Workshop LLMs 1

Methodological reflections and practical applications of LLMs for the Social Sciences and Humanities – morning session

📅 27 November 2025
📍 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
🕘 09:30-12:00 and 13:30-17:00
💸 Fee: free! but registration is required (limited places)

Please note: If you want to attend the entire day, make sure to also register for the afternoon program via LLMs 2.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming how we can approach research in the social sciences and humanities. But alongside their generalization power come serious methodological considerations. In this full-day workshop we will first learn more from three speakers about the capabilities and pitfalls of LLMs, how they work and how they can be evaluated. Then, in the afternoon session, we will use named entity recognition (NER) as a use-case to see how LLMs might assist us in improving a baseline NER model by generating additional, synthetic training material. We will make use of historical data. While the use-case itself only serves as an example, the methodology used (expanding training data with LLMs, evaluating and comparing a base model to an improved model) can be applied broadly to different topics and fields.

For researchers

This workshop is explicitly targeted towards researchers in humanities and social sciences. The first session does not require any prior knowledge. The second session in the afternoon is hands-on and technical where we will run through a prepared notebook on Google Colab together (so you will need an account on https://colab.google/). Experience with Python and Jupyter notebooks is recommended for this second part.

Programme

Morning session (theoretical): room BV-1H50
Link to campus map! BV = building 1091 called “BelleVue”; NU = building 1111 “Nieuwe Universiteitsgebouw”

• 9:30-9:45: welcome + SSHOC Task 3.1 introduction (Ellie Smith)
• 9:45-10:20: The Ins and outs of LLMs (Antske Fokkens)
• 10:20-10:50: coffee break
• 10:50-11:25: Applying LLMs to Archival Information Extraction (Stella Verkijk)
• 11:25-12:00: What is a “good” LLM? Common evaluation tasks for LLMs (Bram Vanroy)

Afternoon session (practical): room NU-5B51 (20/10T)

• 12:00-13:30: lunch (only provided for those that registered for the full day)
• 13:30-15:00: hands-on session part 1
• 15:00-15:30: coffee break
• 15:30-17:00: hands-on session part 2

Contact

The workshop is organized by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and the Instituut voor de Nederlands Taal (INT) as part of SSHOC-NL Task 3.1: Methodologically Sound Data Enrichment and Evaluation. You can contact us via this form https://enrichment.ivdnt.org/contact/.