LDaCA presented four workshops as part of ResBaz:

How to wrestle a billion words (of Hansard)
Sam Hames, Betsy Alpert and Eve Ansell
This workshop aimed to show you how you can make the most of the Proceedings of Australian Federal Parliament (1901-present) in your research. We started by showing you some of how Parliament works through their official transcripts and explore their search interface. Then it showed you how you can take things to the next level with computational tools to analyse a.) the passage of a specific piece of legislation and b.) explored how particular language is used since Australia's Federation.

From a mess to a map
Simon Musgrave and Sam Hames
This workshop looked at the problems which might be encountered turning messy text data into the very structured data needed for many kinds of computational analysis. As an example, it started with data collected in an online survey about Australian slang and ended with maps showing the comparative distribution of some slang terms across the country. It looked at parts of the workflow where computational approaches are useful (e.g. normalising typography and parsing complex responses), but also emphasised the decisions which remain the responsibility of the researcher (e.g. categorising responses).

Making the most of your qualitative transcripts with a little bit of computing
Sam Hames
Qualitative research projects sometimes get away from us and we find that we have more material than we know what to do with. This workshop aimed to give you a pathway for navigating 'too much' with a little bit of computational assistance and without giving up on the core qualitative foundation of of your work.

It worked through a case study and some tool demonstrations to help you:

• Make the most of your transcripts by identifying consistency issues that will confuse a computer (and maybe your collaborators)
• Work through marking up some transcripts in a more consistent format
• Demonstrate some possibilities for computers to help you search and find things
• Demonstrate computational methods that might help you address the 'big picture' or what you might be missing, while still being able to close read your transcripts

Introduction to computational text analytics
Sam Hames
Do you have more text than you know what to do with? Did you collect data including text for your project and now feel overwhelmed when you try to analyse? Is there too much? Are you doing the same thing over and over again and feeling like you're not using your time efficiently? Are you worried about missing the forest for the trees (or the trees for the forest)? This workshop introduced the fundamentals of computational text analysis using LADAL. It started with the key questions of why and where computational methods might be appropriate for your work before demonstrating a few key computational methods that are relevant for many researchers.