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CULTURAL DATA SCIENCE

Supplementary subject

About the programme
Language: English  | Place of study: Aarhus  |  Commencement: August / september

Introduction

The humanities face a revolution in the amount of data available for answering our most important questions. This includes the mass digitalization of historical texts and visual artefacts, a proliferation of social interaction via text online, and an increase in digitalization of geopolitical data. At the same time, the statistical and computational methods required to analyze this data have advanced rapidly.

Digital humanities and humanistic data

Students and scholars from the humanities are well placed to use these methods to make important contributions within and outside of their research areas. New fields like digital humanities, computational linguistics, and humanistic data science are becoming increasingly important, both within and outside of the university. In Cultural Data Science, you will acquire the computational and statistical tools needed to start working in these fields. The supplementary subject will focus on textual, geospatial and visual data, and will be of particular interest to students from Linguistics, Cognitive Science, History, Anthropology, Religion Science, and Language and Literature. The courses prepare students to apply their core humanistic knowledge to new data driven forms of academic work and they are designed to be accessible to those without prior knowledge of statistics or programming.

Questions

  • How can humanities scholars best make use of the massive amounts of data available to help understand human culture?
  • How can we use computational methods to mine historical and contemporary texts, and to draw lessons about culture and cultural evolution from very large text databases (e.g. including traditional media, social media, and historical records)?
  • How can we use computational methods to map the interactions between human culture and the geospatial environment, both in historical and contemporary contexts? 
  • How can we use computational methods to better understand visual artefacts of culture, including artistic and archeological artefacts? 
  • How can we use computational and statistical methods to better track the evolution of culture in the spatial environment, in textual expression, and in the production of visual artefacts?

Admission requirements

In order to be admitted to a supplementary subject, you have to be enrolled in a bachelor’s degree programme at a Danish University. Futhermore, the academic regulations of the bachelor’s degree programme have to allow for a combination with supplementary subject. 

ECTS requirements

It is a requirement that you have passed 60 ECTS credits in your core subject before 15 April. Introductory courses are not included when calculating these ECTS credits. 

Level requirements

English B

History B or History of Ideas B or Comtemporary History B or Social Science B

Mathematics B

If you do not meet the level requirements, you can supplement subject levels.

Restricted admission

40 seats. The number of seats is indicative and can be adjusted continuously by the university.

In evaluating qualified applicants, the admissions committee assesses each applicant on the basis of the average mark (i.e. GPA) obtained in the core subject in the Bachelor’s degree by 15 April. Propaedeutic courses are not included in the GPA.

All Bachelor’s supplementary subjects require a sufficient number of participants. Therefore, we kindly urge you to make up to four applications to make sure you are admitted to a Bachelor’s supplementary subject in case your highest priority is not offered. The same applies if your highest priority has restricted admission and not all qualified applicants are admitted.

Non-permissible combinations of subjects

You cannot take a supplementary subject in the same field as your central subject. The general rule is that you may not choose a Bachelor’s supplementary subject with the same title as your central subject.

If you are supplementing a subject level in the Danish upper secondary school and do not finish the supplementary subject before August, you have to upload the documentation that you are registered for the supplementary subject to your application for admission no later than 1 August. Deadline for uploading documentation for passed supplementary subject is 5 September.

Academic Regulations

As a student it is important to know the regulations for the chosen supplementary subject: what is the content, how is it structured and what does it require from you.

You can find this information in the academic regulation for the bachelor’s supplementary subject:

Structure bachelor

Student Life

The academic life of students at Cultural Data Science

At Cultural Data Science you will meet a student centred learning environment, with an explicit focus on practical exercises and projects on topics of high relevance to humanistic researchers. There is a focus on fostering the acquisition of technical and statistical skills and knowledge within the context of humanistic research. Cultural Data Science has an interdisciplinary learning environment, where the intellectual backgrounds of students from all study areas are valued and respected.

The social life of students at Cultural Data Science

Your life as a student doesn’t end when you close your books. As a student at Cultural Data Science you will spend much of your time in the Nobel Park along with students from programmes such as Cognitive Science, Linguistics and English.

Follow the academic activities at Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics.

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Career

The supplementary subject in Cultural Data Science teaches you to draw well-reasoned inferences from large amounts of qualitative data relevant to areas of interest across the humanities. You will become proficient in the analysis and visualization of data drawn from textual, visual artefactual, and geospatial sources. You will gain competencies in applying computational and statistical methods to questions relating to social media interactions, geospatial dispersion and geopolitics, historical textual and artistic sources, and other digitalized products of human culture.