Congratulations on Passing the Doctoral Examination

The topic of his dissertation is: "Understanding LDA Topic Modeling: an evaluation from the perspective of Digital Humanities".

As a quantitative text analysis method, LDA topic modeling has been widely used in the digital humanities in recent years to examine large amounts of unstructured text data. When using LDA topic modeling, one must deal with many factors that can influence the result of the modeling. In this dissertation, LDA topic modeling, more specifically six crucial factors, were evaluated through experiments, namely the number of topics, the hyperparameter alpha, the hyperparameter optimization, the hyperparameter beta, the iteration of Gibbs sampling and the chunk length. The influence of the six factors was investigated using a German newspaper corpus and a German novel corpus from two perspectives, document classification and topic coherence. The aim is to answer the question under which circumstances LDA topic modeling is stable and thus to provide an insight into the sensitivity of the method to parameter settings.

Dr Keli Du began his master's degree in Digital Humanities at the University of Würzburg in 2013, graduating in 2016. While studying, he worked at the University of Hamburg as a research assistant on the externally funded project “Music Organisation at the Guelph Courts”. He also worked as a research assistant on the DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) project at the University of Würzburg. From November 2015 to August 2018, he was a research assistant and research associate in the project ‘Sentiment Analysis of Literary Criticism Using the Example of Changing Evaluations in the 1880s’ at the University of Göttingen. In 2016, he began his doctoral studies in Digital Humanities at the University of Würzburg, which he successfully completed in March 2024. Since July 2020, he has been with us at the Trier Centre for Digital Humanities as a research assistant.

The entire TCDH team congratulates Dr Keli Du on passing his exam and wishes him all the best for the future!