Bytes and Bygones is a conference on the Digital and Computational Analyses of Ancient Cultures organized by the CUNE-IIIF-ORM and Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies group at the 3rd Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies Conference held at Ghent and Brussels from 15 to 18 September 2025. The following one-day transferable skills course titled: Computational Humanities for Ancient Text Corpora: Linked Open Data and Stylometry will be hosted on Friday 19 September at UGent.
If you are interested in learning about methodologies that can help bring the studies of historical texts to a larger audience, academic and public, and help solve some age-old questions about authorship or genres, this course is for you! We will be joined by leading specialists in Linked Open Data and Stylometry, respectively. Adam Anderson will teach Linked Open Data, a methodology that allows for sharing and accessing data across the world, thereby helping yourself and other scholars make links between various corpora of texts. Jeroen De Gussem will teach Stylometry, which helps define styles of a text, so if you have questions like who wrote the different books of the bible or how many scribes did it take to make an archive, this methodology will be invaluable. For more information on the course and its teachers, see more here: https://www.bab.ugent.be/course/.
The students will be introduced to two powerful methodologies of the 21st Century for working with textual and historical material. What you will learn will be widely applicable and students of all studies are welcome, but we will focus our examples on historical data.
It is free for PhD students enrolled in a Flemish University and costs only 15€ for other PhD students. The course will include coffee breaks and a simple lunch.
Teaching will take place in Bladijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent on Friday 19 September.
You can register here: https://congrezzo.ugent.be/bytesandbygones. Please note that this is in connection with a conference, but it is possible to ONLY register for the course. Further questions can be sent to bytes_and_bygones@ugent.be
