Editors’ Choice: When DH Was in Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory

“More hack, less yack,” they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is Gettin’ Shit Done. Hell, I like Gettin’ Shit Done.

But as I’ve mentioned before, I cannot agree with the distinction between theory* and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies (i.e. in order to do more you must speak less).

I’ve long found the complete domination of THATCamp Bootcamps by technical skills from the CS side curious to the point of illogical. (It turns out that this post is an elaboration of my THATCamp SF post of about a year ago.)

Editors’ Choice: E-ject Oriented Ontology

Perhaps this has occurred to others, but I was thinking this morning of the word object and the many other words it shares -ject with: project, deject, eject, reject, inject, interject … perhaps you can think of others. Like “object,” most of these words serve as both noun and verb (sometimes as adj.). In most of the etymologies, -ject comes from the Latin jacĕre meaning to throw. In the case of object, the inherited meaning is to throw something before the mind or senses. I suppose the etymology, in this case, could be viewed as unfortunate for OOO, which clearly presents objects as mind-independent, and certainly the evolved and contemporary understanding of object is mind-independent, though even being “objective” still requires a mind.

Editors’ Choice: Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

This is the rough text of a short talk I am scheduled to deliver at a symposium on ‘Future Directions in Book History’ at Cambrdige on the 24th of November 2011.

I am on the programme as talking briefly about the ‘Old Bailey Online and other resources’ (by which I assume is meant London Lives, Connected Histories, and Locating London’s Past, and the other websites I have helped to create of the last ten or twelve years). But I am afraid I have no interest whatsoever in discussing the Old Bailey or the other websites.

Editors’ Choice: Culture + Heritage + Digital at Web Directions South 2011

Luke Dearnley and I were last minute additions to the Web Directions South lineup last week. Coaxed by Maxine Sherrin to do a ‘fireside chat’ we sat comfortably by a digital fire and talked broadly around some of the exciting projects that are happening in the digital heritage space right now.

Editors’ Choice: Digital Practitioner Series: An Interview with Mark Sample

In this next installment of our Digital Practitioner Series we’re talking to Mark Sample, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for History and New Media.

Our interview was prompted by a piece he created (through the “publishing division” of his blog, samplereality.com) called Hacking the Accident. Using the French Oulipo group’s N+7 technique (in which every noun in a text is replaced with the seventh one following it in the dictionary) Sample took advantage of Hacking the Academy’s BY-NC Creative Commons License to produce a document that offers, in his words, “disruptive juxtapositions, startling evocations, and unexpected revelations that ruthless application of the algorithm draws out from the original work.”

Editors’ Choice: Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

Last week I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions workshop on digital humanities (DH), where I tried to answer the question “Why the digital humanities?” But I discovered that an equally important question is “How do you do the digital humanities”? Although participants seemed to be excited about the potential of digital humanities, some weren’t sure how to get started and where to go for support and training.

Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into DH work.

Editors’ Choice: Innovations in Digital Research: Challenges and Opportunities

(The following talk was given for the 6th Annual Nebraska Digital Workshop.)

I’m going to talk this afternoon about a central paradox of doing digital humanities–what Jerome Mcgann, one of the leading scholars of electronic texts, calls the problem of imagining what you don’t know.

In Digital Humanities, what we think we will build and what we build are often quite different, and unexpectedly so. It’s this radical disjuncture that offers us both opportunities and challenges…. What we really are asking today is how does scholarly practice change with digital humanities? Or how do we do humanities in the digital age?

Read Full Talk Here

Editors’ Choice: Digital Evaluation Of The Humanities

[It] wasn’t until the advent of Big Data in the 2000s and the rebranding of Humanities Computing as the “Digital Humanities” that it became the subject of moral panic in the broader humanities.

The literature of this moral panic is an interesting cultural phenomenon that deserves closer study…. We can use the methods of the Digital Humanities to characterise and evaluate this literature. Doing so will create a test of the Digital Humanities that has bearing on the very claims against them by critics from the broader humanities that this literature contains. I propose a very specific approach to this evaluation.

Editors’ Choice: The Role of Technology in Scholarly Editing

[This paper was presented at TEI Memebers’ Meeting]

In the past years two complementary but somewhat diverging tendencies have dominated the field of digital philology: the creation of models for analysis and encoding, such as the TEI, and the creation of tools or software to support the creation of digital editions for editing, publishing or both (Robinson 2005, Bozzi 2006).

Editors’ Choice: Bible Sentiment Analysis

This visualization explores the ups and downs of the Bible narrative, using sentiment analysis to quantify when positive and negative events are happening: Bible sentiment analysis

Methodology

Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data.

I ran the Viralheat Sentiment API over several Bible translations to produce a composite sentiment average for each verse. Strictly speaking, the Viralheat API only returns a probability that the given text is positive or negative, not the intensity of the sentiment. For this purpose, however, probability works as a decent proxy for intensity.