CFPs & Conferences, News

Conference: digital humanities deutschland

digital humanities deutschland | Digital Humanities 2012.
In order to facilitate future strategic development of DH as a leading future research paradigm, we invite all academic Digital Humanities researchers in the German speaking region to come together, exchange ideas and information and establish a joint professional organization called “Digital Humanities Deutschland” (hereafter: DHD). The DHD is intended as a chapter organization within the European ALLC (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing).

News, Resources

Resource: large-scale data exploration, MIC-style

Real-world data are messy. Relationships between two variables can take on an infinite number of forms, and while one doesn’t see, say, umbrella-shaped data very often, strange things can happen. When scientists talk about correlations or associations between variables, they’re usually referring to one very specific form of relationship–namely, a linear one. The assumption is that most associations between pairs of variables are reasonably well captured by positing that one variable increases in proportion to the other, with some added noise. In reality, of course, many associations aren’t linear, or even approximately so. For instance, many associations are cyclical (e.g., hours at work versus day of week), or curvilinear (e.g., heart attacks become precipitously more frequent past middle age), and so on.

Detecting a non-linear association is potentially just

News, Resources

Omaha Language Dictionary data

Linguists and others interested in more in-depth information about the Omaha language may view the working database behind the Omaha Ponca Digital Dictionary. This database is a work in progress.

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mechanical Turks and Mirror Stages

I like this essay by John Jones about search algorithms, which he compares to “mechanical Turk” automatons of the 18th Century.

It’s a point that’s well-understood in some circles and completely not in others. Witness the degree to which users continue to express some preference for couching search queries to Google and Siri in the form of natural-language questions: according to Bo Pang and Ravi Kumar, that tendency seems to be steadily increasing as users become more familiar with the functioning of search engines rather than decreasing. Users sometimes relate to Google as if it were an oracle, a non-human being with its own personality and knowledge.

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

Fred and I got some fantastic comments on our Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing paper through the Writing History in the Digital Age open peer review. We are currently working on revising the manuscript. At this point I have worked on a range of book chapters and articles and I can say that doing this chapter has been a real pleasure. I thought the open review process went great and working with a coauthor has also been great. Both are things that don’t happen that much in the humanities. I think the work is much stronger for Fred and I having pooled our forces to put this together.