Editors’ Choice: Building topic models into Bookworm searches

I’ve been seeing how deeply we could integrate topic models into the underlying Bookworm architecture a bit lately.

My own chief interest in this, because I tend to be a little wary of topic models in general, is in the possibility for Bookworm to act as a diagnostic tool internally for topic models. I don’t think simply plotting description absent any analysis of the underlying token composition of topics is all that responsible; Bookworm offers a platform for actually accessing those counts and testing them against metadata.

But topics also have a lot to offer token-based searching. Watching links into the Bookworm browser, I recently stumbled on this exchange. How can I solve this biologist’s problem? (Or, at least, waste more of his time?)

Read the full post here.

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Schneider based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: Cinzia Pusceddu-Gangarosa, Stephanie Hedge, Amy Buckland, Emmanuelle Chaze, Anu Paul, Patrick Wingrove, Becky Halat, Annie Johnson, Amy Williams, Carl Cornell, and Kwinn H Doran.