Lessons from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

In this paper, we present the concept, content and experience with an actively running Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities. This video-based course is held in German, does not require any programming skills, and serves as an introduction to automatic text analysis. The target audience is anyone who is interested in applying basic language technology to text corpora. It has a strong empirical focus on digital representations, tools and corpus linguistics. The main goal thereby is to grasp the fundamental terminology and concepts of computational linguistics, to understand the main problems and solutions, as well as to know about the performance and limitations of current methods. Furthermore, manual annotation and data visualization are introduced in this course.