International course: Interdisciplinary human past and quantitative Uralistics, Univ. of Turku, 21th-25th November, 2022

New updates

  • Nomination of Erasmus students is now proceeding.
  • The course will start on Monday 1th November at 4.15pm Finnish time via Zoom (will be recorded, link will appear in the online schedule).
  • In Turku the course will be held in Arcanum and Publicum (9am-5pm)

Online schedule with links will appear here.

Finnish Academy project URKO – Uralilainen kolmio (Uralic triangulation) organizes a BIP course in November 2022. It includes physical meeting in Turku 21-25th Nov and virtual components before and after the course.

There is no course fee, but we cannot offer travelling or accomodation grants. Funding the travelling is applied through Erasmus scheme of the participant’s university. Take contact to your Erasmus officer (or to your university teacher’s first) and forward the “Instructions for Erasmus grant” (below).

The course will take place. Please express your interest by filling the form here! The final enrollment is done through your Erasmus officers who enroll you to your local BIP portal. (Or contact us if you will use other than Erasmus funding.) We can host up to 30 in-person participants in Turku intensive week. In the case of > 30 people interested to participate in-person, we will suggest a full on-line participation to some of the applicants. Unfortunately, we cannot promise much support for the online participants due to lack of human-power. Note, that this is only the first announcement of the course, and more information coming here non-stop

Aims

After the course, the students recognise the main elements of the North-Eurasian environmental history and development of linguistic, cultural and genetic diversity and will be able to continue with independ usage of R and QGis. Complementary content of the course is to establish readiness to discuss the human holistic past, to read more literature from different disciplines and continue deepening skills in statistical and spatial methods. Ultimately the course provides competence to initiate your own research project on human history and/or digital linguistics/humanities.

Contents

The course will familiarize the student to spatial methods and statistical methods in QGis and R environments. The cartographical database of Uralic languages and Uralic typological database, UraTyp, will be used as exemplary databases. The basic usage of QGis and R will be learned: How to download data, how to manage it, how to add information, how to visualize the data, how to conduct basic analyses. Lectures will consider the development of the ecological environment of the Uralic language speaker area, evolution of the Uralic language family and development of genetic and archaeological diversity of North-Western Eurasia. As a course work the students will make an independent or group work of the holistic past of an area of a language or language subgroup. Preferably, the course works will exploit the learned statistical methods.

The course and all the tasks will be in English. The course has 3 parts. 1) Independent familiarizing to technical tasks: how to operate with QGis and R and how to upload data. This part is partly as video’s and party as live-lectures in Zoom (with possibility to see the videos later). 2) In-person week in Turku. Lectures at 9am-12pm and technical tutorials 2-5pm. 3) Independent finalizing of the course work and Zoom-seminars to present the work.

Course tasks: independent working (reading, videos, studying programs and datasets, answering questionnaires), lectures, practicals, group work (course project and presentation)

Criteria: Passed-not passed

Instructions for obtaining Erasmus grant

University of Turku is organizing a BIP course in Uralistic (language). As you probably know, Beneficiary Module (BM) has been very unstable and not working well (or at all) lately. You are welcome to send your students for Erasmus BIP exchange to Turku even if I haven’t been able to upload (and save) this BIP in BM. As soon as BM is working well enough, I will inform the course organizers that your university is uploaded as a sending partner university in this BIP. Then I should know the code of this BIP so that you should be able to connect your students to this course. In any case, you should be able to allocate Erasmus grant to the participating students even if BM is not yet ready.

Please do not hesitate to drop an email to jenni.santaharju (at) utu.fi or outi.vesakoski (at) utu.fi about general questions about the course or tarja.virta (at) utu.fi about BIP details