Author: Colleen Nugent

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

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.

Right now Latent Semantic Analysis is the analytical tool I’m finding most useful. By measuring the strength of association between words or groups of words, LSA allows a literary historian to map themes, discourses, and varieties of diction in a given period. This approach, more than any other I’ve tried, turns up leads that are useful for me as a literary scholar. But when I talk to other people in digital humanities, I rarely hear enthusiasm for it. Why doesn’t LSA get more love? I see three reasons.

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The point of visualization is usually to reveal as much of the structure of a dataset as possible. But what if the data is sensitive or proprietary, and the person doing the analysis is not supposed to be able to know everything about it? In a paper to be presented next week at InfoVis, my Ph.D. student Aritra Dasgupta and I describe the issues involved in privacy-preserving visualization, and propose a variation of parallel coordinates that controls the amount of information shown to the user.

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Guy Massie and I recently gave a talk at the Carleton University Art Gallery on what we learned this past summer in our attempt to crowdsource local cultural heritage knowledge & memories. With the third member of our happy team, Nadine Feuerherm, we wrote a case study and have submitted it to ‘Writing History in the Digital Age‘. This born-digital volume is currently in its open peer-review phase, so we invite your comments on our work there. Below are the slides from our talk. Enjoy!

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The purpose of this ebook is to provide a brief overview of the Ruby programming language and consider ways Ruby (or any other programming language) can be applied to the day-to-day operations of humanities scholars.  Once you complete this book, you should have a good understanding of Ruby basics, be able to complete basic tasks with Ruby, and hopefully leave with a solid basis that will allow you to continue learning.

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Presentation from the 3rd EBLIDA-LIBER Workshop on Digitisation, October 2011

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