Recently, I had to opportunity to help J. Warren York, a graduate student in the Department of Politics here at UVa. He’s looking at how tax law affects political contributions and advocacy, so this was an interesting project that may tell us something useful about how the US government works [insert your favorite broken-government joke…
Though more and more outside groups are starting to adopt Bookworm for their own projects, I haven’t yet written quite as much as I’d like about how it should work. This blog is attempt to rectify that, and begin to explain how a combination of blogging software, interactive textual visualizations, and a exploratory data analysis…
The role that data plays in our society is changing. Institutions and corporations collect vast amounts of information about us. Individuals contribute to this further by creating data about themselves on social media. One of the world’s largest corporations, Google, earned its status by collecting vast amounts of data that have enormous value to advertisers….
As a teacher, I’ve always operated on the assumption that students are primarily interested in each other. Here’s a fun activity that takes advantage of that interest to teach students a little about data visualization. It’s an extremely unscientific Cosmo-style quiz, designed to show students which interests they have in common with each other. It’s…
From the announcement: Organizers are currently seeking proposals for the 2015 DLF Forum program. The Program Planning Committee requests proposals within the broad framework of digital collections, infrastructure, resources, and organizational priorities. You do not need to be part of a member organization in order to submit a proposal. The Forum traditionally has no overarching…
From the announcement: MITH is accepting nominations for potential speakers for our Digital Dialogues series in the Fall 2015 semester. Digital Dialogues is MITH’s signature events program, held almost every week while the academic semester is in session. Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly…
From the announcement: The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas has issued a call for proposals for Digital Humanities Forum 2015, to take place September 25-26, 2015. The theme for 2015 is Peripheries, Barriers, Hierarchies: Rethinking Access, Inclusivity, and Infrastructure in Global DH Practice. Find out more: CFP: Digital Humanities…
From the posting: The Ohio State University (OSU) Libraries seeks a dynamic and self-motivated librarian for the position of Mary P. Key Diversity Resident. OSU Libraries’ two-year Mary P. Key Diversity Residency Program is designed to provide mentorship through a successful transition from academic training to research librarianship, to provide the opportunity for hands-on exposure…
Recent calls for finding “public” audiences for scholarly work, engaging “the general public,” and for doing public digital humanities work are encouraging, but only when those calls are informed by the long history of “public” scholarly work with some understanding that the term is contested and changing. We should all acknowledge that is no “general…
This past week in my Humanities Data Analysis class, we looked at mapping as data. We explored ggplot2’s map functions, as well as doing some work with ggmap’s geocoding and other things. One thing that we just barely explored was automatically extracting place names through named entity recognition. It is possible to do named entity…