As we all know, the digital humanities are the next big thing. A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation at a digital humanities colloquium, explaining what I saw as the major reasons for this (Allington, 2011). We are working within an economic system in which owners of capital (funders) invest in research speculatively […]
In recent years, visualization has become an all-purpose technique for communicating and exploring data within the humanities. There are a wide availability of tools offering different points of entry from IBM’s Many Eyes to Gephi to Tapor 2.0. Projects like the Visual Thesaurus, Mapping the Republic of Letters, and Hypercities, among countless others, all engage with visualization as an integral part of their […]
… Instead of focusing only on defining DH, as though we can come to a single result from a complex Boolean query, I’d like to suggest that we also consider the practice of DH as a recurring process of refining. Boolean logic presumes winnowing and filtering, but as any scholar who has spent a few hours in the […]
Knowing only that they had signed up for English 1110.01, first-year writing, my students walked into the classroom for the first time to see projected on the front screen what I’m currently projecting now. While many of the students weren’t familiar with the exact nature of XML, they all could infer its status as a […]
The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world…. a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these [Internet Archive collections] I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish […]
The opening plenary from CNI’s spring 2013 membership meeting by Herbert Van de Sompel, From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record, is now available on CNI’s two video channels: In the past two decades, scholarly communication has evolved significantly to become mainly digital and network-based. This transition has brought along changes in the […]
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group is excited to launch a new series for the Signal. We’re calling it Content Matters, and much like the Insights series that the Innovation Working Group has published here for few years now, the interview series will feature discussions and stories about the content that our members are passionate about, the importance of […]
Every week Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) distributes the most important news and pieces for the field by publishing links on our website and Twitter feed. In order to identify the content most valuable to this broad and dispersed community, we rely on volunteers who help us read through the aggregated RSS feeds from our collection of 500+ […]
Topic modeling could stand in as a synecdoche of digital humanities. It is distant reading in the most pure sense: focused on corpora and not individual texts, treating the works themselves as unceremonious “buckets of words,” and providing seductive but obscure results in the forms of easily interpreted (and manipulated) “topics.” In its most commonly […]
Abstract We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive […]
