Our take: In “What’s the Deal with Topic Modeling?”, Alyssa Virker writes for the Data-Sitters Club’s TL;DR series, which offers short introductions for people curious about digital humanities. Writing as a newcomer, she explains in plain terms what a topic modeling tool does and what it cannot do. The tool groups words that often appear together, but it is the researcher who must interpret and name each group. Virker shares how her own corpus of TikTok captions about Ukrainian war poetry turned out to be too short and too uniform for the method. Her honest and funny account makes topic modeling far less intimidating and reminds readers how much DH methods depend on human interpretation.
Editors’ Choice: What’s the Deal with Topic Modeling?
