The 19th century saw something of an explosion in periodicals. For example, the number of newspapers in Britain alone leapt from 550 in 1846 to more than 2,400 just 60 years later. For humanities scholars, tracking information in such a huge mass of publications poses a daunting challenge. Digital humanities efforts have made some headway…
On its release in 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was called “the greatest book ever” and “a more enthralling read than all the novels ever entered for the Booker Prize put together.”The tabloid The Daily Mail, where these giddy pronouncements appeared, is not known for understatement, but more cautious academic researchers have long…
From the CFP: We seek manuscripts that include a novel analysis of data and meaningfully engage with theory on marginalization. We follow Linabary and Corple’s (2018) call to “study up” – start research from the lived experience of such groups for understanding. “Meaningful engagement” includes (but is not limited to): emphasizing the links between marginalization theory and…
From the resource: In the mapping workshops that we offer, a recurrent question refers to where to get the data. Every time students attend one of these workshops, all the datasets are given to them, so it is understandable that many might wonder where the instructors get this information from. This is what inspired us…
From the ad: The Data Science Institute (DSI) at Vanderbilt University invites applications for its first cohort of DSI postdoctoral fellows. Fellows will be expected to carry out an independent research program in collaboration with one or more faculty mentors who are affiliated with the DSI. Fellows will come from a diverse range of backgrounds…
“Learn from the Past, Organize the Future, Make Democracy Work.” This is the mission statement that greets visitors at the SNCC Digital Gateway—a wide-ranging, collaborative website that documents and animates the history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Founded in April 1960 under the guidance of veteran activist Ella Baker, SNCC became a leading…
In a previous post, we explored how using language models and the idea of “perplexity” can allow us to study stereotypes in movie character roles using their dialogue as a basis. We examined a corpus of 750 Hollywood films, released between 1970 and 2014, and tried to model assumptions from the research that people of…
Hello again, everybody! I’m back this semester as a DH Prototyping Fellow, and together, Alyssa Collins and I are working on a project titled “Twitterature: Methods and Metadata.” Specifically, we’re hoping to develop a simple way of using Twitter data for literary research. The project is still in its early stages, but we’ve been collecting…
This semester, I am teaching our department’s Archaic to Classical Greek Survey. I specialize in late antique Roman history and GIS, and thus this has been a departure from my normal research interests–and just one reason we are searching for a Homerist with DH skills right now. However, reading and teaching Greek does not mean that…
Early modern scholars oftentimes emphasised the ideal of sharing knowledge beyond confessional and national borders. But was the learned community of early modern Europe truly as open and accessible as these intellectuals proclaimed? Or did the Republic of Letters in action perhaps comprise a number of “sub-republics” divided along the lines of religion, discipline, region,…