and Participation Packages

You may even take in our four-session “Introduction to Python” course by working in the Constellate Lab alongside a recording of the class.

Take advantage of this summer to introduce yourself to text analysis for free and consider how to bring these skills to your campus, help researchers, and collaborate with faculty. Constellate offers everything you need to learn, perform, and teach text analytics: a defined curriculum, robust tutorials, and live classes taught by experts, all tailored to your level of ability. If you enjoy the introduction, perhaps you will join us in a robust evaluation of Constellate this fall. 

Do you have questions on how to use Constellate in the Utrecht University Library? Contact the the Digital Humanities Team for help.