i am very pleased to have received an invitation from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore to contribute to a workshop themed on the Digital Humanities, which the college is organising on the 11th of March.
what is even more exciting to me is that the facilitation of the invited session will be helmed by my student - Daniel K Handoyo. Daniel is a Year 2 undergraduate pursuing a double major in History and Linguistics at NTU School of Humanities (SoH). He has titled his session Digital humanities: deriving insights from Singapore historical data with computational text analysis. Its abstract reads:
This presentation focuses on an ongoing research study which adopts a hands-on approach to applying digital humanities to historical inquiry, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance the analysis of Singapore's historical data. We focus our inquiry on the recorded speeches and debates of Singapore’s early parliament, offering a window into the legislative priorities that shaped the nation’s policy landscape. In this study, we employ topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique for discovering latent themes in a collection of documents, through the use of BERTopic, a cutting-edge framework that leverages transformer-based language models. This approach enables us to derive meaningful patterns and trends from parliamentary discourse, such as determining correlations between individual Members of Parliament (MPs) and the topics they frequently engaged with. This research illustrates how computational methods can be integrated with traditional historical analysis, underscoring the transformative potential of digital tools in supporting scholarly research within the humanities.