About the Course

This is a pilot run for the UZH Faculty of Law's Online Course I. It introduces automated text processing and the Python programming language.

It consists of the following parts:

• First steps in Python
• Text Preprocessing (in particular: extracting parts of speech and sentence elements, stemming, n-grams, and using regular expressions to find specific text passages)
• Analyzing text (in particular: concordances, finding similar texts with TF-IDF, sentiment analysis)
• Web Scraping (in particular: HTML, BeautifulSoup, Selenium)
• Working with large language models (Prompting, APIs)

The course includes short quizzes and programming exercises in addition to videos. We use the Anaconda distribution of Python and Jupyter Notebooks, which we install at the beginning.

Target Audience

Master’s and doctoral students who wish to use text processing (NLP) for academic research projects. The course is designed for students from non-technical disciplines (i.e., fields that typically do not include formal training in statistics or computer science). It is aimed primarily at students of the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Theology, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Important Note for Master's Students

Participation in this pilot does not provide ECTS credits and precludes future enrolment in the official course version planned for spring 2026. Do not enroll if you prefer to take the accredited version later.