Editors’ Choice: Digital Humanities at the MLA and AHA Meetings

December 21, 2011

Editors’ Note: There are a number of sessions and workshops related to the digital humanities at the annual Modern Language Association and American History Association meetings the first week in January. Below are links to information and material related to these sessions. Please tweet or email us with any suggestions for additional links.

See Full List Here.

Cosine similarity among LC classification genres

Genre similarities

December 20, 2011

By Ben Schmidt

When data exploration produces Christmas-themed charts, that’s a sign it’s time to post again. So here’s a chart and a problem.

First, the problem. One of the things I like about the posts I did on author age and vocabulary change in the spring is that they have two nice dimensions we can watch changes happening in. This captures the fact that language as a whole doesn’t just up and change–things happen among particular groups of people, and the change that results has shape not just in time (it grows, it shrinks) but across those other dimensions as well.

Creative Commons image by Dominic's Pics via Flickr

Mechanical Turks and Mirror Stages

December 19, 2011

By Timothy Burke

I like this essay by John Jones about search algorithms, which he compares to “mechanical Turk” automatons of the 18th Century.

It’s a point that’s well-understood in some circles and completely not in others. Witness the degree to which users continue to express some preference for couching search queries to Google and Siri in the form of natural-language questions: according to Bo Pang and Ravi Kumar, that tendency seems to be steadily increasing as users become more familiar with the functioning of search engines rather than decreasing. Users sometimes relate to Google as if it were an oracle, a non-human being with its own personality and knowledge….

Creative Commons image by Conor Lawless via Flickr

Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

December 19, 2011

By Trevor Owens

Fred and I got some fantastic comments on our Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing paper through the Writing History in the Digital Age open peer review. We are currently working on revising the manuscript. At this point I have worked on a range of book chapters and articles and I can say that doing this chapter has been a real pleasure. I thought the open review process went great and working with a coauthor has also been great. Both are things that don’t happen that much in the humanities. I think the work is much stronger for Fred and I having pooled our forces to put this together. Now, one the comments we got sent me on another tangent….

EC: Networks Analysis Round-up

December 16, 2011

Editors’ Note: For those interested in networks and network visualization, a series of posts from Scott Weingart and Elijah Meeks that introduce, explain, and provide examples and instructions for the analysis of networks are linked below. *updated 1/4/12*

Scott Weingart, Networks Demystified 2: Degree, December 17, 2011

Today I’ll cover the deceptively simple concept of node degree. I say “deceptive” because, on the one hand, network degree can tell you quite a lot. On the other hand, degree can often lead one astray, especially as networks become larger and more complicated. A node’s degree is, simply, how many edges it is connected to. Generally, this also correlates to how many neighbors a node has, where a node’s neighborhood is those other nodes connected directly to it by

Creative Commons image by evmaiden via Flickr

EC: [Community building 0] – From simplifying Webmaking to Webmaker ethics | Alina Mierlus

December 15, 2011

By Alina Mierlus

Has been a long time since I started working (with others) on building a new model of (Mozilla) community here in Barcelona and around…. When I refer to a new model of community, I mean designing new processes, creating new event frameworks that can invite others to participate and adopting new practices for community development. That can mean interacting with people you’ve never did before, start conversations with other communities of practice, delegate responsibility and act as a coach for the new, future community leaders. This may seem uncomfortable, but after starting doing it you’ll have a lot of fun.

Creative Commons image by vial3tt3 via Flickr

Humanities in a Digital Age Symposium (podcast)

December 14, 2011

Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures hosted a daylong symposium on “The Humanities in a Digital Age.”

Spatializing Photographic Archives

December 13, 2011

By Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser

Spatializing photographic archives, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, entailed the release of open source software for recovering the 3D geometry of a location from photographs taken from diverse angles (and even at different times); and a case study of Richard Misrach’s landscape photography demonstrating the value of this approach for scholars.

We’ve now completed an extensive and carefully illustrated White Paper for this NEH-sponsored project, a large pdf of which you may find here. (26.5mb).

The White Paper describes the open-source software tool we’ve developed, and our reasons for wanting to forge a new approach to making digital tool for scholars. It also examines the implications of our approach for photography. After examining the