A little About Me

My name is Erdal Ayan. I am an Academic Assistant in Herder Institut, Marburg, Germany. I have also been a master student in Informatics at Philipps University Marburg since September, 2017. Nowadays, I am working on data visualization, big data processing, text analysis and corpus building in scope of my study and workload at my institut. I am very curious about building up corpora for educational and research purposes.

Special Thanks to Supporters

Actually, I did not know about the summer university in Leipzig until I get an informative email from the head of my department, Barbara Fichtl, who also deserves special thanks by me. :) I want to thank CLARIN-D for providing me with fellowship, organizing committee of European Summer University for accepting me and administration of Herder Institut, Marburg for supporting me to take part in the workshop and academic activities during my stay in Leipzig. I do not want to forget to thank Prof.Dr.Elizabeth Burr and her hard working assistants for their efforts to welcome and host us for almost two weeks time in Leipzig.

About the Workshop and My Experience

From 17.07 to 27.07.2018 I participated in the workshop titled “Word Vectors and Corpus Text Mining with Python” in scope of “Culture & Technology” - The European Summer University (ESU) in Digital Humanities in Leipzig. The workshop was organized and held by an expert on digital humanities and arts and a PhD candidate, Eun Seo Jo from Stanford University, USA. I should mention that I have learned a lot more than what I expected beforehand. The content and scope of the course was extensively focusing on processing large scale texts, common concepts dealing with machine learning and Word2Vec. But my experience went beyond that and it helped me a lot to understand and revise my background knowledge on basic functions of the software, NLTK, web crawling, tokenization/annotation processes and similarity analysis via Python. I guess I will never forget positive motivation and effort created and spent by Eun Seo Jo, who always encouraged me to learn more. The workshop was really promising for my future career and potential projects. In this sense, I am now planning to integrate several of the methodologies and ideas that I have learned so far into my PhD project and some other local projects, which are going to be on multilingual text analysis, as well as my work at Herder Institut.

All in One: A lot of Work and Some Time to Enjoy Being in Leipzig

It was also unique chance to attend other workshops during the teaser sessions. For example, I visited two different workshops titled “XML-TEI document encoding, structuring, rendering and transformation” by Alex Bia from Universidad Miguel Hernández, Elche, Spain and “Integrating Human Science Data using CIDOC-CRM as Formal Ontology: a practical approach” by Nicola Carboni from Harvard Institut „Villa I Tatti", Firenze, Italy and Leo Zorc from Universität Zürich, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. I was also working on XML data format and CIDOC-CRM standards in scope of my workload in Herder Institut. Therefore, I found opportunity to exchange ideas with other participants and get recommendations on several tools to use from the experts of the workshops. It was really informative to hear project presentations and lectures by PhD candidates and experts from different fields of studies. I enjoyed being in an international atmosphere in Leipzig and I made new friends from other countries, which contributed a lot to my academic knowledge and provided new opportunities to build up collaborations for upcoming projects on corpus building and digital humanities. In addition, it was adorable to see and visit the places such as Spinnerei and Kunstkraftwerk, Bibliotheca Albertina, Museum of the Printing arts, lake of Cospuden, Leipzig canals and Bergbau Technik Park. Being in Spinnerei and Kunstkraftwerk and seeing samples from modern art and memories of the people, who once lived in DDR, was particularly impressive for me. Last but not least, it was my first experience to visit a summer university in Europe, and I will certainly intend to have my second experience in ESU 2019 and present my own project(s).

 

Erdal Ayan, M.A.-M.Sc.

Academic Assistant

Herder Institut Marburg

Germany