We recently put out a paper on how racial bias functions in Hollywood films. This work was based on a few studies that came before it, namely this one, from USC Annenberg. We presented numerical analyses like the number of characters in different racial and ethnic groups and the number of words spoken by these…
Recently, several folks on Twitter have noted their displeasure that the Tate appears to be linking to Wikipedia articles in lieu of authoring their own written biographies of artists represented in their collections. The @Tate is now copying and pasting artist biographies from Wikipedia for catalogs. Nothing against Wikipedia; but this is a misguided strategy…
We (Tim Causer, Kris Grint, Anna-Maria Sichani, and me!) have recently published an article in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities on the economics of crowdsourcing, reporting on the Transcribe Bentham project, which is formally published here: ‘Making such bargain’: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription. Alack, due to our own economic…
Since its establishment in 2001, the English version of Wikipedia[1] has grown to host more than 5.6 million articles that reflect content ranging from culture and the arts to technology and the applied sciences. Consistently ranked as one of the top visited sites on the Internet, Wikipedia provides an open and freely accessible resource of…
Last week (July 31, 2018), I had the honor of speaking at CLIR’s (Council on Library and Information Resources) summer seminar for new Postdoctoral Fellows. I was very excited to get the opportunity to meet a new cohort of fellows just as they are beginning their new positions at various institutions. (For more information on…
In the last 25 years we have seen the web enable new digital means for historians to reach broader publics and audiences. Over that same period of time, archives and archivists have been exploring and engaging with related strands of digital transformation. In one strand, similar focus on community work through digital means has emerged…
Recently, historians have been trying to understand cultural change by measuring the “distances” that separate texts, songs, or other cultural artifacts. Where distances are large, they infer that change has been rapid. There are many ways to define distance, but one common strategy begins by topic modeling the evidence. Each novel (or song, or political…
This is a quick introduction on how to get and visualize Google search data with both time and geographical components using the R packages gtrendsR, maps and ggplot2. In this example, we will look at search interest for named hurricanes that hit the U.S. mainland and then plot how often different states search for “guns.”…
One useful library for viewing a topic model is LDAvis, an R package for creating interactive web visualizations of topic models, and its Python port, PyLDAvis. This library is focused on visualizing a topic model, using PCA to chart the relationship between topics and between topics and words in the topic model. It is also…
How is humanities and social science knowledge impacted by the introduction of three-dimensional visualization technologies? While 3D visualization may seem far removed from the everyday work of scholars in the social sciences and humanities, it has great potential to change how we conduct and communicate our work. Three-dimensional visualizations can be used for creating models,…