ISSMF4220 ¨C Corpus-driven Conceptual Datathons

Course content

This course is designed to complement the course ISSMF4210 Understanding Key Concepts in Social and Political Life, as part of the Honors Certificate Concepts that Matter - Debating Democracy. It will provide students with training in corpus analysis, with a particular focus on the use of corpora for conceptual analysis. Students will learn to access and interrogate the Sustainability and HEalth (SHE) and the Genealogies of Knowledge (GoK) corpora through a web-based interface, using the extensive range of digital tools provided to collect and analyze data.

Learning outcome

Knowledge?

A student who has completed this course will be able to:?

• explain what corpora are and how they can be employed for conceptual analysis;??

• understand how to use various visualization tools to reveal strong patterns and enhance the analysis of very large corpora;??

• explain how to access and make sense of metadata on the provenance of a particular pattern to understand who uses it and in what context;?

Skills?

A student who has completed this course will be able to:?

• use corpus analysis to generate, sort and analyse concordances to reveal various discursive patterns that offer an insight into the use and meanings of a specific concept;??

• use corpus analysis tools to reveal constellations of concepts associated with democracy and sustainability;;?

• engage in collective, live analysis of authentic data drawn from very large corpora in a datathon setting.?

?

General competence?

A student who has completed this course will be able to:??

• present the findings of textual analysis r clearly to peers and experts;??

• develop a more informed and critically aware use of language??

Admission to the course

The course is restricted to students admitted to the Honours Certificate Concepts that matter - Debating democracy.

Teaching

The course includes 4 online workshops, followed by an intensive, face-to-face student-driven datathon, The datathon will be held locally at each partner university over three days.?

Face-to-face datathon:? 14, 15 and 16th April? 2025.

The datathon on April 14th, 15th and 16th will consist of guided activities and student-led work. The aim will be for each group to conduct a small, contained, corpus-based analysis of a set of related concepts on the topic of democracy and/or sustainability. The analysis and its findings will be made available as a slide presentation on the SHE corpus website and will form the basis for the assessment. More information will be made available on Canvas as soon as details are finalised.?

Examination

The students will present their findings on the chosen concept/set of concepts on the last day of the datathon and receive feedback. They will have an opportunity to amend the slides used in the presentation after the datathon and they will be uploaded to the SHE corpus website. Each student will additionally submit a 2000-word reflective report presenting the analysis and their interpretation of the data collected.

Language of examination

English

Grading scale

Pass/fail

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.